[Reading-hall-of-fame] Concerns about Spanish Journal of IRA

[Leu, Donald]

Dear Emelia,

I do not believe I have had the pleasure of meeting you.  I hope to correct that mistake, on my part, very soon.

I respond as one member of the IRA Board who is also a member of the RHoF.  I do not speak for the entire Board.  Still, I have been active on this particular issue, ever since I was elected.  I understand the importance of the issue and I take seriously your concerns, as I greatly admire your work. Like you, I care deeply about IRA and the work our community of literacy educators does, around the world, to support children, parents, and teachers.

This issue has consumed substantial amounts of time at every Board meeting that I have attended.  I am confident that we have worked carefully, honorably, and cautiously, trying to determine the best possible solution for a complex situation.  I will share some of the aspects of this situation we face so that you have a better understanding of the challenges, the actions we have (and have not) taken, and the direction that I, personally, would like us to take:


 1.  If revenue and profit margins were our only concern, we would not have appointed new editors three years ago.  Lectura y Vida has never been profitable.  It's fiscal performance has been under continuous board review far before the resignation of Maria Elena Rodriguez and the commencement of the 2007 search that produced the two current editors, Mirta Castedo and Celia Diaz. We celebrated Maria Elena's extraordinary tenure at the Atlanta Convention, and introduced the new editors to the IRA publishing community at the authors' reception. Thereafter, the IRA publications director prepared and assigned a lengthy time and event regimen for the new editors so that they could complete a half year transition under Maria Elena's continuing stewardship before assuming complete editorial control.  Part of this was the development of a larger, more visible, editorial board.  We were hopeful that we could substantially increase the impact that the journal had in Latin America, serving teachers and others in more substantial ways.


 1.  Three years of sustained board attention have been given to the Lectura y Vida matter; there has been no rush to judgment and no final termination decision, yet. We are doing everything that we can to avoid seeing the journal disappear.  We have been concerned about many elements of the LyV operation including, but not limited to, its financial operation and its subscriber base in Latin America. Throughout this process, my good friend and fellow Board member, Adelina Arellano-Osuna of Venezuela, has helped all of us to better understand the special context of this journal and its importance to Latin America.  As our concerns grew, Adelina visited the Buenos Aires office to gather additional information about this matter. Finally, Linda Gambrell, during her presidential year, asked that a special board committee be formed to study the Lectura y Vida situation. Appointed to this committee were four board members (Barbara Walker, Adelina Arellano-Osuna, Carl Braun, myself, and the director of publications, Dan Mangan). The efforts of this committee continue to this day. Everyone has worked many long hours, trying to figure out how best to increase the influence of this journal. Dan Mangan, Director of Publications, and Adelina Arellano-Osuna have worked especially hard.  I believe that our work has been carried out with great honesty, dignity, and respect.  We care very deeply about how best to solve this issue in the best possible fashion.


 1.  At the level of raw subscriber numbers, LyV has very little readership; it can be said to have a market penetration of zero, given that its target audience, Latin America, has a population base of half a billion with over 400 universities. In the summer of 2007 the publications director prepared a breakout study of the Lectura y Vida subscriber list. The breakout study made clear that the journal had a negligible subscriber base of 1,397.


 1.  The ironic fact is that most of the subscribers to this international journal are in the U.S. About two thirds (905/1397) of all subscriptions to Lectura y Vida are to addresses in the U.S., many of those were to institutional entities such as university libraries (403). These data, from our recent study of the matter, suggest that Lectura y Vida is having little, if any, impact within the communities we seek to support.


 1.  I am not sure I would agree that LyV is competitive, in academic terms, with JAAL. Perhaps I misunderstood your use of the phrase "in academic terms," but in terms of impact I might question this conclusion. LyV has a subscriber base of 1,397.  JAAL, by contrast, has about 15,000 print and 1,000 online only subscribers.


 1.  Lectura y Vida is an important financial expense for the Association and appears to have had very little impact at a time when deteriorating economic conditions, world-wide, are placing a much greater strain on our limited resources. In addition to its negligible subscription levels, Lectura y Vida has never been a viable publication from a financial perspective. In the 2008 fiscal year, the journal's subscription revenue was $39K against direct expenses of $113K. IRA would lose approximately $50 for every additional subscription to Lectura y Vida, at least using figures from the past year.  Moreover, conversion to online delivery does not eliminate costs, but simply trades one set of costs for another. What many tend to ignore are the necessary hosting, access control, and maintenance costs, as well as the continuing costs of web-based marketing. There are also costs associated with an editor's time.


