Journals Revisited: A Survivable Future
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for May 2004
Just 18 months ago in this column, I discussed the serials crisis in academic libraries and what might be happening to change an unsupportable situation. The “kaleidoscope of partial answers” suggested then haven’t helped much so far, as library budgets become ever more burdened by steadily inflating print and online prices for scientific, technical, and medical journals.
The crisis may have reached a head last fall, when the University of California announced it was paying $8 million a year for online access to Elsevier journals—half of all UC’s online journal fees—and wasn’t getting complete coverage even at that price. Some UC faculty groups called for boycotts of Elsevier journals. There and at several other universities, faculties backed libraries in refusing to keep paying for Elsevier’s “big deals” at the expense of other library services and collections (AL, Jan., p. 23–24). Things have to change, and that change is starting.
Market analysts and commercial scholarly publishers have been saying that this wasn’t a real crisis: Wealthy university libraries would always pay for the journals. But the list of libraries cutting back on scientific, technical, and medical (STM) purchases includes Harvard and Cornell as well as UC, Missouri, North Carolina State, and Columbia. You have to wonder just where those wealthy university libraries are.
Likely prospects
Commercial serial publishers won’t shrivel up and die; that’s nearly impossible and probably undesirable. It’s likely that most specialized print STM journals will be abandoned in favor of purely digital publications, although it’s not yet clear how much will be saved through that change.
The number of open access journals (with no charge for online access, typically covering costs via publication fees or institutional subsidy) will certainly grow—but, as with SPARC-supported lower-cost journals, that growth won’t save libraries any money until such journals replace overpriced commercial and professional-society journals, or at least cause their publishers to lower subscription prices.
An optimal scenario
Here’s what I’d like to see happen in the long run, as a humanist and as one who believes that browsing backfiles of print serials makes sense for new scholars.
- The bulk of STM journals become online-only. Some lesser journals disappear in the process, encouraging fewer and more substantive publications. Many humanities journals, where the journal is nothing more than a collection of articles, also become online-only. That doesn’t eliminate publishing costs and it’s not clear how substantially it lowers them—but it will at least reduce duplicative fees to some extent.
- A variety of initiatives such as Stanford’s LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), formal deposits of online journals at national libraries with archival responsibilities, other true digital archives, and author self-archiving combine to offer hope that those online-only collections of articles will survive for centuries.
- Several categories of journals remain available both in print and online. These include the core journals in each field (5–10% of the total), well-regarded journals where thematic issues and other forms of context make the print journal more valuable than the sum of individual articles, and journals with more nonlibrary subscribers than library subscriptions.
- Publishers planning to stay in the game moderate their profit expectations and establish more efficient production routines to reduce excessive prices, thus lowering overall STM costs for academic libraries. Society publishers lower institutional subscription prices, recognizing that they can no longer count on hidden subsidies from academic libraries to support nonpublishing activities by the professional society.
- As economic conditions improve, academic libraries restore their monographic budgets, improve service budgets, support the indexing services that make journal articles more accessible, and maintain subscriptions to high-value humanities and social science journals, which are generally much less expensive than STM journals.
Pipe dream or possibility?
I have no reason to believe that this outcome is likely and no power to bring it about. Currently, various parties in scholarly publishing are arguing over the field and its future—and it’s a multisided argument in too many cases rather than a coherent discussion. We hear publishers making misleading statements about open access publishing, as well as portions of the open access community engaging in various forms of oversimplification.
The situation must change. I believe it will change for the better, perhaps in ways that lead to an outcome similar to the scenario above.
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