From the issue dated September 20, 2002
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Second Thoughts on 'Bundled' E-JournalsLibrarians' skepticism grows on colleges' agreements with ElsevierBy ANDREA L. FOSTER For three years, Cornell University has been providing faculty members
But its contract for the journals is set to expire at the end of this year. And Cornell is among a number of colleges that may end their licenses with ScienceDirect, reflecting growing skepticism about the deals they have made with Elsevier. Ross W. Atkinson, the associate university librarian for collection development at Cornell, says he is frustrated that the university's agreement with ScienceDirect makes it uneconomical to cancel individual journals that are rarely used. As a result, Cornell can't replace unpopular Elsevier titles with high-quality journals not published by Elsevier, he says. Cornell's library system will get less than a 3-percent increase in its $7-million budget in 2003. And Sarah E. Thomas, the university librarian, warned faculty members in an e-mail message this month that she will have to cancel some journal subscriptions. ScienceDirect is increasing the price of its journals, and the additional cost, she wrote, would "consume almost our entire" growth in the budget. Like Cornell's, many academic libraries and consortia are deciding whether to renew contracts first brokered during the burst of electronic offerings in the late 1990s. One of their biggest decisions will be whether to continue with ScienceDirect, the largest and most costly of the electronic packages. The database now provides access to about 1,500 journals, including 335 Academic Press and Harcourt Health Sciences titles recently acquired in Elsevier's purchase of Harcourt General. Elsevier offers libraries and consortia several options for licensing a bundle of ScienceDirect titles. One option is for libraries that want to move to an electronic-only collection. Other options allow libraries to complement their print collections with electronic titles at a fraction of the titles' print price. In some cases, journal articles that aren't included in a library's subscription can be paid for and retrieved individually. All ScienceDirect deals, however, discourage libraries from dropping titles, and they often limit librarians' ability to publicly discuss the terms of their contracts. Some institutions that cancel titles don't realize any cost savings but are allowed to substitute other ScienceDirect titles that cost the same. Other institutions are greatly restricted in how much money they can save by canceling titles. Other publishers promote bundled journal subscriptions, discourage libraries from canceling titles, and sometimes require secrecy about contract terms. But librarians criticize Elsevier because of its dominance in the journal market and because its journal prices, they say, tend to be higher than other publishers', which is why they sometimes refer to Elsevier as "El Severe." High Prices, Big Demand Colleges and consortia can spend between a few hundred thousand to several million dollars on a deal, depending on the number of titles they select and the number of library patrons they serve. Faculty members and academic researchers are increasingly demanding around-the-clock electronic access to journals. But as college budgets decline, journal prices rise, and libraries feel the pinch, some librarians are beginning to question whether they can afford to commit a huge chunk of their funds to one publisher's database. "It's a pitched battle right now for control of research libraries' rights to determine what they offer their patrons," says Jeffrey B. Garrett, acting assistant university librarian for collection management at the Evanston campus of Northwestern University. "The problem with all of these big deals out there is that we are being asked to provide our patrons with things that we don't want, and pay for them. And we really don't appreciate being confronted with this form of ultimatum." Elsevier has responded by trying to limit the cost increases of its journals. In a letter sent to libraries last month, Derk Haank, chairman of Elsevier Science, announced that for ScienceDirect customers the total cost of their print and electronic titles for 2003 would increase no more than 5 percent over this year's price. For other customers, the cap would be 7.5 percent, which has been the typical percentage cap of cost increases on print journals, says Karen Hunter, senior vice president for strategy at Elsevier. The percentage cap on price increases on electronic journals has varied depending on the institution's license agreement, she adds. "We've been contacted by customers who have budget problems and who are saying, 'We don't want to have to cancel.' And we're trying to figure out what to do," she says. Budget Woes Cornell isn't the only college having second thoughts about ScienceDirect. A three-year deal that seven Virginia colleges brokered with Elsevier to gain access to all its electronic journals through 2003 probably will not be renewed, says Paul Metz, director of collection management at Virginia Tech. He negotiated the group deal for his institution, George Mason, James Madison, Old Dominion, and Virginia Commonwealth Universities, and the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia. Mr. Metz's pessimism is based on the state's budget woes, and on an Elsevier representative's telling him, he says, that the publisher would not be able to make as generous an offer as the group's current deal. The institutions have an arrangement where, if one college has a title, all the others can get it too at no extra cost, which effectively allows everyone entry to the complete array of ScienceDirect titles, says Mr. Metz. Some librarians also say they cannot afford the new prices of Academic Press titles quoted by Elsevier. Katina Strauch, head of collection development for the College of Charleston Libraries, says that starting in January 2003 her institution will no longer be able to afford electronic access to a collection of journals that was formerly part of Academic Press's International Digital Electronic Access Library. The 175 journals were folded into ScienceDirect when Elsevier purchased Harcourt last year. Currently, the college spends $24,625 a year for access to about 130 journals in the Academic Press database and $14,793 for 37 titles in print. But under Elsevier's pricing structure, the cost for one person at a time to electronically retrieve any of the 37 titles the college has in print would be $120,033, and the college would pay about $43,127 to maintain the 37 print titles, says Ms. Strauch. She says the college expects to cancel its subscription to the Academic Press database and maintain its print subscriptions, forcing researchers to work harder to get the information they want. "They'll have to do interlibrary loan, or they'll just have to pay per article," she says. Daviess Menefee, Elsevier's director of library relations for North and South America, says a small number of libraries have had a "very good deal" with Academic Press. Although Elsevier can't provide the same contract terms as Academic Press, he says, his company is trying to "bridge the gap" with those libraries. Other aspects of Elsevier's terms for ScienceDirect rankle some librarians. Some complain that ScienceDirect's contracts ban them from discussing many of the contract terms. Mr. Menefee says that since the company has contracts with a wide variety of libraries, it would be counterproductive for librarians to compare their contracts. It "would generate more confusion and possibly consternation among customers who might not understand why there could be a discrepancy," he says. Cutting Costs Many colleges are looking for ways to at least reduce their expenditures on electronic journals. During the last six years, the library at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has canceled about one-third of its print- and electronic-journal subscriptions from Elsevier, with expensive engineering and physics titles taking the biggest hit. Kenneth L. Frazier, the director of the Madison library, says the cancellations are an unavoidable result of the total price of journals to which Madison subscribes having increased by between $300,000 and $500,000 a year, while the library's budget has been relatively flat. The library subscribes to 138 titles through ScienceDirect and 322 Elsevier print titles, but not as part of a bundled deal. Mr. Frazier says the cancellations have freed up money for his library to buy lower-cost journals. For example, the library is considering replacing Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, an Elsevier journal that cost $2,961 in 2002 with the IEEE Sensors Journal, which the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. publish jointly at a cost of $525. And the library is still able -- through interlibrary loans or commercial vendors -- to acquire articles from journals it doesn't subscribe to. Mr. Frazier is an outspoken critic of large electronic packaged deals. He called them the "big deal" in a March 2001 article in D-Lib Magazine, a monthly magazine about research in digital libraries. Other librarians have since adopted the term. Mr. Frazier also was the founding member and past chairman of the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, an alliance of research institutions, libraries, and groups that has helped create low-cost journals as alternatives to titles published by for-profit companies. The Association of Research Libraries sponsors the group. Elsevier structures its contracts so that it is quite painful for libraries to retreat from a bundled ScienceDirect subscription, says Mr. Frazier. For a modest price increase, he says, many libraries went from subscribing to only a few hundred journals to receiving more than 1,000 titles. But if they now want to turn off the full spigot, they face the prospect of paying for costly journals individually. Mr. Metz, of Virginia Tech, also says that one of the benefits of rejecting another big ScienceDirect deal is the prospect of having greater freedom to drop titles that aren't well used by scholars, and using the savings to purchase non-Elsevier titles. "I think we've just finally reached the point where ... you want to buy other publishers' journals, too," he says. Institutions that are part of the NorthEast Research Libraries consortium realize limited financial savings from canceling ScienceDirect journals. The consortium includes Cornell and about 20 other higher-education institutions, most of which are major research universities. When consortium members drop individual ScienceDirect titles, they save no more than a set percentage of the money they