General Serials Cancellations

Science & Engineering Division:
Journal Cancellations
1999/2000

Background:
Unrelenting journal price increases and the significant decline in the Canadian dollar over the past few years have made it necessary for the UBC Library to cancel $750,000 worth of serials/journal subscriptions in 1999/2000. Over the past decade, research library expenditures on serials have increased by almost 10% each year.

Serials cancellations are one means used by the Library to contain expenditures and keep within the collections budget. Others measures include cooperating with various consortia to share the costs of expensive online databases, negotiating continually with vendors to obtain the most favourable terms possible, eliminating duplication of materials in different parts of the library system, making minimal commitments to new ongoing collections expenditures, and soliciting and using endowment and trust funds to extend operational collections dollars.

In order to stay within budget and to meet the Library’s overall cancellation target, we have to cancel journal subscriptions worth $300,000 in the Science/Engineering/Mathematics subject areas. Despite these cancellations, the Library will continue to spend in the region of two million dollars on Sci/Eng/Math serials (including electronic journals and bibliographic databases). Other things being equal we will, in 1999/2000, continue to spend about the same number of dollars on Sci/Eng/Math journals but those dollars will, unfortunately, buy far fewer titles.
Access to materials on demand:

Since the Library can no longer purchase all the journals of interest to UBC faculty and students, we will concentrate on providing access to materials on demand. In the short-term we hope to meet your needs through a variety of services:

free document delivery service (Pegasus)

table-of-contents emailing alerts

indexing and abstracting databases

The Library will continue to pay for the Pegasus document delivery service so that UBC faculty, students, and staff continue to have free access to the scientific literature not available at UBC. For more information see the Science & Engineering Division’s (Sci/Eng) web site at http://scieng.library.ubc.ca/ and select ‘Pegasus’. Training in the use of this service is available through our Division. The Library is working with CISTI (the source of Pegasus documents) to develop a Web interface to the document request system which will, we hope, make it easier to use. Most of the journals on the cancellation list are available at CISTI, and articles from jounals cancelled at UBC may be obtained via the Pegasus service.

In order to keep up-to-date with journals not physically available at UBC, faculty and students may subscribe to electronic table-of-contents services, many of which are available free-of-charge. They may also consult the Library’s many online bibliographic databases which often include abstracts of journal articles. (On the Sci/Eng web page select ‘Specialized Information Services’ followed by ‘Current Awareness’. Also check ‘Science and Engineering Databases’ and ‘Online Journals in Science and Engineering’ on the Sci/Eng web page).
Criteria:

In preparation for selecting potential journal titles for cancellation, all active subscriptions in the Library’s Science & Engineering collection were reviewed. The initial list of titles to be considered for cancellation (as well as titles to be retained) was compiled in the Science & Engineering Division, using the criteria described below. These criteria were very helpful tools that complemented the librarians’ professional judgement. Our primary goal is to ensure that, generally speaking, the titles that are of greatest importance to the majority of UBC library users will be retained.

For an online version of the proposed list and the criteria used to develop it, see http://www.library.ubc.ca/home/serialcan/welcome.html

The first four criteria described below define retention guidelines. Criteria 5—7 were the most important criteria used to select titles for the potential cancellation list. Criteria 8 and 9 were then used to confirm the selections made on the basis of criteria 5—7.
1. Electronic journals should be retained—this part of the collection needs strengthening.

At its May 1997 meeting, the Science & Engineering Library Advisory Committee recommended that electronic journals should be a priority for the Science & Engineering Division, and we anticipate that, in the longer term, electronic journals will be part of the solution to the so-called serials crisis. Cancelling electronic journal subscriptions does not, therefore, seem appropriate. It would, in any case, save very little since the cost of electronic journals is generally tied to the cost of print subscriptions.
2. The journal packages published by professional societies should be retained.

These titles are core to our collection, and are very heavily used. Societies generally offer price breaks for subscribing to complete packages. Cancelling individual titles within packages would result in the remaining titles from that society costing more than the complete package did in the first place.
3. Titles added to the UBC collection since 1990 should, by and large, be retained.

Since these titles were only recently added to the collection—many at the request of faculty to match new areas of research—we assumed that they are important to our current collection and should not be cancelled.
4. Trade journals should, mostly, be retained.

Trade journals are among the few journals in our collection that are frequently used by undergraduate students for major essays and undergraduate theses. Also, trade journals are generally low cost and cancellation would save very little.
5. Expensive titles costing over $5,000 per annum are a high priority for cancellation.

The top 15 titles on the list of potential candidates for cancellation together cost the Library almost $100,000 per annum (1997/8 prices).
6. Titles with low citation rates by UBC authors should be cancelled.

