THE PROBLEM
• Journal price increases of 12—14 percent per year for last six years
• Collections budget increases of 3.3 percent for last six years
• Exponential growth of published scholarly research
• As a result, journal cancellations will be required
PLANNING FOR JOURNAL CANCELLATIONS
• A cancellation project in 1997 will stabilize us for 3 years
• We will maintain the current mix of support for disciplines and formats
• We will cancel print when electronic content becomes available
• We will need to reduce 1997 journal expenditures by 20%
• All broad disciplines cut equally
• Cancellations to be carried out in consultation with faculty
FUNDING UCSD ACQUISITIONS AND ACCESS IN THE COMING YEARS
• The UC systemwide Library Planning and Action Initiative has a goal of developing
a sustainable business model for UC’s libraries
• Campus administrators are not able to secure adequate new money to maintain current
acquisitions levels
WHAT WILL THE LIBRARY DO?
• The Library will increase fund-raising
• The Library will increase resource sharing
• The Library will continue to migrate to electronic content
• Moving $$ from Library’s Operating budget will
not solve the problem
• Realigning spending within the Collections budget will not solve the problem
NATIONAL ISSUES AFFECTING ACQUISITIONS AND ACCESS
• Are academia and publishers inextricably linked?
• Copyright will continue to be a key factor in scholarly communication
|
Journal price increases, especially in the sciences and medicine, have mushroomed
during the past decade while increases to the Library’s collections budget have not
kept pace. During the last six years, price increases have averaged 12—14 percent
per year while at the same time the average yearly increase to the collections budget
has been 3.3 percent. The dramatic difference between the rate of increase for journal
prices and the Library’s collections budget illustrates the severe magnitude of the
problem.1 (See also Attachment #1.)
In addition to double-digit percentages for journal price increases, the Library
faces other challenges associated with library acquisitions. There has been exponential
growth in the amount of scholarly research published. Therefore, the issue is not
one of supporting only the increased costs of what we already have, but also of being
positioned to acquire more newly published works representative of the scholarly
research produced. In addition, the Library must now purchase monographs close to
their time of publication because, with publishers reducing sizes of print runs to
lower costs, research monographs are often unavailable later.
Of all of these challenges, though, the journal price increase problem is the most
severe, because it has wreaked havoc with the Library's collections budget. To address
this problem, another round of journal cancellations will be required at UCSD, a
daunting task given that the Library has already reduced its paid subscriptions by
1475 titles since FY90/91, a 17% reduction. (See Attachment #2.)
A number of variables affect how many titles will need to be cut during this cancellation
project and when the next journal cancellation project will need to be conducted.
The primary variables include the annual:
- Rate of inflation for print materials
- Rate of inflation for electronic materials
- Rate of increase for the Library’s collections budget
- Percent of the journals collection that is in electronic form
- Cost of electronic content compared to print equivalents
- Percent of the collections budget devoted to journals
Library acquisitions staff have developed a model for how best to proceed for the
next three year period, using assumptions for these variables:
- We will conduct a cancellation project in 1997, effective with the January 1998
subscription base.
- We plan to manage for three successive years without another cancellation effort.
This strategy enables us to retain more titles and reduce the impact of high administrative
costs associated with managing yearly journal cancellation projects.
- We will maintain current ratios for distributing available dollars among the
various disciplines and formats (e.g., journals, monographs). (See Attachment #3.)
- We will cancel print subscriptions the year after electronic content becomes
available, wherever feasible.
- Electronic journal pricing is variable among publishers; some charge more than
the printed journal and some charge less. For modeling purposes, we have made an
optimistic assumption that electronic content will cost 90 percent of print content.
- Inflation rates for print content will be 10 percent.
- Inflation rates for electronic content will be 10 percent.
- The dollar mix of print to electronic within the journals budget will be as follows:
- 97/98: All print subscriptions still maintained regardless of electronic content
- 98/99: Print 60%; Electronic 40%
- 99/00: Print 55%; Electronic 45%
- 00/01: Print 50%; Electronic 50%
- 01/02: Print 40%; Electronic 60%
Using these assumptions and collection budget data, we will need to reduce journal
expenditures by 20 percent or $622,360. In 1997, sufficient numbers of journals will
be identified to be cancelled effective with the January 1998 subscriptions. Although
the Library considers journal cuts of this magnitude as unacceptable, in view of
UCSD’s status as a premier research institution, such cuts are unavoidable in the
current budgetary environment.
