Return to Forever

Citation

Maxymuk, J. (1999), "Return to Forever", The Bottom Line, Vol. 12 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.1999.17012bag.001

Return to Forever

Return to forever

Keywords: Internet, Pricing, Serials

I began this column on my birthday, a day when the unrelenting passage of time becomes as clear in mind as in old movies when a steady stream of calendar pages are torn free and blown away. The collected experiences of 42 years have left me, I think, a bit wiser. As a librarian, I need all that accumulated wisdom to do more with less year after year. In libraries we do not need a snowstorm of old datebook pages to see that time is passing; we have serial prices.

Two years ago in my first column for this journal, I wrote about the unmanageable state that serials had reached in libraries. Now is a good time to take a second look at this ongoing budget crisis for library managers and examine any changes that bode good or ill for libraries, library users, and even publishers. There is a relationship among these three principals that existed in relative balance for many years, but we are far from equilibrium now and may never get back. There are increasing signs that it is time to chart a new course.

Plotting the ascent

Talk about unrelenting. Take a look as the last half decade flies by in exponential bursts according to these ten academic journals quickly selected from my library's serials' spreadsheet (Table I). These examples are all from the science and business disciplines. By some curious logic, science and business titles are consistently more expensive than humanities titles by a great margin. The cumulative percentage cost increase over the five year period for each journal is given in parentheses beside the journal title.

Not all journals accelerate at rates approaching some of these, of course, but the figure that is consistently given as the average annual journal price increase year after year is 10 percent. Over five years, an annual 10 percent hike cumulates to approximately 61 percent. In other words, the average journal's price increases would resemble those of the first title in the table ­ the Journal of Experimental Biology ­ that went from $1,009 to $1,610 in five years, a 59.5 percent rise. Even this average jump so far outstretches the rate of inflation over this time that librarians should drop down on their knees and thank the library gods that scholarly journals generally do not pay their contributors and in many cases instead inflict page charges on those authors.

Even more important is the fact that these increases have far outstretched those of library budgets which at best have very modestly climbed in that time, but just as likely have remained stagnant or been cut. In this environment, libraries lost the ability to keep up years ago and have since been creatively cobbling together different sorts of solutions to try to make the best of an untenable situation. Even the largest libraries were forced to institute widespread cancellations of serial subscriptions based on some formula of cost versus use factors. If a switch in formats from paper to microform or CD-ROM was cost-efficient, librarians tried that. Subscriptions in multiple formats were eliminated. More attention was given to consortial arrangements with similar institutions. In many cases, libraries piloted document delivery subsidization programs.

These solutions were not really solutions at all of course, but merely a way to buy time in the very crazy semi-free market that is scholarly publishing. In my library for example, we canceled Chemical Abstracts in its paper form, betting that the pay-as-you-go cost of online searches of the CAS database would save enough money in the budget to forego canceling any of our handful of chemistry journal subscriptions for 2 to 3 years. In addition, we saved significantly on binding and shelf space while providing students with a product closer to what they would find in the workplace. In those terms, the move was a success. But the problem of chemistry journals increasing in cost much faster than inflation and eating up a disproportionate share of the library budget did not disappear. We just covered it up temporarily with some sleight of hand.

The most basic element of a free market is the law of supply and demand. If the public stops buying your product because it is too expensive, then a free market would force you to either add value to the product to make it more enticing to the user, lower the price, or go out of business. Scholarly publishers do not react in any of these ways; instead they continue to raise prices prohibitively. Libraries follow with more cancellations, and publishers, now with fewer sales, feel they need to raise prices higher to continue to be profitable. It is a cycle that seems headed for a shattering collapse for all the principals involved.

Enter e-journals

In my column two years ago I looked at this situation in light of the spread of electronic journals, then in their infancy, and tried to see if this new form would offer libraries and the pricing cycle itself any relief. It was clear that the configuration of electronic journals offered many advantages. E-journals are much more widely accessible. They can be read within the library's walls or remotely during library hours or after. They are often more flexible by being full-text searchable. They are portable in that articles or parts of articles can be easily downloaded to disk and transported to another machine, or they can be emailed quickly across the globe. Finally, they are often available earlier than print versions are, and this can be a very positive feature in many areas of research.

The downside is that they are electronic and only virtually available. If you don't have the appropriate hardware and software, they are not available. If the system is down or if there is severe network congestion, they are not available. If your computer setup can not deal with the format of the data, they are not available. Lastly, if care is not taken to properly archive older issues, those are not available. However, for the most part the industry has dealt very well with these potential negative factors so that e-journals have truly become a force in the world of scholarly communication.

It has not necessarily been a force for economy, though. Two years ago, pricing schemes for e-journals were far from set in stone. Many journals offered free introductory periods while their publishers worked out a method to charge users for electronic access. The two basic forms for charging then remain the same now, though. The first method simply makes the e-journal free for anyone who subscribes to the print journal. The second method assesses a separate fee, usually smaller, for online access whether the user subscribes to the print journal or not.

The first method is employed by the Institute of Physics http://www/iop/org/Journal/bulletin/us which makes its e-journal equivalents free to print subscribers. The drawback is that there is no way to access the e-journal without subscribing to the paper journal. There is no fee structure in place for electronic only. In their favor, IOP includes a six year online archive of back issues and offers access to 30 years' worth of abstracts. Furthermore, IOP looks on a multicampus institution as one subscriber allowing institution-wide access for the cost of one print subscription held on any campus. This view of multicampus access for one subscription is not applied universally by publishers using this method or the second method.

That second method is used by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) for their Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) http://www.jbc.org/subscriptions/cost.shtml. They charge institutions for print only ($1,600 for 1999), for online only ($1,100 for 1999), and for print and online together ($2,700). It seems to me that the subtext of this scheme is ASBMB would prefer to offer JBC in electronic form to cut its production costs. Despite publishers' protestations to the contrary, I can't imagine production costs for electronic journals not being significantly less than those for print ones.

