RE: Institutional Journal Costs in an Open Access Environment

[Janellyn P Kleiner <jkleiner@lsu.edu>]

Are you suggesting that libraries should pay author publishing 
fees? Promotion and tenure, usually based on publishing records, 
are the province of academic departments not libraries. The role 
of libraries is to house publications and provide access to them, 
not to support faculty publishing charges. That is the 
responsibility of academic departments where the decisions on 
supporting publication can best be made by those who conduct the 
research and publish the results. They have the knowledge and 
experience to make decisions about what is worthy of publication 
and merits financial support if grant support is not available. 
Libraries do not. I am an advocate of OA, but the support for 
faculty publishing should come directly from Universities to 
academic departmental budgets not library budgets. Libraries do 
not and should not have any role in the promotion and tenure 
process other than for their library faculty.

For libraries, such as ours, that periodically survey faculty to 
determine their needs and also retain browse and use data as well 
as interlibrary loan data, they have the data that tells them 
what is essential and what is not. We have more than a decade of 
this data. Our decisions on what to buy and the databases and 
titles to which we subscribe are based on that data and are very 
cost effective.  Document delivery, subsidized by our library, 
supports researchers who have more specialized needs. In today's 
environment, it is essential to know how to use funds to support 
research and instruction effectively. Today's technology makes it 
easy to obtain and store data useful to decision-making. We can 
justify our expenditures and this has brought us support from 
campus faculty and our university administration.

Jane Kleiner
Associate Dean of Libraries for Collection Services
The LSU Libraries
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Phone: 225-578-2217
Fax: 225-578-6825
E-Mail: jkleiner@lsu.edu