spend on the package, says Ann Okerson, associate university librarian at Yale University. She declines to reveal the figure, saying only that it is "modest." Some librarians say that large publishers like Elsevier are pushing bundled journal subscriptions so they can rely on a certain income stream, and analysts agree that ScienceDirect is important to the company, which is a division of Reed Elsevier. "It's seen as part of the turnaround story at Reed Elsevier," says Michael B. Nathanson, a European-media analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, a brokerage firm in New York. Any trend among libraries to move away from ScienceDirect could cause the company's stock price to decline, he says. In August 2000, ScienceDirect's market penetration among academic, corporate, and medical institutions was 35 percent. Two years later it is 69 percent, and by the end of the year the company expects to reach 75-percent penetration, says Paul D. Richards, a media analyst with Numis Securities, in Britain. Indeed, ScienceDirect continues to attract new customers. For example, the Medical College of Wisconsin Libraries, which has not had a license for the database, is planning to receive about 175 titles beginning this year. It now spends $300,000 for the 175 titles in print, but will spend an additional $37,500 for the electronic access. That means the college will spend one third of its budget for journals on Elsevier titles. Alfred B. Kraemer, head of technical services at the medical-college libraries, says his decision was influenced by data showing that scholars' use of electronic titles at the libraries more than doubled from 2000 to 2001. "We know they have been waiting for this," he says. To sign up for ScienceDirect, the college expects to pay about 12.5 percent of the money it spends on Elsevier print titles. But to pay individually for electronic titles would be 25 percent of the cost of the college's print titles, says Mr. Kraemer. He says Else-vier is guaranteeing that library patrons will be able to retrieve online the back issues from ScienceDirect if the college decides to cancel its license. Even some faculty members at universities that have rejected ScienceDirect speak highly of the service. "I'm a huge fan," says Martin S. Eichenbaum, chairman of the economics department at Northwestern. He has been regularly looking up articles from about 10 economics journals because the university has a one-year trial subscription to ScienceDirect, which will end this year. Mr. Eichenbaum says he likes being able to retrieve articles anytime from his office or home computers. And he says he can efficiently search the database for specific topics or terms. Help for Small Colleges Despite doubts about big package contracts, many small colleges strongly defend them, saying they substantially widen the scope of titles available to institutions that have tiny print collections. "No one's come up with a better solution for those of us who are in the semi-have and have-not category," says Tom J. Sanville, executive director of the Ohio Library and Information Network. The consortium of 80 Ohio academic libraries is spending about $19-million a year to gain access to a database of more than 4,500 journals, including ScienceDirect. He has found that the print collections of libraries in the consortium constitute only a small fraction of the titles that their patrons view online. Four-year colleges that have an average of 150 print titles each used about 1,325 titles electronically for the year ending in June 2002. Community and technical colleges that subscribe to few journals each retrieved between 400 and 600 titles, Mr. Sanville says. He says the amount each college spends for the database is not significantly different from what it spent just to receive titles in print. "This is a huge increase in opportunity for our students and faculty," he says. Still, doubt reigns in many campus libraries. Philip M. Davis, life-sciences bibliographer for Cornell, says his research shows that scholars regularly use only a fraction of the journals available to them in large databases. He investigated the NorthEast consortium's use of the old Academic Press database for 2000 and 2001, and concluded that scholars retrieved journals that their libraries already owned in print 10 times more often than the titles that their libraries did not have in print. His findings are scheduled to appear in the November issue of Colleges & Research Libraries News. He says his study shows that librarians understand well what scholars at their institutions read, and that big deals are not necessarily good deals. "It's kind of like the all-you-can-eat buffet where Chinese restaurants will advertise based on the length of the buffet table," says Mr. Davis. "You don't want more, you just want more value." ADVANTAGES AND PITFALLS OF 'BUNDLED' SUBSCRIPTIONS Here's an example of how a college halves its cost for electronic access to Elsevier Science journals by purchasing the titles as a group, instead of individually. In this case, the Medical College of Wisconsin Libraries is about to sign a package deal to receive the titles electronically.
SOURCE: Alfred B. Kraemer, Head of Technical Services, Medical College of Wisconsin Libraries
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 49, Issue 4, Page A31
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education