RE: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Fred,

It's all well and good to make assertions like "the new open 
access models hold out the promise of unrestricted access to all 
journals," but when you talk to many of the people responsible 
for managing the current crop of OA resources, it becomes clear 
that not everything in the OA world is a picnic.

A great many OA projects survive at the pleasure of the provost, 
and in what are challenging economic times, some of these 
projects are going to be scaled back, cut loose, or simply shut 
down.  This retrenchment is not restricted to OA resources.  We 
have just in the last couple weeks heard that LSU may end its 
support of its university press and that The New England Review 
has until 2011 to find other sources of funding or its sponsor, 
Middlebury College, will remove further support.

One university OA service contacted me recently to assist in the 
creation of a business plan. At that project's parent 
institution, the administrator in charge is pressing the OA 
service to switch to a subscription model.  (For the record, I 
think it's a bad idea--and in this instance, unnecessary.)

I am agnostic as to the Big Deal, the Little Deal--though I do 
like the Side Deal--but I do think we should drop the pretence 
that we have solved a very difficult problem with a utopian 
fantasy.  Some OA projects will be with us forever, but there is 
little reason to hold out the "promise" of unrestricted access to 
all journals.  A real estate agent once promised me that the 
value of my house was bound to go up.  I didn't believe him 
either.

Joe Esposito

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of "FrederickFriend"
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 6:31 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

In reply to Rajia and to Shirley in her earlier post, it is clear 
that users in small to medium-sized libraries have been gaining 
access to a broad range of titles through Big Deals, and this has 
been a plus-point for that business model. However, the benefit 
has been obtained at great cost to the academic community, not 
only financial cost but also academic cost in not having access 
to the research monographs and smaller journals which have had to 
be sacrificed in order to pay for the Big Deals. Moreover the new 
open access models hold out the promise of unrestricted access to 
all journals, not only those contained in Big Deals, with a 
better benefit to cost ratio than the Big Deals. I do not 
under-estimate the magnitude of the change in business models, 
but bigger changes in business models are already happening in 
the music industry without the industry collapsing.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tobia, Rajia C" <TOBIA@uthscsa.edu>
To: "Rais, Shirley (LLU)" <srais@llu.edu>; <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2009 6:59 AM
Subject: RE: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

>I feel I must chime in, too.  In the late 1980s and most of the 
>1990s, we also painfully canceled many journal titles due to 
>flat budgets, budget cuts, and inflationary increases.  By 
>joining in consortial "Big Deals" starting in the late 1990s, we 
>were able to offer our faculty and students a richer mix of 
>titles than ever before possible.
>
> We did an analysis in 2004 of our Big Deals with Elsevier, 
> Wiley, and Blackwell.  We wanted to find out how much it would 
> cost to replace shared titles we received because we are part 
> of a consortium Big Deal. We wanted to make sure we were 
> getting value for our dollars. We analyzed titles that our 
> library received through a consortium Big Deal with those three 
> publishers. The titles we reviewed were titles that were not 
> part of our historically subscribed titles but shared titles 
> among the consortium.  We arbitrarily picked an article 
> download rate of 100 or more article downloads per title per 
> year as being high use.  We then looked at the full 
> subscription costs of these titles. It would have cost the 
> library an additional $500,000+ to subscribe to these shared 
> consortium titles on our own, an additional $500,000 that we 
> just do not have.
>
> Now, I am not a big fan of Big Publishing but on a practical 
> level, it would be very difficult for our faculty and 
> researchers to lose access to these highly used titles. I think 
> for the small to medium sized academic library, Big Deals have 
> not been an entirely bad thing, particularly if there are 
> pooled consortium subscriptions as the backbone of the deal. 
> The economic times are tough and we may have to bow out of some 
> of our Big Deals, but at a loss of many titles that are being 
> used on our campus.
>
> Rajia Tobia, A.M.L.S. Executive Director of Libraries 
> University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio 
> mailto:tobia@uthscsa.edu