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) http://www.ams/org/bookstore/mathsciprice.html uses a complicated variation on this scheme of its products. The predominant charge that users of any AMS product must pay is a data access fee ($4,499 for institutional members in 1999) simply for using any of their data. Beyond that there are separate product delivery charges. Mathematical Reviews in paper is one charge ($401 in 1999 for the current year), the online version MathSciNet is a second ($1,775 in 1999 which covers over 50 years) and the CD-ROM version is a third ($1,995 in 1999 for the current five years). The subtext here is that AMS realizes that a print index cannot compare in utility to an online one so users will pay accordingly.

There are also a number of package deals available from publishers and vendors. IDEAL http:///www.idealibrary.com is "an online electronic library containing 174 Academic Press journals." Access is available for an astronomical and complicated fee structure. If you already subscribe to the 174 titles, you will probably save money, but you have to take all the journals. An arrangement like this is only feasible in a large institution where economies of scale might make it relatively cost-effective. Similarly, many vendors like EBSCO http://www.ebsco.com/home and UMI http://www.umi.com/proquest/ offer full-text/image indexes that are essentially searchable collections of the more popular journals for undergraduates. These have become standards in most academic libraries.

The problem with all of these electronic solutions is that they really don't get at the heart of the serials crisis. They merely mask it and perhaps prop it up on wobbly posts until the coming storm. It is the same for document delivery. Why buy these exorbitantly priced journals if faculty are only going to need an occasional article? Why not just pay for the needed articles? Sounds great, but I think once libraries start moving to document delivery wholesale, document delivery fees will skyrocket.

Changing direction

Steven Harnad, for one, has long espoused a different view. Harnad has edited the refereed print journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences for the past 20 years and the refereed e-journal Psycoloquy for the past decade. http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/talks/Harnad_Snider.html. He is a strong champion of the necessity of peer review, the value of an author's copyright, the essential need for scholarly communication of research findings, and of the electronic format to accomplish these standards in a cost-effective way. To him, the clear objective is for researchers in all scholarly disciplines to be able to communicate, review, and comment on findings as freely as possible. He feels that in the paper world, the "Gutenberg Galaxy", scholars struck a "Faustian Bargain" by necessity to participate in the marketplace of ideas http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/talks/Harnad_Snider.html. In exchange for their texts appearing in print, scholars give up their copyright to publishers who must try to recoup printing costs. Harnad sees this structure as being restrictive in that only those who pay or whose library subscribes to the printed journal can read the research. In today's library of mass cancellation of journals, his view of the corrosive underlying structure of printed scholarly communication becomes more persuasive.

Harnad sees the future in the Los Alamos Physics Eprint Archive (XXX) http://xxx.lanl.gov/ begun in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg. XXX is a searchable electronic archive and distribution server for research papers in physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational linguistics, and neuroscience. While most submissions are electronic pre-prints, there is also a body of refereed reprinted articles as well. Users can register to automatically receive by email a listing of newly submitted papers in areas of interest to them, as papers in those areas are received. Hundreds of papers are archived weekly and thousands of users across the globe access this site regularly.

This approach is a good start, but two big problems must be confronted when discussing any move away from our existing structure of scholarly communication. First, the peer review process is what controls the quality of research output in the academic community. That cost, however negligible, is currently underwritten by publishers as part of their publishing costs. Who would bear that cost under an all-electronic mode if not publishers of former printed journals? Proposals include learned societies setting up a centralized peer review mechanism paid for by manuscript submission fees, university consortia using serial cancellation savings to pick up the tab, or even researchers themselves paying directly through page charges written into their funding grants. Second, there is the inert power of the established framework to overcome. In order to best advance their work and themselves, researchers try to publish their findings in the most prestigious place possible, and the most sanctioned journals generally are printed ones with the longest history.

Another promising approach is that taken by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) http://www.arl.org/sparc/. Begun as a partnership project of the Association of Research Libraries to foster expanded competition in scholarly competition, this alliance of libraries has three stated goals:

1. 1.

   Create a more competitive marketplace where the cost of journal acquisition and use is reduced, and publishers who are responsive to customer needs are rewarded.

2. 2.

   Ensure fair use of electronic resources, while strengthening the proprietary rights and privileges of authorship.

3. 3.

   Apply technology to improve the process of scholarly communication and to reduce the costs of production and distribution.

SPARC hopes to accomplish this by:

• •

  soliciting and encouraging the introduction of new publications of high quality and fair price;

• •

  guaranteeing a subscription base and market new products to potential subscribers;

• •

  providing start-up capital (in selected cases);

• •

  generating support for SPARC projects from distinguished faculty, educational organizations, professional societies, and scholarly publishers.

Whether SPARC will be successful in its activities remains to be seen, but their attempt to inject more competition to the academic serials' market and in turn make it more "free" and responsive to users is a worthwhile project. In January of this year Werner Reinhardt, Director of the University of Siegen's library, addressed an open letter to half a dozen major publishers of science periodicals regarding this whole spiraling situation. He concludes that "Libraries are your best customers. You are robbing them of their purchasing power. Before long you might have lost those customers for good." There is no doubt of this. The existing paradigm is buckling under its own weight and something new will move into the void once this "paper house of cards" (in Harnad's words) finally does collapse. Librarians need to look at this crisis as an opportunity to shape that new structure.

Comments on this column are welcome and can be sent to maxymuk@crab.rutgers.edu. Or visit my Web page http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~maxymuk/home/home.html. Links to Web sites referred to in this column can be found there.

John Maxymuk is Reference Librarian at the Paul Robeson Library, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA.