1. Why do we need to make cancellations now?
The need to reduce continuing commitments against the Libraries acquisitions budget is the result of a consistent and ongoing gap between available funding and the cost of materials. The well-publicized budget problems of the state of Iowa have had a dramatic effect on the overall budget of the University. Despite these constraints, the University Administration has protected the Libraries’ acquisitions budget from reductions, and has even been able to provide funds to increase that budget by approximately 5% per year. While we are optimistic that some increases will continue, no increase we can reasonably anticipate will allow the budget to keep up with the rising cost of information in all formats and the explosion of information in digital form.
As mentioned, although the UI Libraries have seen increases to the acquisitions budget, amounting to 28% between FY 2000 and FY 2006, these increases have not kept up with the rising cost of scholarly journals, especially in scientific, medical, and technical fields and in some areas of the social sciences. Between 2001 and 2006 the mean price of the nearly 6000 academic journals covered by ISI’s Web of Knowledge increased by 65% (from an average of $697 to $1147 per title).
The University of Iowa Libraries joins a large number of peer institutions that have found it necessary to implement significant cancellations on a regular basis (see http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/collections/cancel2007/others.html ). This year’s cancellation project is but another symptom of an ongoing crisis in the process of scholarly communication, a necessary tactic for dealing with the realities of an unsustainable economic model . It is likely to be a recurring feature of the landscape for the indefinite future as long as publishers’ prices continue to rise at rates so far beyond the general rate of inflation. For more information on the general issues related to scholarly publishing, see the Create Change site (http://www.createchange.org/) maintained by the Association of Research Libraries.
2. What is the goal of the cancellation project?
The Project’s primary goal is to identify for potential elimination journals, databases and other recurring commitments totaling approximately $225,000, a little under 3% of the total acquisitions budget, in order that the Libraries can live within its anticipated budget allocation for FY 2008. The reduction should also allow the Libraries to respond in some measure to demands for the purchase of new journals and other information resources, and to provide some support for alternative means of delivering information through ILL and document delivery.
Unlike in previous projects this goal is not intended to allow the Libraries the leeway to avoid another cancellation project for several years to come. To do so would have required cancellations in the neighborhood of $500,000. While the timing and need for future cancellations will depend on future allocations, rates of inflation and programmatic directions, our intention going forward is to undertake smaller and more targeted annual reviews in order to manage the budget after FY 2008.
3. How will we decide which journals to cancel?
The most critical element of the decision-making process is consultation with faculty, students and other users about the journals they consider most critical to teaching, learning and research. In addition, librarians making the final decisions will consider a number of other factors (and will share data related to these criteria to the extent possible):
a. The cost and price history of the journal. This information is being provided to librarians with the list of journals charged to the funds they manage.
b. The use of the journal, especially of current and recent issues. Our means for measuring use are imperfect, and this criterion must be used with caution, but the data available in many subject areas does provide some insight into proportionate use. For most electronic journals we have extensive, standards-based usage information.
c. Citation behavior (for those fields for which we have sufficient information). The Libraries has reports on the number of times Iowa authors have cited (as well as published in) journals, year-by-year, in fields covered by the ISI Web of Knowledge. There are also reports indicating the frequency of citation and impact factors of many journals by all researchers.
d. Whether and where a journal title is indexed.
e. Whether articles from a particular title can be obtained quickly and cheaply via interlibrary loan or by other means. The cost of copyright fees, payable when we borrow a title more than 5 times in a year, has risen sharply in recent years, especially in the health sciences. This cost must also be taken into account.
4. Why can’t the Libraries take money from other parts of its budget—salaries or general expense, for example?
All parts of the Libraries’ budget are under great stress and none are able to provide any relief to the acquisitions budget. Since 2002 the Libraries have undergone significant reductions in its operating budget, resulting in reductions in staffing levels that total $1,332,823. The UI Libraries are among the most leanly staffed of any in the CIC (the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, an academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago), or our peer group within the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The ARL website has statistical information about the size of staff and other data relating to research libraries. See http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/index.html
5. How will we conduct the 2006-7 review?
The procedures of this review will be similar to those of previous cancellation projects. Each collection management librarian will receive a list of titles charged to the fund he or she manages. These funds typically correspond to academic departments, colleges or programs. The collection management librarian (see http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/collections/selectors.html for a list by subject) will work with his or her constituencies to identify titles that can be eliminated with the least damage to teaching and research. Librarians will make a special effort to consult faculty and students who may not be based in departments or colleges most closely associated with a given fund. This process will take place over the course of the fall and early spring semester.
