Re: Fascinating quotation

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

The problem with Mark Funk's viewpoint is that it represents the way he
would like the world to be, but not how it is.  I happen to want the world
to be the same way, but I have been disabused by the facts in the
marketplace.

The problem is simply that librarians are already cancelling subscriptions
when material can be found in another form at a later date.  Recently
clients have informed me that when they specifically asked librarians why
particular journals were cancelled, they were told that the reason was
that the journals were available from EBSCO Host, Project Muse, and (most
astonishing to my mind), JSTOR.  The reason the JSTOR example sticks out
for me is that JSTOR famously has a "moving wall," where some materials
may not be available for several years after initial publication.  One
publisher who told me that librarians pointed to JSTOR as the reason for
cancellations has a 5-year moving wall.  I simply do not see how 5 years
with JSTOR is irrelevant when we discuss 6 months with the NIH.

Of course, librarians do not march in a lockstep; they won't all cancel
everything; few will want to cancel anything.  But there is a simple
problem with the reality of academic economics, namely, that a library's
budget is always smaller than the list of publications it wants to
acquire.  Either an existing subscription must be cancelled or all new
titles must be overlooked.  Price increases, even if they are at a rate
below CPI, exacerbate the situation.  Librarians are paid to make
decisions and make them they do, almost always with a high degree of
professionalism, and those decisions include declining to acquire certain
titles for various reasons that are carefully weighted.  The availability
of material in another format, from another vendor, through an aggregator,
or because of the existence of an Open Access source are all reasons to
say no to one journal in favor of another.  Seen from the business side,
this is called "channel conflict."  OA in this context is just another
channel.

I feel obliged to repeat a point I made before, that it seems to me that
any funding agency, including the NIH, has a right to stipulate that
research done through its grants be published in an OA form.

Joe Esposito

On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:36:40 EST, Mark Funk <mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu> wrote:

> While Dr. Zerhouni's analogy to the Olympics is perhaps not the best,
> Joe's criticism focuses on an imperfect analogy, not the publishers' bogus
> arguments about lost business.
> 
> If I were a sports bookie, I not only would not be interested in six-month
> old Olympic results, I wouldn't even be interested in NBC's nightly
> delayed broadcast of the day's events. I would purchase a satellite dish
> and a satellite subscription service so I could get the results live. As a
> bookie, my career depends on having this information as quickly as
> possible.
> 
> In the medical world, our researchers are similar to sports bookies.
> They need information today, not six months from today. They need it so
> they can use it to apply for a grant with a deadline next week, use it in
> their current research project, or even apply it in the clinic to a
> desperately ill patient. For the most part, these researchers use a
> library's subscription in order to get this information. Libraries are not
> going to cancel a needed journal because some of its articles will appear
> free in six months.  Librarians' heads would be appearing on stakes all
> across the country if we tried that.
> 
> Librarians know that information is valuable. Timely information is even
> more valuable, and people are willing to pay for that timeliness if it is
> needed. Hundreds of web sites have free stock market quotations only
> fifteen minutes old. Have these hurt Dow Jones' subscriptions? I don't
> think so. The NIH proposal only makes the research that they fund more
> widely available to people throughout the world, those without access to
> well-financed medical libraries.
> 
> As overly-priced as many of them are, medical journals are a vital source
> of timely information to our users. Librarians may cancel a journal for
> being little used, out of scope, or of declining quality.  But if our
> users need information from that journal, we aren't going to cancel it
> because some of its articles might be free six months after publication.
> 
> You can bet on it.
> 
> Mark Funk
> mefunk@mail.med.cornell.edu