Some years ago the Library ordered a custom citation table from ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). The table lists those journals from the ISI’s citation databases that were cited by UBC authors during the period 1981-1993, together with the number of times each title was cited.The ISI citation rates are thus an indicator of the local importance of specific journal titles (rather than a ranking of the global importance of the title—see point 9 below).

If a journal was cited less than about 60 times over the 12-year period, we considered it a candidate for cancellation. For some very expensive titles, we recommend cancellation even when there were more than 60 citations over the 12-year period because the cost-per-use is simply too high.

The inhouse usage statistics described in point 8 below matched up quite well with the ISI citation rates in terms of indicating titles of greater versus lesser importance to UBC users. ISI citation rates have also proven valid and useful in past rounds of journal cancellations.
7. Foreign language titles should have a higher priority for cancellation than English-language ones.

By and large, foreign language titles in our collection are little used, and thus have a lower priority for retention. CISTI has extensive holdings of foreign language titles, so we expect to be able to meet requests for articles from such titles through the Pegasus document delivery service.
8. Titles showing low inhouse usage should be cancelled.

Daily usage statistics for both current and bound journals were collected in 1998 for the whole month of March (a month which always sees high library usage). Generally speaking, titles with low usage rates are recommended for cancellation, because cost-per-use is too high. (As noted earlier, usage figures were used merely to confirm selections based on criteria 5—7).
9. Titles with low JCR (Journal Citation Report) impact factors should be cancelled.

The JCR is a tool for journal evaluation for over 4,500 journals in science and technology worldwide. Evaluation is done in terms of an impact factor for each title. The impact factor is the average number of times articles published in a specific journal in the two previous years were cited in a particular year. It is thus an indicator of the relative global importance of a particular title.

In general, titles with an impact factor lower than 1 are recommended for cancellation. For purposes of selecting potential candidates for cancellation, the ISI citation rate for a journal (described in point 6 above) was given a higher priority as an indicator of the journal’s importance to UBC than its JCR impact factor.

Note: The Department of Mathematics is working on a separate list of math titles. The list referred to in this document and the criteria described above apply only to journals in the Science & Engineering collection.
How you can help us develop the cancellation list for 1999/2000:

We invite you to review the proposed list of cancellations and to discuss your suggestions with departmental colleagues, or fellow students. If you and your colleagues wish to remove a title from the list, we ask that you suggest a title or titles of equivalent value to be substituted for cancellation (bearing in mind that a title of no interest to you may be critical to other researchers). We have to meet our target of $300,000 so if any titles are removed from the cancellation list, others will have to be substituted. In fact, we plan to overcancel somewhat to allow us to subscribe to new journal titles of critical importance.

We encourage you to work with other people in your area to develop a consensus on suggested changes to the proposed cancellation list, and to communicate this consensus to us through your library representative.

A meeting of the Science & Engineering Library Advisory Committee is planned for February to discuss cancellations and give feed-back on the process. We will need your feed-back by mid-March 1999 at the latest to allow us to consider suggested changes and to finalize the list before initiating the formal cancellation process with library vendors in early May 1999.
‘To publish and perish’

Balancing the Library’s budget forces us to make increasingly difficult choices. Various articles dealing with the crisis in scholarly communication are available on the Library’s Serials Cancellations web site. I should like to draw your attention in particular to the Pew Report published by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, and entitled ‘To publish and perish’. It contains an excellent overview of problems and possible solutions. There are also some new and hopeful initiatives such as SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, which is an alliance of libraries seeking to create a more competitive marketplace for the publication of research information. The UBC Library is a founding member of SPARC.

A Letter from the University Librarian, Catherine Quinlan, is also available on the Serials Cancellations web site. She outlines the problems around journal publication and the Library’s plans for providing access to the scientific literature, and she offers some suggestions about what you, the authors of scientific journals, can do to help.
Printed journal lists available in the Library:

In the Science & Engineering Division you may consult a binder on serials cancellations containing the following lists:

Titles proposed for cancellation—sorted alphabetically by title*

Titles proposed for cancellation—sorted by call number*

Titles proposed for cancellation—sorted by cost

Titles to be retained—sorted alphabetically by title*

Titles to be retained—sorted by call number*

Complete list of currently active journal subscriptions—sorted alphabetically by title

Complete list of currently active journal subscriptions—sorted by call number

* copies of these lists have been sent to department heads and departmental library representatives

If you have any questions about the cancellation process, or would like to know the name of your departmental library representative, please contact me by phone or by email. (I am usually available in the Science & Engineering Division in the mornings, Mondays—Thursdays, and all day on Wednesdays).

Hilde Colenbrander
Acting Head, Science & Engineering Division
Telephone: 822-3826
Email: hilde@interchange.ubc.ca

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Last modified: Jan 21, 2011

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