 1.  Our whole approach is to be as flexible and imaginative as possible with respect to finding a partner who can help us continue publication of the journal. In February 2008, the publications director prepared an analysis of the Lectura y Vida situation for the Board LyV Committee. His conclusion was that IRA had three distinct options: terminate the journal, convert to online, or find another agency, such as a publishing company or a university that could take over the journal, perhaps in continued partnership with IRA. The committee could have terminated the journal then; we recommended to try to find another agency. To pursue this third option, three documents were prepared: a solicitation letter, a non-disclosure agreement, and a detailed information prospectus. The solicitation letter communicates that IRA is taking action on a resource of interest, and it invites the recipient to sign and return the NDA in order to receive a detailed information prospectus. The prospectus, which includes a financial statement, does not mandate a sale and purchase; rather, it invites the recipient to suggest a workable structure that achieves the desired objective.


 1.  Careful preparations were undertaken to launch the canvassing for a new agency, and the journal editors themselves were invited to be a part of the process. Two of these transfer documents had to be translated into Spanish. Moreover, a list of solicitation targets in the region had to be identified. Adelina Arellano-Osuna assisted with both tasks. At the Board committee's meeting during the IRA Phoenix convention in February 2009, a timetable was decided upon that called for communication to be sent out in early March. Recipients who returned signed NDAs were to receive the information prospectus, and the prospectus called for a general proposal to be returned to IRA by April 20th. It was also agreed to at this point that the publications director would contact the LyV editors and inform them of the actions being taken and the reasons behind them. While the editors were naturally stunned by the news, they understood the situation and made additional suggestions as to whom the solicitation packages could be sent.


 1.  We have not, yet, terminated Lectura y Vida.  We are in the middle of an ongoing transition process, where we seek to transfer publication of this journal to another group or entity. Solicitation letters went out to 15 nominated agencies. We received a total of 3 signed NDAs by the deadline. Each of the signing parties was then sent the full prospectus, which called for a draft plan to be submitted to IRA by April 20th, a one month window.


 1.  We have extended our initial deadlines in order to cast a wider net for potential publishing partners. No plans were received by the deadline. A week before the April 20th deadline the LyV editors contacted the publications director to say that the deadline was too tight, that they had additional agency candidates they wished to recommend, and further, that they requested an opportunity to present their personal plan to relocate the journal to their own universities. Consequently, the deadline for receipt of a plan was pushed back to June 1, 2009, additional parties have been sent the solicitation letter, and the editors will present their own plan via a conference call following the IRA Minneapolis convention.


 1.  We do plan to terminate Lectura y Vida if we are unable to transfer the publication of this journal to another party. The board committee had agreed that if another agency cannot be confirmed by December 31, 2009, Lectura y Vida would cease publication at the end of 2010. It takes a year to move a subscriber base off our internal systems, and the editors' contracts expire in December of 2010.  We take our contractual obligations with editors very seriously.  Despite our best efforts, our time is running out.


 1.  The comments on the Hall of Fame Listserv may likely have caused more harm than good.  I worry about this trend on our listserv.  This is a group revered by many in the reading community.  I am incredibly honored to be a member of such an illustrious group.  It harms our reputation, I think, when we post claims on our listserv that are not based on accurate information.


 1.  I have not operated in a manner that did not take other voices into account, nor in a "secret" procedure.  With all due respect, I do wish the next time something that involves me takes place like this, that the person call me to discuss the matter rather than post unsupported claims with inferential leaps that go unsubstantiated.  (I hope I have not offended anyone with this sentence.  I do not mean to.)  I would be happy to share as much as I can, certainly anything that would not hurt IRA or another individual.

 I hope this is not typical of our conversations on the Hall of Fame Listserv.  If it is, I will be unsubscribing.  Our list could be so much more, with discussions of recent studies that have been published or research that needs to be conducted. To have conversation revolve around rumor or hearsay does not benefit ourselves as individuals, nor our organization, I think.


 1.  We need to understand the difference between secrecy and confidentiality. The former entails the deliberate withholding of information, while the latter deals instead with the controlled release of information to prevent harm to others. The board committee has scrupulously observed a rule of confidentiality in order to explore realistic options for the journal without unduly alarming either the journal's staff (including the review board) or the broad base of the Association's Latin American members. We value the goodwill of our Latin American membership very highly, and we had hoped to put off general announcements until we had good news to share.


 1.  IRA is trying to strengthen its international commitments and find new ways of providing per-reviewed articles about literacy to colleagues around the world, in first languages. Latin America is but one of the international regions which IRA serves. It is the only region that has been supported with a separate journal and regional office, and this support has been provided for the better part of 30 years.  Most importantly, the model of support has always seemed to not feel quite right to me.  It seemed to be based in more of a colonialist/paternalistic model. This has caused some of us, on the IRA Board, to wonder if we need to develop a better model for supporting communities in regions of the world where such journals do not exist in a local, or regional, language.