Savings that will accrue from these cancellations, plus any savings that the library
can achieve as electronic content becomes more widely available, should enable us
to avoid additional journal cancellations until 2000/01. During this three year time
frame, a better understanding about electronic content and scholarly communication
trends should emerge that will help us to make more informed decisions regarding
acquisitions of, and access to, scholarly content following the year 2000. (See Attachment
#4.)
As has been the case with past journal cuts, all broad disciplines will be cut equally.
Therefore, every library’s collections budget will be cut 20 percent. Cancellation
processes will be discussed with the various library advisory committees and will
be carried out in consultation with faculty. In some libraries, data has been collected
for in-house journals usage that can be used in conjunction with faculty input to
guide the cancellation process.
As long as the rate of journal price increases exceeds the rate of increase of the
Collections budget, we are working with an inadequate funding model to support acquisitions
and will need to cancel journals. Future cancellations will be avoided only if new
and sustainable budget resources are found to support acquisitions and access, or
if changes in the way in which we disseminate scholarly communication occur.
How can one secure new and sustainable resources? Financial support to protect UC
collections budgets from inflation was eliminated by the state in 1989. No sustainable
funding model has been in place since that time. The Office of the President has
created The Library Planning and Action Initiative, an 18-month effort that as one
of its goals will “recommend a sustainable business model or models for the university
library system to accommodate the changing funding, intellectual, service, collection
development, and technology environments.”
Could UCSD campus administrators increase library funding to maintain our current
level of journal acquisitions? To maintain current acquisitions levels, the following
amounts of new money for journals would be needed:
| If permanent increases were funded: |
| 97/98: |
$465,000 |
| 98/99: |
$165,000 |
| 99/00: |
$330,000 |
(NOTE: FY97/98 figures are high because the Library has been using reserves to cover
journal increases for 93-96. These reserves are now exhausted.)
| If one-time increases were funded: |
| 97/98: |
$465,000 |
| 98/99: |
$630,000 |
| 99/00: |
$952,000 |
It is extremely unlikely that funds of this magnitude would be able to be secured
for library acquisitions.
Within the UCSD Libraries, three activities will continue to be pursued to support
acquisitions and access. These include:
— Allocating more money to the Collections budget through increased fund-raising.
Fund raising to support acquisitions has always been the highest priority for the
Library’s development efforts.2 The campus, with the exception of
the NEH endowment drive from 1986 to 1989, has not considered the library as a campus
priority for fundraising and development efforts. The Library is increasing its support
for fundraising activities by hiring a full-time senior development officer devoted
solely to the Library.
— Increase resource sharing with other institutions.
One important mechanism to compensate for increased demand for materials not held
at UCSD is to develop better document delivery services. Interlibrary loan at UCSD
has steadily increased; borrowing was 14,800 in 1990/91 and 28,131 in 1995/96. Resource
sharing is a key component of the UC library system, consonant with the UC libraries’
principle of “one university-one library.” Shared collection development programs
are continually emphasized; turnaround times for interlibrary loan requests are continually
being reduced; and new methods for collaboration are continually being pursued. UCSD
is now leading a regional effort to link all of the academic libraries in San Diego
and provide direct patron-driven interlibrary loan with same day delivery service.
Relying on interlibrary loan causes its own overhead. In addition to the direct cost
experienced by faculty and graduate students caused by the inherent delay in getting
access to print-based information when interlibrary loan is mandated, there are also
indirect costs. The Library incurs additional staffing costs for processing and must
pay additional copyright fees when the library exceeds fair use guidelines. Eventually
these costs must be paid by further cuts in the collections budget or other operations.
While electronic content can be easily moved from one location to another in a very
timely fashion, proposed copyright legislation may significantly change interlibrary
loan, as we currently know it. Already, most electronic journal licenses do not permit
the use of electronic journal articles for interlibrary loan.
— Migrating to electronic content to save dollars.
