“Bundle of Sticks” and the Value of Interdependence: Building a Tools and Services Collective

Introduction

In “Bundle of Sticks,” a famous fable credited to Aesop, a parent gives three children a bundle of sticks and challenges each to try to break that bundle. None succeed. Then the parent asks each child to break a single stick from the bundle, and, of course, each easily accomplishes this task.

The moral is clear: our strength as individuals lies in our ability to work together to tackle big problems. But there is another moral here, too, and this one might resonate more quickly with our electronic publishing audience: bundles are powerful forms and, once created, are notoriously difficult to break.

Bundling as a business approach has been used to great success by large, conglomerate publishing and digital services (and at great expense to the academy). For decades, libraries and smaller publishers have witnessed the strength and resilience of this model. They have also experienced the damaging impact of its outsized, overpriced, and overly standardized offerings on academic institutions.

By contrast, independence has been among the most prevalent characteristics of smaller nonprofit, commercial, and academy-based publishing and digital services. Their business models have prioritized innovation and bootstrapping behavior, yielding a diverse array of promising but small-scale offerings that compete with one another for scraps of funding, time, and attention. These independent “sticks” are mission driven and responsive, and they increase access to academic publishing for authors and readers alike. But their siloed offerings are fragile and all too easily broken.

The Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project is studying and piloting a third path: the conscious pursuit of interdependence. We are trying to match the resilience of the bundle while retaining the diversity of the individual sticks. In order to do so, we are exploring ways to scale up and unite myriad siloed, mission-driven tools and services. We want to demonstrate what a well-structured union of tools and services could accomplish, both technically and as an overarching collective business framework.

Herein, we raise questions about how bundling and independence show up in the scholarly publishing industry today, both for large conglomerates and for smaller commercial and nonprofit players. We then contemplate what interdependence might look like and how it might help to transform academic publishing. We end with findings from the NGLP project (2019–2022) and its Collaborative Frameworks Working Group regarding a set of initial steps that we believe publishers, tool developers, and service providers might take together toward developing a collective publishing framework for open source, values-aligned tools and services.

Bundled, Closed, and Integrated

In the field of scholarly publishing, bundling as it is practiced today is deeply strategic. Large commercial publishers have long used the bundle as a powerful mechanism for selling digital content in unbreakable groupings. The bundle serves a dual benefit for the publisher. It reduces publisher expenses through standardizing offerings; it also increases publishing revenues by compelling libraries to buy more content than they want at higher prices than they can afford. The economies of scale produce high profit margins that benefit shareholders and are not passed along to academic institutions, researchers, and funders as price reductions.

More recently, large commercial publishers have also popularized another type of bundling, this one in the form of digital services. The most successful publishers today are giant conglomerates that regularly buy up and forge together chains of tools, changing them from relatively small and independent entities (e.g., Mendeley, SSRN, Digital Commons, Aries Systems, F1000, Knowledge Unlatched) to bundled-up scholarly communication offerings that are owned and controlled by a single corporation.

In so doing, these large commercial publishers are leveraging their resources to aggregate the many disparate tools and services their clients need into smooth, uninterrupted workflows and, simultaneously, to aggregate usage information for their own business intelligence and additional product development. They secure their market advantage through the age-old practice of acquisition and integration. Currently, a handful of multinational corporations own and control most of the infrastructure supporting scholarly research and publishing—along with most of the academy’s research outputs.¹ The industry consolidation represented by these bundling activities reduces competition and reinforces commercial entrenchment, narrowing options and opportunities (who can publish and where; who can access publications and how) and increasing data intelligence in potentially dangerous ways (usage data and predictive analytics).

This acquisition-and-integration model of bundling offers efficiency, no question, but the strategy of absorbing distributed tools and services into a single workflow (and, often, a single business model) also threatens to diminish the important distinctions among the sticks in the bundle. One pertinent example of this risk is Elsevier’s 2017 acquisition of bepress. Though bepress retained its branding and services in the wake of that acquisition, its role within the scholarly communication landscape was compromised. No longer was bepress a scrappy player in the library publishing space, born within academia and supporting institution-based alternatives to commercial publishers. It became, in that moment of acquisition, the agent of a conglomerate publisher. For the publishing community, the values and principles underpinning that platform underwent a cataclysmic shift.² Using bepress Digital Commons became an ethical dilemma and risk—for example, for those who were concerned about how usage data about their authors and readers would be integrated into Elsevier’s business intelligence or shared with government officials without knowledge or informed consent.

In other words, while these forms of bundling by conglomerates may serve to align a set of sticks (content or services), they accomplish this alignment by centralizing a set of previously independent and distributed resources (tools and services from many creators) under a single business structure. This act of acquisition and integration, while strengthening the commercial offering, ultimately undermines the productive diversity represented by the sticks collected in the original bundle.

Open, Unbundled, and Independent

Coexisting with these large conglomerates, independent publishing tools and services (sticks) pepper the academic publishing landscape. These include a wide array of open source (OS) technologies and (usually) nonprofit services developed by scholars, publishers, and librarians that focus on specific functions in scholarly communication, including creation, evaluation, publication, distribution, reuse, and preservation.

These independent OS tools and services represent some of today’s most innovative efforts to transform and improve access within the publishing landscape. They actively seek to support more inclusive publishing models and modes of scholarly communication, including meeting the needs of underserved/underrepresented authors, readers, and topical areas. From Islandora to Open Journal Systems (OJS), and from Fulcrum to LOCKSS, the most successful of these OS tools and services galvanize institutions and engage in multi-layered development activities, supporting community engagement and distributed governance alongside the actual code or service offering.

