Re: A Commitment to Electronic Archiving - how Elsevier ensurethat you'll loose 5 years of back files -- unless you sign the "big deal"

[Dennis Dillon <dillon@mail.utexas.edu>]

This is an interesting decision from several perspectives.

First, you wonder why any business would pressure its customers to proceed
down a path where they stop providing that business with revenue, while
the business simultaneously dilutes the value of its brand by reducing its
customer base.  This would appear to be a lose-lose strategy and one which
few businesses intentionally follow for long.

Second, as Stuttgart University demonstrates, when libraries weigh
difficult budget choices about the long-term sustainability of their
subscriptions and the safety of the vendor's access guarantees, a critical
part of that evaluation is trust.  Does the vendor have a relationship
with its customers built on long-term behavior (reasonable pricing,
keeping its word on access guarantees, not arbitrarily changing the rules
in mid-stream) that indicates that a fruitful long-term business
relationship is possible?

Every subscription is inherently a trust relationship.  As the Stuttgart
decision emphasizes, as economic pressures tighten -- the importance of
the quality and the reliability of the vendor/customer relationship
becomes an increasingly important factor in both budgetary and academic
decisions.

No one wants an academic publisher to go out of business because of
inadequate revenues, but then, what is the value of a journal that because
of publisher policies and strategies becomes increasingly available to an
ever smaller portion of its target audience?

We all know that there are a variety of complex issues that underlie these
decisions by Stuttgart and Elsevier.  Yet in these actions Elsevier loses
revenue, Stuttgart loses access to the journals, and the journals become
less valuable to all of us because Stuttgart is no longer part of this
particular scholarly communication circle.  Elsevier also becomes less
valuable to the academic community because the reach of its publications
is diminished.

We all lose.

Dennis Dillon
Asst. Dir. for Collections and Information Resources
The University of Texas at Austin

________________________

>"Permanent archiving of electronic information and assured access to those
>archives are essential in scholarly information. Elsevier Science is
>committed to maintaining an active electronic archive of its journals and
>to providing access to that archive to all subscribers"
>
>					new-elsevier@elsevier.com
>				(2001 Subscription Price List, p.6)
>
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>Subscribers to journals in the Elsevier Science Portal "Nuclear Physics
>Electronic" have received a message from Elsevier Science announcing the
>end of unconditional access to the archives of these journals for
>institutional print subscribers (see below). Only content of 1995 and
>earlier will (for some time) remain accessible on the Elsevier Server
>until those back files become available via ScienceDirect.
>
>For content published after 1995, longtime print subscribers that may have
>invested about 40,000 USD per year for the 9 journals that are part of the
>platform, are suddenly denied access to 5 years of those archives that
>were formerly included with their print subscriptions.
>
>What remains, are the usually 12 months "free" access included with all
>Elsevier print subscriptions through the web editions program. If a
>scientist tries to access earlier issues, he is shown only the abstract
>and asked to check whether his institution has signed up to ScienceDirect.
>
>The announcement by Elsevier Science marks the sad end of an aera of
>former longtime archival access for physics journals on Elsevier. Last
>year already saw the same transformation of suddenly disappearing archives
>into link collections to ScienceDirect silently going on for the 15
>journals on the Elsevier Science Portal "Surfaces and Interfaces", for the
>2 journals on Chemical Physics Physical Chemistry Online CPC Online
>(Chemical Physics and Chemical Physics Letters) and for the 18 journals in
>Elsevier's "Condensed Matter Web", and for numerous individual journal
>titles that formerly provided electronic access to several years of back
>files via the Elsevier Science Website, like Earth and Planetary Science
>Letters or Computer Physics Communications. Access to all those back files
>has been shut down for all but ScienceDirect Digital Collections
>Subscribers.
>
>For the publisher it's just streamlining its operations and luring even
>more subscribers into its ScienceDirect "Freedom Collection". However, we
>and our scientists as longtime subscribers to these journals feel deceived
>and are not willing to accept this publisher's actions without a word of
>protest.
>
>As our library, after 4 years of managing to sustain our subscriptions,
>again faces a severe cut in our acquisitions budget (almost 500,000 EUR or
>ca. 28% of our serials budget), we are now planning to cancel most if not
>all of our Elsevier Subscriptions with the end of 2002 to free up the
>necessary funds needed to continue our other subscriptions, especially to
>journals by well-known learned societies. Only after a comprehensive
>faculty evaluation of our present journal holdings as a whole (including
>consideration of titles to be added to our collections) will we reconsider
>which Elsevier journals have enough demand to warrant resubscribing
>despite their high price tags and which other journals can be cancelled
>instead.
>
>After being confronted with a sample of statistical data on cost per use
>for Elsevier journals vs. society journals and on learning that they would
>not loose any long-time archival access to formerly subscribed journals
>because Elsevier Science has already cut back access to those archives,
>our university's library advisory board unanimously decided to back up the
>library's proposal for a politically motivated "emergency decision" to
>cancel our Elsevier subscriptions. At the same time, we'll encourage
>faculty to publish in not-for-profit society and open access journals and
>to follow a consequent strategy to self-archive their refereed journal
>articles in open electronic archives. Stuttgart University library is a
>signatory to the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
>
>Bernd-Christoph Kaemper
>Subject Specialist for Physics and Electronic Resources Librarian,
>Stuttgart University Library, P.O. Box 104941, 70043 Stuttgart, Germany
>Tel +49 711 685-4780, Fax +49 711 685-3502, kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de