Beware What You Wish For:
Online Journal Quandaries
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for November 2002
Let’s talk about access to scholarly articles in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) fields—or what’s commonly called the serials crisis. It’s becoming clear that the combined wisdom of America’s top academic librarians and consortia isn’t enough for a simple solution. That probably means this is not a problem so much as an ongoing situation—a situation that distorts library budgets and may be distorting journal prominence and use.
If you’re a public librarian, consider yourself lucky. The STM situation primarily affects scholarly journals, with little or no impact on magazines. I should note that this is a wildly oversimplified discussion; a comprehensive treatment of the issues would comprise a book.
What’s the problem? There are too many scholarly journals for even the largest academic libraries to keep up with, new specialized journals spring up all the time, and subscription prices for existing journals frequently rise faster than inflation, forcing libraries to eliminate other acquisitions (for example, books) and cut valuable serials. With many journals costing thousands of dollars each, and some costing more than $10,000 a year, it’s a big-money issue.
Is this a recent situation? It’s been going on for at least three decades. I participated in a 10% serials cancellation at the University of California/Berkeley in the mid-1970s, and Berkeley wasn’t the first to act.
Won’t moving journals online slash costs? That was one proposed solution in the early 1990s, with repeated assertions that the problem would solve itself when journals went digital. Those who made the argument confused costs with prices, trivialized online costs, and underestimated the cleverness of the big international journal publishers. They also overestimated the ease with which scholars would abandon print journals. Some still believe this is the answer.
How about electronic and replacement journals? The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and other initiatives to develop new, lower-cost journals have had small but positive results. New free electronic journals have done well in some areas but have neither the prestige nor the reach of important traditional journals. Both have helped but won’t solve the problem by themselves.
Isn’t everything available online now? Not everything—not by a long shot—and this may be a case where a so-called solution raises new problems.
What’s the big deal? Publishers have made aggregated sets of articles available online at “bargain” prices, with a library (or group) paying more than they were paying for print but getting hundreds or thousands of journals (online only) that they didn’t formerly acquire. Kenneth Frazier (University of Wisconsin/Madison) calls it the “Big Deal” and wrote a troubling article on it in the March 2001 D-Lib Magazine, which engendered a number of responses in the April 2001 issue. Frazier argues, “Academic library directors should not sign on to the Big Deal or any comprehensive licensing agreements with commercial publishers” and makes an excellent case for refusing. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that most academic libraries can reasonably or responsibly resist the Big Deal, particularly when offered on a consortial basis and at a time when students expect online access to articles.
What’s to be done? Jean Claude Guédon of the University of Montreal offers a tough, clear discussion of the situation in the ARL Bimonthly Report, no. 218. In the January 2002 Learned Publishing, Andrew Odlyzko (then at AT&T Labs) seems to favor abandoning journals altogether, suggesting that Web links would be a satisfactory substitute for peer review in establishing article quality; in the same issue, David Goodman of Princeton University discusses Princeton’s deliberate abandonment of print subscriptions in certain sensible cases. Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton proposes a universal form of what many physicists already do—free university-based archives of preprint and postprint articles as primary means of access, reducing commercial journals to quality-control roles at an asserted 10% of current costs. Harnad’s paper is at www.text-e.org.
Free Online Scholarship (FOS), a movement with Peter Suber (Earlham College) as lucid spokesperson, posits open archives, online journals with author fees, and other ways to make scholarship freely available online. Start at the FOS Newsletter for extensive links to information on FOS.
Who’s right? There may not be a right answer. All these suggestions provide facets in a kaleidoscope of partial answers. The situation should get better through a variety of efforts, but the problem isn’t going away any time soon.
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