Although the longevity of some of these tools and services speaks volumes about the resilience they can have (e.g., both LOCKSS and OJS date back to the 1990s), these are still relatively fragile tools with thin margins, supported by small communities of practice. They compete with one another for members/clients, for funding, and for attention. Some are hugely successful in terms of adoption and use, but they simultaneously have so few resources that they cannot adequately staff their operations, pay off technical debt, or keep up with the pace of development happening around them.

So, while their independence enables these technologies the agility and freedom to align their service offerings with the specific needs of the communities they serve, it also often results in serious sustainability challenges (i.e., unstable or unsupported infrastructure) as they cycle off grant funding and work to establish business models that will serve them over time. The distinctiveness that they bring to the community is, in other words, both blessing and curse.

Even unbundled, these open source solutions and their communities offer a compelling glimpse of a possible alternative to today’s overwhelmingly profit-driven and locked-in scholarly publishing landscape. But their independence also exposes them as fragile sticks, each one easily broken by a shift in institutional priorities, change in leadership, or the kind of funding fatigue that currently plagues academic libraries.

Proposed Solution: Open and Interdependent

Is there a way to pursue the strength made possible via integration without sacrificing the diversity of perspective, approach, and voice enabled by independence? Is there a midway point on the spectrum between these distinct models where independent tools and services embrace interdependence by agreeing to intentionally standardize and streamline their offerings so that the pieces fit together better, both technically and fiscally? And if so, what specific, small steps can we take toward this big goal? How can we incentivize academic publishers, tool developers, and service providers to align and move as a collective effort toward those goals at scale? These are among the key questions with which the NGLP project has been grappling.³

The solution we propose and are currently testing in the NGLP project is interdependence. To be sure, this concept is neither new nor novel; it has long been discussed by librarians, funders, tool developers, service providers, and publishers in various settings.⁴ Moving from discussion to action, however, has proved challenging, in large part because funding and reward structures continue to focus on simpler, one-off, or shorter-term initiatives. We have thus far lacked adequate scaffolding to incentivize and reward teams and technological solutions that work in truly interdependent ways.

Interdependence, in its purest form, is a mutually beneficial relationship that empowers and enriches the work of all entities involved. Interdependent relationships arise and thrive when a set of independent players come together as partners because they need something that they can only create together.

Rather than bundling a single set of solutions to corner the market (integration) or encouraging a wealth of single-faceted initiatives that compete with one another from siloed locations (independence), a model of interdependence encourages the growth and development of distinct technologies whose strength and stability are enhanced by the voluntary partnerships and shared service models established among them.

An interdependent approach to academic publishing would allow for targeted solutions for distinct communities. It would include developing and upholding the standards and frameworks necessary to enable modular recombinations of tools and technologies to serve needs as they arise. There is no single publishing workflow or toolset that can address the distinct methods and practices of scholars across the academic spectrum. The landscape of publishing solutions should provide a smorgasbord of options that can be combined and recombined in ways that reflect and support the diversity of author and reader needs and practices.

Such interdependence isn’t accomplished through goodwill and good intentions alone. It requires independent entities to agree to balance the very real needs of their solo endeavors with the needs of the collective and to actively and continuously calibrate their own activities so that they support both. Interdependence has to resonate with those who bind together in a collective, not just as an ideal but also as tangible benefits that each member of the collective can see and feel and value.

Steps toward Interdependence

There are serious barriers to embracing interdependence in our academic publishing landscape today. Tool developers, service providers, and publishers currently lack the resources and incentive structures necessary to enable, much less encourage, an interdependent approach. Recalibrating the way we invest in infrastructure elements, including the publishing tools and services of concern to the NGLP project, will require substantive work that is beyond the scope of this project but is getting underway in related initiatives such as Invest in Open Infrastructure.

Our current project is piloting an approach with a limited set of players on a very concrete (if still complex) case study in interdependence: improving the publishing pathways and choices available to authors, editors, and readers through strengthening, integrating, and scaling up scholarly publishing infrastructures to support library publishers.

To achieve these goals, NGLP is constructing a framework for the following:

1. Vision. Offering a collective vision that engages tool developers, service providers, and library publishers with a shared sense of purpose. This cannot be based on platitudes; it needs to offer measurable indicators of alignment.

2. Tools. Providing tools to help guide tool developers, service providers, and publishers toward this vision and to help them demonstrate their ongoing efforts to improve their alignment with the vision.

3. Relationships. Facilitating interactions between these entities, providing opportunities for each player to demonstrate how its work supports and benefits from an interdependent and collaborative network.

Conclusion

To return to the metaphor with which we began, bundles are unquestionably strong but, in the case of scholarly communication, their strength more often results in vendor lock-in and disproportionate revenue generation than in powerful, values-aligned, affordable publishing solutions for the scholarly community. At the same time, distinct and siloed open source technologies, while often values driven and low cost, generally do not have the services integration or staying power (sustainability) as individual sticks to rival these bundles. Too frequently, they founder under the weight of their own ambitions and limited resources. NGLP’s focus on fostering a framework for productive interdependence offers a third path—one that recognizes the importance of reliable, well-resourced platforms; the productive distinctions that can arise in unaffiliated technology projects; and the necessity of aligning these efforts to create cooperative, mutually beneficial relationships that distribute resources and provide robust publishing services suites for scholars and library publishers. Rather than buying things that are yoked together in commercial bundles, let’s instead build webs of synergistic tools, values-aligned service provision, shared resourcing, and collective governance. The work is not easy or uncomplicated, but it is the kind of thing we have to do if we truly want to transform scholarly communication.