We are hopeful that electronic content will, in the long run, slow the rate of inflationary
growth, reduce overall expenditures, and improve access. In addition, digital technology
appears to be the only solution that can deal with exponential growth. However, our
budgetary problem is real and immediate; any solution potentially provided by the
migration to electronic texts will not be realizable during the next several years.
In addition, current negotiations with the commercial publishers of heavily-used
science, technology, and medical titles regarding annual rates of inflation for electronic
content still generate rates that vastly exceed the current rate of growth for the
Library’s Collections budget.3
Other suggested actions will not solve our immediate acquisitions problem because
their implementation will generate results that are unacceptable to our users and
their implementation will not generate sufficient permanent dollars in order to institute
a sustainable financial model to support acquisitions. These include:
— Allocating more money to the Collections budget from the Library’s Operating
budget.
The Library already has over $1 million in unfunded high priority needs within its
Operating budget, above and beyond the budget shortfalls associated with the Collections
budget crisis. It is in the midst of a programmatic realignment whereby portions
of the salaries budget will be reallocated or reduced dramatically to cover other
salary or non-salary high priority needs, including changes required to deliver information
in electronic formats.4 (See also Attachment #1.)
— Realigning spending priorities within the Collections budget.
Within the Collections budget there are historical ratios that exist between amounts
of money spent for materials in different broad subject categories and in different
formats. For example, we balance spending between social sciences, humanities, and
the sciences. We also balance spending among monographs and journals. Any of these
ratios can be altered to protect journal subscriptions; however, such alterations
are not in the long run sustainable and will seriously impact selected user groups.
(See also Attachment #3.)
Dramatic changes in the way in which we disseminate scholarly information are required.
Scholarly communication has now become an extraordinarily complex business with much
at stake for a variety of players: for-profit and not-for-profit publishers, scholarly
societies, faculty, campus administrators, librarians, etc.
Under current structures, journals from commercial publishers are the primary mechanism
for communicating knowledge in the scientific, technical, and medical arena. Faculty
serve as editors or editorial board members for these journals. Faculty submit articles
to the publishers of these journals, thereby promoting scholarly discourse as well
as earning academic advancement or accolades as part of formal academic review processes.
Publishers sell these very journals at costly institutional rates back to libraries
at the faculty member’s institution where these faculty teach and do research. Ironically,
however, the cost-per-use of some of the most expensive journal titles in medicine
are probably lower than many of the cost-per-use figures for the much less expensive
humanities journals.
Some scholarly societies act like commercial publishers and others more closely resemble
not-for-profit entities. Institutional rates for key journals from scholarly societies
serve as important sources of funds for operating some societies, thereby keeping
individual membership rates at low levels.
Academic reward structures emphasize print-based distribution of knowledge and contribute
to the surge of published research.
All of these factors and many more affect the current crisis faced by all research
libraries attempting to acquire and preserve scholarly communication. We must move
from viewing this as a library crisis and instead view it as an academic crisis.
Faculty on our campuses are key players who can mandate this scholarly information
shift and must join librarians and campus administrators in addressing this problem.
Interwoven into the academia and publisher linkage is the issue of copyright. Copyright
is a critically important concern and will become even more important as the electronic
age advances. Copyright affects the university community in two key ways. Currently,
as faculty submit articles for publication, copyright for the great majority of these
articles gets passed to the publisher. Some faculty have begun writing in clauses
that retain copyright for the electronic version of the article. While most publishers
have accepted this clause to date, it is not clear whether publishers will accept
articles in the future if such clauses are linked to specific articles by more and
more faculty. Secondly, copyright legislation is currently in flux. If current legislative
efforts led by the entertainment industry succeed, copyright fees would be paid every
time information is transmitted from one system to another. Fair use would most likely
disappear and interlibrary loan as we currently know it would no longer exist. The
University of California is monitoring these federal copyright initiatives and has
written and is now circulating its “University of California Copyright Legislation
and Scholarly Communication Basic Principles,” in order to educate lawmakers and
assure that academic discourse remains unfettered.
These two national issues, scholarly communication in general and copyright in particular,
will in the long run hold the key to the current acquisitions crisis that we face.
Changes will not occur in a sufficiently timely fashion, however, to resolve our
current budgetary challenges. In the meantime, we will need to continue with journal
cancellations.
Gerald R. Lowell
University Librarian
February 20, 1997
|