April 4, 2006
Cutting Way Back on Journals
An article in the Louisville Courier-Journal tells of the rising costs of journals at a time of tight budgets at the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky. The situation is one that many librarians will recognize, The campus libraries are buying fewer books, and journals that are important to research are being dropped. At Kentucky, at least, the numbers are daunting: The university discontinued subscriptions to about 1,000 journals this year.
Such a lengthy list of canceled subscriptions is not included in the news article, but many observers (including those here at The Chronicle) have noted that smaller journals are often first to get the ax. And those smaller journals frequently need subscribers more than the bigger ones do. The Courier-Journal story does note that professors have a hard time getting their hands on information after journals are dropped.
Posted on Tuesday April 4, 2006 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: An Argument Over Accuracy Heats Up
Next: $100-Laptop Creator Responds to Bill Gates
no se pierda el interesante caso movistar
movistar
antes de nada siempre hay algo
— asdf Apr 4, 04:08 PM #
The Association of Research Libraries statistics are most informative. From 1986 to 2004 the average percentage change in the total expenditures for the member libraries has increased 5% versus a 7.6% increase in serial expenditures.
The unit cost for serials has risen, on average, 6.1% per year from 1986 to 2003. It would appear that there is little statistical information to demonstrate a rationale for the actions at the Universities of Louisville and Kentucky unless one views the changes within a context of shifting priorities.
As for the choice maintaining the more common serials, my personal bias is that libraries, are very oriented to quantifiable measures of “success.” I believe that libraries look for the most easily quantifiable measures of success, with frequency of use being one such measure. By reducing those serials that are used the least and often times the most expensive, a library can boast of providing greater service at a lower cost.
I believe this sort of mind set resulted when faculty gave up oversight of libraries. By and large, if librarians do research, it is about librarianship. In my own personal experience, librarians are not scholars and do not have an understanding of what it means to do research and therefore do not understand the process of research.
University Libraries are, in a sense, monopolies. They are responsible to faculty and students only to the extent that faculty are willing to be involved in oversight.
If faculty want a good library, they need a teacher and researcher (in a field other than librarianship) who has a good business sense, and who values the process of education and research, as their Head Librarian, not someone whose major graduate study was, and research is, limited to librarianship.
If you are going to make a great product, you have to be a consumer of your product.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a librarian is: “keeper or custodian of a library.”Library School does not give an individual the expertise in a subject, yet they are often entrusted to do the selection, usually with little faculty supervision. It seems to me that this lack of hands on faculty oversight is a fundamental, systemic flaw, with the case in point being just one of many manifestations of that flaw. Librarians are trained to be keepers of libraries, not builders of libraries.
— Karl Miller Apr 5, 10:12 AM #
This problem is compounded by the fact that libraries now subscribe to massive journal databases, which often don’t include the small journals. What journals they do include is often overlapping enough that if you need access to a journal on a competing database, you’re facing an impossible battle to get it.
The problem of knowledge dissemination is becoming a real problem in the humanities, who often find themselves in line for serial funding after the sciences. PLoS can’t succeed quickly enough. And we need a PLoH.
— John Laudun Apr 5, 10:54 AM #
I empathize with Karl Miller in his post concerning Journals in academic libraries. I am an academic librarian and have 30 years experience with library acquisitions and budgets. We, too, had several years of journal cuts, though none as severe as U of L. We actively engaged the faculty in the decision of what journals to cancel. It also afforded us and opportunity to cancel some titles no longer needed since the research orientation of some departments has changed.
Yet, even with that input, there was no way we could balance our budget without damage to scholarly research. Mine is a private university and our endowments are only generating so much income. However, we are in much, much better shape than most public universities who have seen either cuts to their funding or zero increase, which is effectively a cut.
Add to this mix the move to electronic journals and be prepared to faint at the cost. We are spending 1.4M a year with one vendor (Elsevier) alone! We are spending additional funds to purchase access to the backfiles of these journals, mostly due to faculty demand. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me to re-purchase the content we already have in print. For every backfile we purchase, we have less to spend on new content.
