Fall 2004 - Volume 10 - Number 2 |
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A Scholarly Communication Crisis by Gerald Saxon, Dean of UTA Libraries This is my first column as Dean of Libraries at UTA, and I want to say how happy I am to be able to work with a talented library staff, a committed faculty and university administration, and an eager student body. Tom Wilding, former Director of Libraries, retired at the end of July and is now living happily in Wales. Tom and staff have set the library on the right course, and I hope to continue the innovations that have been started and to create new programs that will help our users. In this column I wanted to write about something that has been on my mind, and the minds of many in the academic community of late, and that is the crisis in scholarly communication. Yes folks, there is a crisis, and it is impacting everyone on college campuses—the students, faculty, and library staff—though many might not be aware of it. My purpose in this column is to shed some light on the subject.
First a definition. By scholarly communication I mean the process by which research or new knowledge is created, refined, evaluated, disseminated, and preserved. Scholars conduct research, prepare their findings, publish their findings in books and journals, which are refereed by other scholars in the field, and the books and journals are sold to individuals and libraries who provide access to the information to a wide audience. In the past, much of this work was done by professional organizations and societies whose main purpose was to serve their membership, foster the dissemination of new knowledge, and underwrite the printing and distribution of the information. This has changed in some disturbing ways. Basically scholars have lost control of the system, and commercial publishers have increasingly taken over. These publishers are more interested in making profits than they are in extending the boundaries of knowledge. The result of this change in the system has been sharply rising costs for books and journals (both electronic and physical ones) and increasing restrictions on who can use the information, resulting in scholars and students having less access to the body of information in a particular field. In short, scholarly communication has become a huge international business and information a commodity to be sold to those with the deepest pockets. A few statistics will help make my point. Between 1986 and 1999, the Consumer Price Index in the U.S. rose 3.3% per year (cumulative 52%), while health care costs rose 5.8% per annum (cumulative 107%). Journal prices, however, rose a whopping 9% a year on average with a cumulative total of 207%. For the past four years, 2000-2004, the increases in journal prices have continued in the 10% range each year. What this means for UTA is this: with a journals/serials budget at close to $3 million a year we need an additional $300,000 each year just to maintain the serials we currently own. We have been fortunate in the recent past because an increasing student enrollment and a rising student library service fee have allowed us to cover inflation and maintain, even judiciously add to, the collection, but I am nervous that the enrollment management practices that have been put into place to slow growth and the concern about increasing student fees will have a negative impact on the library’s budget, 70% of which comes from student fees. Lower enrollment growth means decreased revenue with which to purchase or license information. Many academic libraries across the country have been less fortunate than UTA, and have already cut journals to cope with the spiraling costs (Duke Medical School, for example, cancelled more than 500 titles recently while Cornell cancelled 200 titles from a single commercial publisher). Other ways libraries have coped have been to not subscribe to new journals, reduce (or not grow) book budgets and place this money into journal collections, enter into consortial arrangements with other university libraries in order to negotiate cheaper prices from commercial publishers, improve document delivery systems such as interlibrary loan, and license electronic information. UTA has used all of these strategies as well to stretch our acquisition dollars. There are also a number of strategic initiatives on the national—even international—level to begin to address the crisis. The scholarly community in a number of disciplines is creating and supporting alternatives to commercial publications. So-called “open access” journals like BioMed Central and Public Library of Science are helping to create a new paradigm for scholarly information. Open access journals, which are refereed and edited by the leading scholars in their fields, are paid for in numerous ways, including by the authors who publish in the journals or the authors’ institutions, by grants, and advertisements. The one characteristic that open access journals have in common is that once published the information in the journal is available to anyone without charge and without restriction. For a list of open access journals, see the Directory of Open Access Journals at www.doaj.org.
Another strategy has been the creation of digital archives or institutional repositories. Many of these archives focus on a particular subject, such as mathematics or physics, or the intellectual products of a particular institution, like the well publicized D-Space from MIT. Pre-prints and post-prints of scholarly articles, research studies, lectures, think pieces, and notes are some of the information products that institutional archives have included on websites. Similar to open access journals, these institutional repositories are freely available to anyone with internet access. The crisis in scholarly communication is not a library problem. Rather it is a problem for the entire academic community. Over the next several months, the library staff will be discussing this issue with stakeholders across campus to raise awareness and begin a dialogue on the crisis. In the meantime you might be asking yourself, especially if you are a faculty member, what can I do to make a difference in the crisis? SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) suggests the following:
I encourage you to contact me if you have questions about the crisis or to send me your ideas on how we might want to address it. My email address and telephone number are saxon@uta.edu and 817-272-5318. I look forward to hearing from you.
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