Go down to the journal stacks soon and you might get a big surprise. Faced with fast-rising subscription costs and a static collections budget, UC Davis libraries will cancel print editions of hundreds of journals next year, maintaining online access in most cases.
Although Provost Virginia Hinshaw exempted the 2003-04 book and journal budget from the library’s budget reduction plan, average subscription prices for periodicals will rise by eight percent in 2004, said Gail Yokote, associate university librarian for research services and collections.
That follows a trend of rising prices over the last two decades.
“We could not continue with the same number of print journals and maintain online access” Yokote said.
Earlier this year, librarians drew up a list of about 2,000 periodicals that are held in multiple libraries or which are available online. After taking comments and reviewing the list, print versions of some 1,300 periodicals will be cancelled. In some cases, one library on campus will retain a print edition.
Dropping print editions also saves money on binding and storage costs, said health sciences librarian Jo Anne Boorkman.
“What we’ve tried to do is preserve access to unique content,” Yokote said.
Contracts negotiated between the University of California libraries, the California Digital Library and publishers include a “perpetual access” clause, so that users will always be able to access archived material even if a subscription expires. UC also maintains a permanent print archive in a depository in southern California. Users can request articles and journal issues from this facility through campus libraries.
As part of the Collection Management Initiative, a one year, UC-wide study funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Physical Sciences and Engineering Library removed from its shelves selected print journals that are available online. During the study, there were no requests for the paper issues except in cases where the issue was missing from the online version, said physical sciences librarian Karen Andrews.
“This demonstrated that physical sciences and engineering clientele were primarily using the electronic versions most of the time, and did not miss the print,” she said.
But Judith Stern, professor of nutrition and vice-chair of the Academic Senate, worries that cutting print journals will affect scholarship and teaching.
“I think it will harm our ability to train people in breadth,” Stern said. Online searches are good for in-depth research but do not give the same breadth of information as browsing articles and editorials in print journals, she said.
“It will limit our ability to be multidisciplinary,” Stern said.
Raymond Waddington, professor of English and chair of the library committee of the UC Davis division of the Academic Senate, echoed Stern’s concern about browsability. Reliability of electronic archives and the completeness of online versions compared to print are also areas of concern, he said.
While the committee had been skeptical about the changes, the collections budget is a major issue, Waddington said.
“Resources do not go far enough and choices have to be made,” he said.
Behind the surge in journal prices is a chaotic situation in the scientific publishing industry. Takeovers and mergers have reduced the number of publishers, while faculty appointments and promotions depend increasingly on publishing in high-profile journals.
“It has grown into an incredible economic machine for scientific and medical publishers,” Yokote said. The move to electronic publishing was supposed to save money, but there’s been no reduction in prices, she said.
Ironically, most of the content of scholarly journals is provided to publishers by university faculty free of charge, including the peer review process.
There’s no clear business model for publishing academic journals online. Some publishers offer free access as a bonus to print edition subscribers. Others offer print editions at a substantial discount to libraries that subscribe to an online version. Some charge a premium for access to both print and online versions.
Brain Research, one of the most expensive titles in the UC Davis collection, costs $19,971 for a full print subscription. UC Davis gets online access as part of the “Science Direct” package of about 1,700 titles negotiated by the California Digital Library with publishers Reed Elsevier. As part of the deal, the library gets the print edition of Brain Research at a steeply discounted price of about $5,000.
For many academic societies that publish journals, subscriptions — especially the expensive institutional subscriptions — are a major source of income to pay for conferences, fellowships and other activities.
Some journals, such as Cell and the New England Journal of Medicine, have substantial numbers of individual subscribers and little incentive to offer moderate terms for institutional access to print and online versions. In both cases, UC Davis libraries will retain print editions but have no access to online versions.
For example, the New England Journal of Medicine will charge institutions $5,400 in 2004 for access to the most recent six months of the journal online; older material is free to print subscribers, Boorkman said.
The Health Sciences Library will cancel 343 print editions in 2004, saving approximately $200,000, Boorkman said. Many are duplicates held at the Shields, Carlson Health Sciences or Medical Center libraries. A single print version will be retained at one location whenever possible, she said.
Humanities scholars have a greater need for print and have not adopted online access to the same extent as scientists, said humanities and social sciences librarian Myra Appel.
“Print resources of all sorts are their research laboratories,” she said. In some cases, such as art, art history, film studies and dance, colored images are important for research and teaching. Online periodicals may not render these images as well as print.
“We have to be very careful when considering whether to cancel a journal, that the online version gives us what we need,” Appel said. “It’s a tough decision.”
One strategy to restrain the cost of journals is to promote alternative publishing options that make papers available at no or low cost, such as the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central and the California Digital Library’s eScholarship program. But many high-ranking journals do not allow papers submitted to them to be shared in this way, and faculty seek the recognition from publishing in high-profile journals such as Nature, Science and Cell.
Services such as the arXiv.org preprint server, which circulates preprints in physical sciences and math, provide a slightly different function to peer-reviewed journals, said Andrews. “People still want to publish in scholarly peer-reviewed journals for tenure,” she said.
Stern said that she had offered to donate print volumes of journals that she receives personally to the library, but had been turned down.
Offers of journal donations are made with the best of intentions but are difficult for libraries to manage, Boorkman said. Legally, personal subscriptions are clearly intended for the subscriber’s use only and not for institutions. As a result, the library accepts donations only to fill gaps in existing collections, she said. The health sciences library does have an “Adopt-a-Journal” program where an individual can donate the cost of an institutional subscription, she said.
More information on the library’s strategies for containing rising costs can be found on the web at http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/info/jrnltrans/index.html.