The journal problem in libraries requires a multiprong approach.
1) State legislatures must appropriate more funding to universities and colleges to appropriate to the library. The percentage of public institutional budgets received from the state is 1/2 to 1/3 of what it was, even if the dollar figure is higher. Also, University administrators often see the library budget as a black hole since it, unlike, say the business school, does not generate income. The relatively large library budget is used as a cash cow when university budgets tank.
2) Publishers must work with individual institutions, consortia, and state higher education boards to lower the cost of journals. The Greater Midwestern Library Alliance that we are part of has been able to achieve some significant cost savings.
3) Publishers must be more flexible in their package pricing. Libraries must have the option to reject certain journals offered in a package and get a reduction in the package price. Too often we pay for journals of limited quality or interest on our campus because it is part of the “big deal.” Why shouldn’t electronic journals follow a print journal pricing model? Elsevier doesn’t push our print subscriptions by insisting we order one title in order to get another. Yet they do so with the eletronic. The market for some journals is limited, but it isn’t up to libraries to “maintain a minium cash flow” as one vendor expected us to do.
4) Publishers need to be more flexible in their licensing agreements. Satellite campuses are often required to purchase a separate subscription to e-journals. Our library cooperates with the medical library across the street to meet the needs of both our faculty and the medical school. We can not make a joint purchase of the electronic subscriptions but must each maintain separate subscriptions. In addition, those faculty with joint appointments must maintain 2 separate computer accounts, one at each library, in order to access these journals from wherever they are doing research.
5) Tenure requirements should focus on quality, not quantity. It isn’t so much the exponential growth in knowledge as it is the exponential growth in publishing, aided and abetted by the need to publish, publish, publish or perish.
6) Libraries must be more proactive vis-avis publishers. We don’t have to accept what does not work for us. After all, we are the publishers’ primary market and perhaps they would prefer a steady income stream to none at all.
7) Libraries need to engage in more cooperative collection development efforts so that very expensive journals or those of limited research appeal will not be lost to scholarship.
8) To facilitate this effort, libraries need to put more effort into quick turn around of ILL requests. Of course, that will probably mean more money for updated equipment and software and more computer techs to keep it going.
Even more can be done to break the high inflation cycle for journals such as supportingt such efforts as SPARC and retaining copyright to faculty research articles. The faculty shouldn’t snipe at the library for circumstances it can not control nor should the library scoff at faculty research needs. We are all in this together.
— Elka Tenner Apr 5, 12:44 PM #
Actually, this issue is far more complex. The root of the problem lies in the current system of scholarly communication which gives ownership of important articles to private publishers. Some publishers are very reasonable in their pricing and policies; and some have taken advantage of their “monopoly ownership” of important journal titles to charge libraries outrageous prices and implement unreasonable policies. Contributing to this are many factors, including changes to copyright law; that electronic journal systems may fall under contract law; and even differences between North American and European copyright laws and sense of how the system should work.
However, there are signs of a revolution. Some high profile scholars have quit editorships of journals (with avaricious publishers) and started competing journals (with more reasonable university presses or even free online). Of course, it usually takes a while for a journal to build reputation. Still, there are now many peer-reviewed journals that can be accessed free on the web. This move has many benefits. Not only could it help library budgets, but it makes research available to scholars in developing countries, and faculty don’t have to waste time authenticating themselves with passwords, etc.
I wouldn’t be surprised if 10 or 20 years from now scholarly information is easier to obtain. However, the transition is likely to be painful. Positive change can happen when faculty and librarians work together. Librarians can not make this change alone and faculty will find that librarians have much to offer.
The first step is to learn more about the problem. The “rub” being that faculty are so busy with teaching and research that it is difficult to take the time. I recommend two short brochures you can download from this page:
http://www.createchange.org/resources/brochure.html
These are fairly brief and you may find the issue fascinating.
Kate Pittsley
Business and Economics Librarian
Eastern Michigan University
— Kate Pittsley Apr 7, 09:38 AM #