May 5, 2022
No Easy Answers: Big Data Vendors, Information Access and Libraries
Last week, in response to concerns about Thomson Reuters’ data services contracts with ICE, Thomson Reuters shareholders, led by British Columbia General Employees’ Union, filed a resolution with the company demanding action to investigate and mitigate human rights risks related to those contracts. This shareholder pressure has forced Thomson Reuters to address the human rights impacts of its ICE contracts. The company will complete a comprehensive human rights assessment and ESG materiality assessment later this year. This is a first step towards addressing the potential harm caused by Thomson Reuters, RELX, and other research companies that also serve as data brokers to governments and law enforcement.*
The UW Libraries is monitoring these developments closely and stands in partnership with SPARC and other industry peers in expressing our strong opposition to any business practices that violate human rights and advocate for change of such practices by UW Library vendors that include Westlaw, and parent company, Thomson Reuters, and LexisNexis.
…”We stand in partnership with SPARC and other industry peers in expressing our strong opposition to any business practices that violate human rights and advocate for change of such practices by UW Library vendors that include Westlaw, and parent company, Thomson Reuters, and LexisNexis.”
At the same time, ensuring access to essential legal resources and information for our scholars and the community is a social responsibility of UW Libraries. When selecting resources, we must consider this great responsibility along with our institutional values, and how best to balance those ideals in the context of limited resources—both financial and physical.
UW Libraries shares the challenge of most major research library systems in that there is little choice in the marketplace but to purchase certain types of research products from these information monopolies.**
Unfortunately, for the specific information sources that our UW community needs and relies on, there are no viable replacement options at this time. Regardless of their cost, alternative databases do not have citators that provide critical context and essential information for performing legal research (Shepard’s for NexisUni and KeyCite for Westlaw). For UW’s non-Law School users, the unique citation content within this resource is the most popular in terms of usage rates. With a shared and unified desire to divest from vendors who do not align with our principles, a Libraries subcommittee spent the better part of the past year doing extensive research on alternative options and concluded that there is no alternative for this critical content that is only available from LexisNexis and Westlaw. Furthermore, lack of access to these resources would result in a greatly diminished ability to conduct legal research for all users.
With no other valid alternative to the primary providers of this data, UW Libraries chooses to maintain access to these resources for the public good (for students, faculty and staff on all campuses and the greater community) while we work in partnership with industry advocacy leaders (e.g. SPARC, ARL and others) who seek federal legislative and regulatory changes to further protect privacy and the sale of personal data from data brokers (the vendor) to third parties, including government agencies.
The Libraries decisions around collection management are guided by a set of specific Collection Management Principles and Strategies aligned with both our mission to accelerate learning for the public good and our core values of accessibility and sustainability. These principles provide a framework for evaluation and decision-making in collection management across all formats and disciplines. The Library has worked extensively in recent years with the Faculty Senate to adopt formal resolutions that further define Licensing Principles and Expectations for Vendors, in alignment with our mission and values. Most recently the Faculty Senate approved a Class C resolution to support the UW Libraries’ Principles in Licensing Scholarly Resources, including discontinuing negotiations with vendors that conflict with these principles aimed at protecting the privacy of researchers and their data, equitable access, and support for new models of sharing (rather than limiting) the dissemination of knowledge.
If you have questions on this topic, please contact: SustainableScholarship@uw.edu
See also:
- How the UW Libraries evaluates and selects vendors
- This keynote talk for the Academic Surveillance and the Big Data Economy event given by Sarah Lamdan, Professor of Law at City University of New York. The event was co-sponsored by the UW Libraries Open Scholarship Commons and the Research Commons, and it took place on May 3rd, 2022.