In mid-March, 2007 all titles identified in this process will be posted on this web site and the entire campus community will be invited to make comments. The Libraries will make every effort to preserve titles recommended for cancellation that turn out to be of concern to members of the university community. However, depending on the balance between the number of recommendations and the number of concerns expressed, it probably will not be possible to save every title receiving objections.
6. Is this an across the board cut?
All of the University Libraries' serial commitments are subject to review as part of this project. The impact will be greatest in those fields in which serials spending represents a substantial portion of expenditures for library materials, but even in fields with much lower commitments to subscriptions, cancellations may be necessary to meet changing instructional and research needs within the overall budget, or because titles are no longer useful in the current programmatic context. Subject areas heavily dependent on books will likely see cutbacks in the form of fewer books as the unit price for books increases. The weak dollar against many foreign currencies will also have an effect.
To contend with the continuing escalation of costs to acquire and maintain scholarly information in all fields and formats the University Libraries must review all ongoing commitments carefully. While the explosive growth of digital information and its associated technologies is part of the problem, information technology can also be part of the solution. Funds committed to subscriptions to particular journals may be reallocated to support document delivery from sources which have been cancelled in the past or to which the Libraries never subscribed.
Funds may also be reallocated to acquire subscriptions for new journals to meet the instructional and research needs of the University community.
7. Whom should I contact for more information?
Each program, department or college within the University has a librarian assigned who is responsible for collection development and management activities for subjects important to that field. The collection management librarian for your subject area will be working with your department and may be contacted for more information. If you don’t know who the librarian in your field is, see the list of collection management librarians by subject at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/collections/selectors.html . General questions may be addressed to Edward Shreeves, Associate University Librarian and Director for Collections and Content Management, 335-5867.
8. If I state my objections to canceling a title, will it be automatically saved?
We want to hear about concerns and will attempt to maintain as many subscriptions as possible. On the basis of several rounds of cancellations in the previous 15 years we anticipate that there will be some level of concern about nearly every title proposed, and we must meet the goal of identifying commitments totaling $225,000 in order to manage the FY 2008 acquisitions budget without overspending. In other words, we are not likely to be able to maintain every title in which a member of the faculty, staff, or student body expresses an interest.
9. How will our subscriptions to large publisher bundles (aka “Big Deals”) like Elsevier ScienceDirect, Wiley Interscience, Springer and Blackwell affect the cancellation project?
Consortial deals through the CIC (the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, an academic consortium of the Big Ten universities and the University of Chicago) and the Iowa Regent Universities for several publisher packages, or bundles, of e-journals have greatly enhanced access to journal literature, adding more than 1,500 previously unavailable titles to those previously available. The contractual basis for these arrangements, sometimes called “Big Deals” by librarians, requires us to maintain the contract for a specific period—usually three and sometimes five years—in return for caps on price increases and the broadened access mentioned above. As a consequence we will not be able during this round of cancellation to eliminate the journals of certain publishers and save the entire cost of the journal. Below you will see a list of current bundles, their cost, and the benefit received in terms of additional titles accessible to Iowa users:
Springer: $483,983
316 subscribed; 808 titles accessed via consortia (115% more titles)
492 extra titles obtained as a result of the consortial purchase
Wiley: $349,163
168 subscribed; 451 titles accessed via consortia (168% more titles)
283 extra titles obtained as a result of the consortial purchase
Blackwell: $314,007
396 subscribed; 760 titles accessed via consortia (92% more titles)
364 extra titles obtained as a result of the consortial purchase
Elsevier: $1,259,148
788 titles subscribed; 1316 titles accessed via consortia (67% more titles)
528 extra titles obtained as a result of the consortial purchase
TOTALS: $2,406,301
1,668 titles subscribed to from the 4 publishers listed above
1,667 titles (for a total of 3335) accessible via consortial agreements (100% more titles)
As these figures indicate, Iowa users have access through these consortial arrangements to 1,667 or 100% more titles than we pay for directly. This additional access, for the most part to titles which are relevant to our programs and are used, is the great advantage of these deals. The great disadvantage is our inability to cancel titles and reduce our spending obligation within the bundle without abandoning the contract and dramatically reducing our access to the publisher’s output. This is especially troubling since these publishers are among the most expensive in terms of cost per title or page.
What we can do during this review with some of the publisher packages is to cancel the print copy, when we still receive it, and maintain the subscription to the electronic version. In most scientific disciplines this step has already been taken, so little savings remain from this approach. Where cancellation of print has not yet occurred, chiefly in the social sciences and humanities, this tactic can save a varying percentage of the cost of the journal, usually 5-20%.
