Cornell Considers What to Do About Rising Journal Subscription Costs
especially from publisher Elsevier. Their Issues in Scholarly Communication site explains the situation and their plan.
“We now pay ca. $1.7 million dollars for Elsevier journals. (Those journals account for less than 2% of the serials to which the Cornell Library subscribes, but that cost is equal to over 20% of the Library?s total serials expenditures including the Medical School.)”
“We are therefore planning to cancel several hundred Elsevier journals for 2004. … Once the cancellations are complete, we will list the titles on this site.”
Many libraries are also facing this same challenge regarding Elsevier journals. What would happen if enough libraries cancel their subscriptions? Is there a movement among academic librarians to coordinate what journals to cancel? If enough libraries cancel subscriptions to the most expensive journal or the journal with the highest cost increase, would Elsevier get the message? (Surely Cornell’s librarians aren’t the only ones who are complaining to Elsevier about rising costs.)
Find yourself asking “What’s the big deal?” Well, here are some of the complications. When a library system, such as Cornell’s, unsubscribes from a scientific journal, that journal isn’t as available to users. In many scientific and medical fields, those journals are essential to learn about the latest in research. “Well, aren’t there books?” In many cases, groundbreaking research is published in journals long before it would appear in a book. Journals are vital to scholarly communication. I’ve heard that some fields require the libraries to subscribe to certain journals in order for academic programs to be certified.
When a journal loses its place in the collection, libraries can take certain steps to still provide access to those articles, but there is no 100% solution. They might be able to offer the articles through interlibrary loan arrangements, document delivery services, or databases. But if enough libraries drop the same journals, procuring the articles becomes more difficult. This also places a burden upon the libraries that still subscribe to those journals. Library users may not know they can still get the article(s) through another means or make the effort to get it. The serendipity that happens when someone picks up a journal to read a specific article and notices another article worth reading won’t necessarily happen the same way anymore. And when many institutions cancel subscriptions, the publisher often raises costs even more to recoup its loses. Institutions know that and know that their decision to unsubscribe to many journals hurts their professional colleagues at other institutions. Librarians at other institutions may increase their rates for interlibrary borrowing to recoup costs from having to lend articles from journals other institutions have cancelled.
That’s a very brief introduction.
Addendum 12/9: Cornell’s list of proposed cancellations
November 12th, 2003 at 2:10 pm
With all apologies to biibliophiles out there who love the romance of the book and the smell of paper, this is exactly why we need to smash the journal publishing industry. Completely. Right now the only benefits of print journals are their ability to mobilize respected scholars for peer-review and to authenticate scholarship and distribute prestige by publishing articles.
These are all things that can be done just as well, and in many cases better, on the internet. There’s absolutely no reason for libraries to spend millions on print journals, other than entrenched interests and the technological cluelessness of many academics.
November 12th, 2003 at 3:37 pm
Actually, there are many more benefits to print versions of journals than what Ryan mentioned above. And moving print media into an electronic format isn’t always an easy thing to do. It’s much more difficult to jettison print subscriptions for electronic subscriptions for many reasons. One of them is that when you subscribe to a print format, you get the physical item. When you cancel your subscription, you can keep that physical item/those physical items. When you subscribe to a journal in an electronic format and access it over the Web, what happens when you cancel your subscription? Do they send you a CD with the run of journals your institution essentially bought? Or does the institution lose all of its access to those journal issues?
Another issue is technology. Some of us are lucky enough to be at institutions that use lots of technology and are highly wired. Many institutions aren’t. Many libraries aren’t. International libraries are often way behind libraries in the United States when it comes to the use of computer technology in libraries. Let’s not forget that there’s an information technology gap.
And there’s preservation, too. Many librarians hesitate when it comes to electronic formats because of issues of longevity. Damage to the format and changes in hardware and software are big “what ifs” many librarians don’t want to approach. Paper and microfilm still outrank digital formats for preservation in many areas.
Some fields and scholars still don’t consider publishing on the Internet–in any context: a personal homepage or a peer-reviewed site–to be at a scholarly level. Changing that mindset is difficult and where some of this conversation about moving from print to electronic formats needs to begin.
But what’s at issue here isn’t the print versus electronic journal debate. It’s about the rising cost of journals and the way certain publishers do business. Some of those companies would still use the same business practices if their journals were only available electronically. A format change isn’t going to magically change those issues. Refashioning the way some scholarly articles are published is a step in the right direction, but it’s not the entire solution to the problem Cornell and other institutions face.
November 12th, 2003 at 4:59 pm
Great points. My only clarification would be that what I’m envisioning is not things as they are, but as they could be. I’m not suggesting a simple change to electronic formats, with the show still run by publishing houses. I’m suggesting that scholars change their model entirely and self-publish. No more journals, no more subscriptions. Maybe intentional communities that aggregate scholarship, maybe websites that attempt to distribute prestige or collect reviews, but no more million-dollar-a-year bundlings or subscriptions. Route entirely around the journal publishers and the gatekeepers, and let the chips fall where they may. I’d pop open the champagne the day Kluwer or Brill disappeared from the face of the planet. =)
But you’re right–that sort of idle dreaming has little to do with the issues librarians and scholars are facing right here and right now. And you’re also right that the main issue is the business practices of big publishers. We’re still living in a world of gatekeepers, and librarians have an obligation to deal with the gatekeepers for the benefit of their patrons. But I do think we’re at the threshold of something big, and scholars can and should start to take baby-steps toward unleashing the big publishers’ grip around our collective throats. =)
November 12th, 2003 at 10:19 pm
And self-publishing versus peer-reviewed publishing is an entirely separate issue that gets even messier. Yikes! I don’t think I want to go there. At least not yet. = )
November 13th, 2003 at 12:42 pm
Werner Vogels, who’s on the Computer Science faculty at Cornell, posted on this. Apparently some faculty are arguing that they shouldn’t submit articles to Elsevier, though I thought I also read that Elsevier isn’t very big in CS publications. Werner makes a great point that universities have done this to themselves, as publication in respected journals is typically a criteria for tenure.
http://weblogs.cs.cornell.edu/AllThingsDistributed/archives/000323.html
(link activated by j, 11/13)
May 31st, 2004 at 1:20 pm
You blow like a Russian whore
[j here: This message seems to be some kind of comment spam. I deleted the many other comments repeating this message. I've left this one as a temporary example because of an e-mail I sent out to a support list Tuesday (6/1/04) morning. It will magically disappear soon.]