December 18, 1998
Dear Colleagues,
Over the past decade, research library expenditures for serials have increased almost 10% per year. Over the same time period, the number of serial titles included in "Ulrich’s International Periodicals Directory" increased almost 60%. The fluctuation in the value of the Canadian dollar only compounds this problem as over 80% of the serial titles we buy are not available in Canada or via Canadian sources and therefore are invoiced in non-Canadian currencies.
The issues of growing cost, growing supply and limited funds to support our serial subscription purchases are in the main responsible for our current need to cancel $750,000 worth of serials subscriptions; the lists of possible titles for cancellation are available in each library branch and are included on the Library’s Serials Cancellation web site at http://www.library.ubc.ca (click on "What's New", then click on "Serials Cancellations").
Given the lack of control the Library has over increasing subscription costs, the growth in new titles published and the value of the Canadian dollar, it is imperative that we begin to consider how we will be able to continue to provide access to the information required by UBC’s students, faculty, staff and researchers.
The process of scholarly communication requires a new economic model that aligns the scholars’ and librarians’ shared interest in broad dissemination of information. A number of suggestions for models for publication and dissemination of scholarly research are being explored both by individuals and academic consortia (see enclosures for further information). While UBC Library is involved in many of these initiatives, none of them will be in place in the time frame required to address our current need.
As a result, we have been talking with many of our users about changing how we provide information to them; continuing to institute cancellations of almost a million dollars on a regular basis in order to keep our budget and our buying aligned is not a sustainable option. In the past, we have concentrated on purchasing the required materials and making this collection available on-site, housed in UBC’s thirteen libraries. However many of the disciplines we support (predominantly those in the sciences) have dramatically changed their reliance on print-based publication and have moved to electronic sources. We plan to reflect this change in the future development of our collection.
What does this mean? Simply that we will not be developing the same kind of collection (i.e. on-site, predominantly print-based) to support all disciplines. In the arts, humanities and social sciences, the move to electronic sources has not been as rapid as it has been in the sciences therefore the need to maintain an on-site print collection is greater. However in the sciences (and increasingly law and business) we should be able to move away from a predominantly print-based, on-site collection to providing access to electronic sources on demand.
While this strategy allows the Library to contain its costs in a more direct manner, it is important to realize that what we are doing is addressing this problem of "scholarly communication" at the "demand" end rather than at the point of supply. Quite simply many authors give away materials to publishers who charge libraries/universities to buy them back, often at an "institutional price" which can be orders of magnitude greater than the price paid by an individual subscriber. As well, some publishers seek to restrict the use that an individual faculty can make of his/her own work, not allowing them to disseminate their research in any way other than through that particular publisher.
What can you do to help? I’d like to suggest some possibilities:
- consider maintaining some aspect of copyright control on the material you submit for publication
- know the prices of the journals in which you publish (all of them, institutional and individual)
- be aware of alternatives in scholarly publishing (i.e. the Internet)
- insist on quality not quantity as the benchmark of scholarly excellence; reconsider the number of publications which should be required to obtain tenure and promotion
- consider participating in library or academic consortia who can work with vendors to provide greater access at reduced costs, and promote alternatives to the existing scholarly publishing models such as SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing an Academic Resources Coalition) and International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication.
In addition, we need your help now in determining which titles to cancel. Please review these lists and forward your comments to the faculty library representative for your department who will be communicating this information to the Library by mid-March 1999.
Thank you for your help. If you would like to talk about any of the matters I have raised in this letter, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely,
Catherine Quinlan
University Librarian
Enclosures:
Policy Perspectives. Special Issue: "To Publish and Perish". vol.7, no.4, March 1998.
Association of Research Libraries. "ARL Promotes Competition in Scholarly Publishing". Press release, October 24, 1997.
SPARC . "Introducing a Response to Soaring Journal Prices". ARL, September 1998.
SPARC. "Founder/Editor of Science Journal Breaks with Publisher to Independently Establish Low-Cost Alternative". Press release, November 23, 1998