The Board has recently implemented a new strategic initiative to assess the prospects for helping regional memberships develop self-supporting publishing operations to disseminate critical information about research and practice. This idea was first suggested by Kathy Au. A committee is being appointed to explore new publishing and subscription models for the regional memberships, perhaps through the enhanced use of online technologies. The goal is to forge tighter connections with our international constituencies while leveraging our limited resources prudently, and to offer similar services across regions. Personally, I would like to see the money we save from turning over Lectura y Vida to another entity used in this way.  Perhaps, we could figure out a model to develop rotating 5-year projects that initiate and build self-sustaining journals of literacy around the world. A model like this would be something all of us could be proud of.  This is a new strategic direction, and more will be said about it as the exploratory effort continues.   If you have any ideas about this I welcome conversation.

There is my best attempt at explaining our concerns and our plans for Lectura y Vida, Emelia.  I always like to look for the positive elements in any situation.  I am certainly hoping we can find someone to take over Lectura y Vida.  Most importantly, though, I hope we can use this experience to help us develop a model for journal support that is based on egalitarian, not quasi-colonialist, principles of mutual respect, temporary support, and self-sustaining interest and impact.


Cheers,

Don
--
Donald J. Leu, Ph.D.
John and Maria Neag Endowed Chair in Literacy and Technology
Board of Directors, International Reading Association
University of Connecticut
249 Glenbrook Road
Storrs, CT  06269-2033
Office:  860.486.0202    Office Fax: 860-486.2994
Cell:  860.680.3752      Home: 860.447.8881
The New Literacies Research Lab: http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/

"Every  one of us is given the gift of life, and what a strange gift it is.
If it is preserved jealously and selfishly, it impoverishes and
saddens. But if it is spent for others, it enriches and beautifies."

-- Geraldine  Ferraro.
   Acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic Party National  Convention.



________________________________
From: <ferreiro at cinvestav.mx>
Date: Fri, 1 May 2009 02:21:50 -0400
To: HOF List <reading-hall-of-fame at nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Concerns about Spanish Journal of IRA



Dear colleagues of the Reading Hall of Fame:

I guess that I am the only Latin-American member of the RHF.  As such, I
feel the need to share with you an astonishing action taken by IRA Board
without further discussion. To say it shortly, they decided to drop out
the only Spanish Journal of IRA (Lectura y Vida) taking into account only
financial reasons. This Journal has 30 years of continuous existence. It
reaches all the countries of the region and has also many USA readers.

I was a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of LyV (Lectura y Vida)
since the early years of this Journal. I can certify of the growing impact
this Journal had over the years. It started when reading and writing
research was at its beginnings in the region.  It was a time when military
dictatorships were alive in many countries (having well known consequences
in scientific and educational life). Little by little, LyV increased its
influence through Latin-America. Many (if not all regional subscribers)
knew about IRA through LyV.  Contributions from many researchers and
educators of various countries enhanced progressively the level of the
Journal. Nowadays, LyV is competitive, in academic terms, to other IRA
journals such as JAAL.

The present Editors were appointed end 2007, after a long and careful
competition process. The first 2008 issue of LyV represented a big
accomplishment since the Advisory Board included 52 names of leading
educators and researchers from 14 different Latin-American countries plus
USA, Israel and four European countries (Spain, France, Belgium and
Switzerland).

Of course, financial arguments need serious consideration. Probably the
Journal, in its present printing form, cannot survive. But there are
alternatives to reduce production and distribution costs (including an
on-line version),  The Board has put a deadline to LyV (December 2010),
taking this decision without hearing other voices and in a "secret"
procedure.

I am sharing these concerns with my colleagues of the RHF for two reasons.
First, because we are attached to IRA and, some way or another, we are
affected by the decisions made by the Board. Second, because IRA aims to
be, by its very name, International. There seems to be a contradiction
between the Obama's policy towards LA region and the IRA Board's policy.
We are in a period of financial crisis, ok. Could we ignore policy
reasons? Did IRA's Board evaluate the political impact of their decision
on the Latin American members of IRA?

Unfortunately, I will not be able to join you at the Minnesota Meeting.
That is why I am sending this message. I am not suggesting that the RHF,
as such, take position. I am only sharing a concern. A major one.
Best regards,
EMILIA FERREIRO
(By the way, I inform you that I was recently appointed Emeritus
Researcher of the Mexican National System of Researchers)


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