Re: Open Access outside the U.S/U.K.

[heatherm@eln.bc.ca]

hi Ann - I'd like to think SFU is typical, but in practice I think SFU is
far more globally-minded than the average university.  My profs at the
University of Alberta were pointing out, in the 70's, that the
international journals (meaning non-North America, non-European),
especially the foreign language journals, were the ones that were being
cut.

Just to clarify:  I didn't mean to say that libraries in Europe or North
America deliberately targeted journals from outside these areas.  It's
just that the careful cost-cutting measures you've described would,
unfortunately, tend to have this effect.  For example, if cost-cutting is
based on usage, it is quite likely that foreign language journals will be
cut, as fewer people read them. It is also likely that journals focused on
non-local issues (for example, library association journals produced by
library associations in other countries) would tend to be cut first, for
the same reason.

For Canadian libraries, it is essential to be able to access both Canadian
indexing and journals.  Perhaps this has protected these journals from
being cancelled by Canadian libraries?  Given decreasing purchasing power
and a need to protect one's own publications, does this not suggest that
more international journals will be cancelled?

The only antidote to these tendencies that I can see, is for libraries to
base their purchasing decisions on a policy basis.  For example, libraries
in the 70's could have said, "We must ensure that our cost-cutting
measures do not disadvantage publishers in the third world", and acted
accordingly.  Is there any evidence that that happened?

cheers,

Heather

On Sun,  5 Sep 2004 10:23:09 EDT liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu wrote:
> Heather, I was responsible for serials & gov docs & microforms at Simon
> Fraser University Library from sometime in the 70s to 1985.  There were
> several years of cutbacks (after those SFU startup years in the 60s in
> which staff and collections all grew rapidly).  We took those cutbacks in
> various ways:  not just serials cancellations, but reduction of
> discretionary purchases, narrowing of approval plans, staff reductions,
> and in one of my years -- salary rollbacks.
> 
> Our criteria for subscription cancellation didn't target the international

> titles -- the category was not particularly relevant, for, you see, at
> that time only a small minority of our titles were Canadian, maybe 20-25%
> at most, maybe less, *so by definition the rest were international.* As I
> recall, the US accounted for as much as 40-50% of our journal collections
> and the rest were from outside Canada/US.  These are very imprecise
> recollections, but my guess is that something of the sort is still true
> for smaller countries like Canada.  By proportion there'd inevitably be
> more "international" cancellations than domestic ones.
> 
> The critera in those days for cutting were much like today's in most
> places:  what titles do your students and faculty really need (i.e., some
> surrogate for use, which we'd do by counting re-shelved items, or putting
> wrappers around issues to see if they were broken in order to open the
> item -- things like that).  The science librarians of the time were
> experts in bibliometrics so Science Citation Index data were particularly
> closely studied. Faculty were asked for their opinions.  Price was noted
> (though price per title was much less of an issue in those days).  It was
> some combination of the above factors, more or less in the order listed
> above, that led us to decide to keep or cancel a journal.  Were any of
> them "international" journals?  Sure -- but, again, note that at SFU our
> 80% of non-Canadian periodicals imprints would by definition meet the
> international criterion.
> 
> Even in the US most of the subscriptions are "international" from all
> around the world, so the answers from all respondents could easily be,
> "yes, we cancelled a number of international titles, because they
> represented the majority of our cancellations!"  This is inevitably the
> case for the larger research libraries, who draw information from a large
> global environment.
> 
> These answers don't particularly shed light on open access, which is
> national boundary independent.  Ann Okerson