Canceling print and maintaining electronic only subscriptions obviously requires that we look carefully at the implications of such a move, particularly as it affects archival access. Most of our contracts give us archival rights to the information we pay for and new projects have emerged in the last several years to provide trusted means to ensure long-term access. Thus, if we should cancel the Elsevier ScienceDirect product in 2008, we would have permanent rights to the information in digital form we had paid since the beginning of the contract (1999). The University Libraries is a supporting member of both LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe-- http://www.lockss.org/lockss/Home ) and Portico (http://www.portico.org/ ) two promising efforts to guarantee permanent access to digital information, particularly ejournals.
Other factors to be considered in moving to electronic only access include concern about completeness of the digital version in comparison to the printed journal, and the importance and quality of graphical material in the journal. Collection management librarians will be weighing all of these factors in making decisions about keeping print, but in the end we may be faced with a choice between digital access without print and no access at all except via interlibrary loan or document delivery.
10. Have there been previous journal cancellation projects at the University of Iowa?
The UI Libraries has been forced to conduct general cancellation projects several times in this decade. In 1991 the Libraries canceled journals costing $237,733; in 1994 $126,166; in 1996 $126,459; in 2000 $370,000. If the subscriptions canceled in those projects had been maintained, they would now be costing the Libraries in excess of $1.7 million.
11. What can an individual faculty member do to help?
There are several ways in which faculty and others can assist the Libraries in addressing this problem. The resolution passed last year by the UI Faculty Senate articulates many of these tactics. See http://www.uiowa.edu/~facsen/Agenda/Senate05-06/11-29-05/2-LibrariesResolution.htm
a. Work with librarians in your subject areas to identify titles whose cancellation will do the least harm. The problems we are facing are not ones created by the Libraries, and we need the help of faculty and other informed users to make the best possible decisions under the circumstances.
b. Help in efforts to raise private funds, or revenue from other sources, to assist the Libraries in responding to the inflation now being experienced in the cost of scholarly information.
c. Support efforts by your professional association and other groups to identify sustainable and affordable ways to distribute scholarly information. Resist outsourcing the journal of your society to commercial publishers. The cost to libraries, if not to members, is virtually certain to rise steeply.
d. Consider publisher behavior—especially in terms of pricing--when you are choosing where to publish articles, which editorial boards to serve on, and how to manage your copyright. Take an interest in the future of publishing and communication within your field. Reduced access to information caused by high prices is in the end the problem of faculty, students and the disciplines to which they belong.
e. For a discussion of the issues and additional detail about some of these recommendations, see Create Change and its associated web sites at http://www.createchange.org/
f. Open Access Journals and other open access services. Open Access journals are by definition free to the reader and available online and present an possible alternative to the costly subscriber-pays model of publishing. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html and http://www.arl.org/sparc/oa/index.html for more information. The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 now being considered by Congress would require that federal agencies with budgets for extramural research over $100 million develop mechanisms to ensure open access to research supported by their grants. Provost Hogan joined many other provosts from around the country to express support for this measure. See http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa/Provosts_openletter_06-JUL.pdf Institutional and discipline-based digital repositories. In some fields, like high-energy physics (see http://arxiv.org/), digital repositories focusing on work produced by scholars in that discipline have become a primary means of sharing research results. The role of the journal has thereby diminished in importance. Institutional repositories are digital warehouses and associated services where the scholarly work, including published journal articles, by faculty and other researchers of a single institution are deposited and preserved for the long term. These too have the potential to shift the balance of the current publishing environment.
12. Can I help by donating a copy of my personal subscription?
Faculty often offer to provide their personal copies as a substitute for the nearly always higher-priced institutional subscription. While the Libraries appreciates the generosity of such offers, there are several reasons why this practice will not work in most instances. In some cases, the publisher sells personal copies only under the condition that the subscriber not donate it to a library (or not do so for several years). Some publishers offer a low-priced personal subscription only if your institution maintains an institutional subscription. In addition for some titles electronic access is based on a print subscription and cancellation of that subscription would result in loss of electronic access.
The more fundamental problem with this approach, however, is its unreliability and inefficiency. Libraries maintain most of their subscriptions through intermediaries known as subscription agents, or vendors, who manage the business and other arrangements with the hundreds of publishers we must deal with. While we pay a small fee for this service, it saves an enormous amount of staff time. To substitute for this relatively efficient arrangement one in which we are dealing with dozens of individuals voluntarily donating their own copy is likely to be time-consuming and inefficient, as well as unreliable. We also know from experience that such arrangements are difficult to maintain over time, and often result in missing or delayed access to recent issues. Were the practice to become widespread, with hundreds of titles, it would likely require staff to be assigned specifically to manage the undertaking. Thus, while we are willing to consider this kind of arrangement in limited special cases, we do not see it as a broad-scale, sustainable approach to the problem.
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