Re: ALPSP library survey

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I appreciate that Fred is trying to be helpful but (as far as I know) he 
has never been a publisher. As an ex-librarian (though I left the 
profession a very long time before Fred did) I am very familiar with 
explanations about how the library should be run from academic patrons. 
His tone grates a little in the same way.

All publishers want to continue to publish and they will obviously want to 
adopt what policies will enable them to make enough money to work on 
behalf of the academic community. It is just possible that their 
collective judgement will be better than his view. As I understand it most 
publishers do not see the model Fred espouses as being more sustainable 
than the present model.

You can of course argue that it is all a matter of innate conservatism and 
vested interest, but if you look at the record would suggest that 
publishers have on the whole been in advance both of academics and 
librarians in embracing the advantages of the digital environment. When I 
started putting journals online in 1994 at Chapman & Hall it was difficult 
to explain to academics what the purpose was and even more difficult to 
get librarians to buy into taking additional online for a small surcharge. 
Only when a lot of publishers produced programs, particularly the Big Deal 
programs, was there serious take-up by libraries.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: ""FrederickFriend"" <ucylfjf@ucl.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 11:09 AM
Subject: Re: ALPSP library survey

> Having attended the seminar Sally refers to, I remember the evidence 
> from IOPP in particular that titles held in arXiv receive a lower use on 
> the IOPP web-site than titles not held in arXiv. I do not dispute the 
> statistics but I am not sure what this tells us about possible future 
> cancellations by libraries on the basis of repository content. There is 
> no evidence so far as I know that the arXiv use has resulted in lower 
> subscriptions for the titles used heavily on arXiv. Usage statistics are 
> only one factor in a complex cancellation environment.
>
> The strategic message for me in this discussion of the relationship 
> between library cancellations and repository content is that publishers 
> have to move away from high-dependence upon library subscriptions. The 
> study Mary Waltham conducted for JISC last summer illustrated that 
> high-dependence, and Richard Gedye of OUP has just said much the same in 
> an article in "The Bookseller". However great or small the use of 
> repository content, the library market is shrinking, and publishers can 
> have a much healthier future by using the grants funding agencies like 
> the Wellcome Trust make available to authors for open access publication 
> charges. That route links their income to increases in research funding 
> instead of to decreases in library budgets. This is why I feel 
> publishers' rejection of policies from bodies like RCUK is 
> counter-productive.
>
> Fred Friend
> JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
> Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL