Is it time to stop printing journals?

["Mcsean, Tony \(ELS\)" <T.Mcsean@elsevier.com>]

I hope that perpetual access is becoming a non-issue.  Elsevier 
agreements give perpetual access to all subscribed e-journals, 
either on ScienceDirect or through a copy which we supply to be 
spun locally.

Long-term availability is further assured by our participation in 
Portico and by our archiving agreement with the Koninklijke 
Bibliotheek in the Netherlands.  We were among the very first STM 
publishers to establish an archiving policy which met librarians' 
expectations, but many have since followed our lead.

Tony

Tony McSean
Director of Library Relations
Elsevier
London NW1 7BY

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Selma Aslan
Sent: 05 April 2007 01:22
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Is it time to stop printing journals?

Dear All

I have been following these discussions from Turkey for some 
time.  The policy we follow at my university is quite straight 
forward:

1. Access a journal through a database subscription if the cost 
is justifiable. If this is not not viable, 2. subscribe to a 
journal online only, if perpetual access rights are granted for 
the volumes paid for; --nb. I could not identifiy any journals 
which fit to this concept, with the exception of Blackwell titles 
so far--. So the third choice is 3. subscribe to both 
online+print so that you own what you pay for.

I am surprised that perpetual rights issue has not been 
mentioned. If I could get perpetual access rights for online 
subscriptions I would not consider getting print subscriptions at 
all. I must note that we do not cover life sciences and medicine 
where the quality of images come under discussion.

Selma Aslan
TOBB ETU, Ankara, Turkey
http://www.etu.edu.tr

----- Original Message ----
From: Roger Schonfeld <Roger.Schonfeld@ithaka.org>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Wednesday, 4 April, 2007 12:42:11 AM
Subject: RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?

Dear Mark,

Thank you for starting such a very timely discussion on Liblicense-l.
Ithaka and its affiliates JSTOR and Portico have been thinking about
these questions for some time now, and we have been working together on
a variety of research studies to try to understand this environment.

Most recently, in the summer and fall of 2006, we commissioned several
nationwide surveys to learn about librarian and faculty attitudes and
perspectives. Our academic librarian survey targeted those senior
managers responsible for collection development (generally an associate
university librarian at a university library, but at a smaller school
this could have been a library director or an acquisitions librarian
depending on how functions are assigned), and received more than 350
responses.
Our faculty survey targeted individuals from across the arts and
sciences disciplines, as well as several of the professions, from 4-year
colleges, and received more than 4,100 responses. Both were limited to
the United States.

We retained a professional research firm called Odyssey to help us with
these studies. One technique they use quite effectively is to offer
strongly-worded statements and then gauge the level of agreement with
these statements on a 10-point scale. In the figures here I will group
those who selected an 8, 9, or 10 as agreeing strongly with the
statement that has been offered and those who selected a 1, 2, or 3 as
disagreeing strongly. Here are two such statements:

* "If our library cancelled the current issues of a print version of a
journal but continued to make them available electronically, that would
be fine with me." On this statement, 62% of faculty members agree
strongly, indicating their strong willingness to cancel current print
issues and rely exclusively on e-journals.
Virtually the same share of librarians, 64%, also agrees strongly with
this possibility. Among both librarians and faculty, only 12% disagree
strongly with this statement, suggesting that active resistance to
dropping print format for journal acquisitions is relatively isolated.

* Faculty members are far less willing to contemplate the withdrawal of
existing backfile collections: "Assuming that electronic collections of
journals are proven to work well and are readily accessible, I would be
happy to see hard-copy collections discarded and replaced entirely by
electronic collections." Only 20% of faculty members agree strongly with
this statement, while 50% disagree strongly with it. Even though the
decision to cease acquiring print-version current issues will
necessarily result in print backfile collections no longer being built,
it is far easier for faculty members to support a cessation of
acquisitions than it is to imagine outright withdrawal. On the other
hand, a plurality of librarians (43%) agrees strongly with this
statement about the withdrawal of print backfiles, while only 25%
disagrees strongly.

Among faculty members, we were not surprised to learn of substantial
differences across the disciplines in their readiness to see an
elimination of print versions, both for current issue acquisitions and
for backfiles. While some of these differences are as expected, with
scientists generally more enthusiastic for a transition than humanists,
in fact we observe substantial swings on a discipline-by-discipline
level even within, for example, the humanities generally.

Throughout our librarian study, we see recurring indications that the
larger research libraries tend to have become more prepared internally
for a transition away from print and to an exclusively electronic
environment. For example, on questions where we tried to gauge just how
soon a major transition might be expected, far more librarians at
research universities could contemplate a tipping-point arising "in the
near future" than could librarians at teaching universities or colleges.

As you suggested, our studies indicate the great concern among both
faculty members and librarians in ensuring that the electronic versions
of journals are properly preserved for the long term.

My conclusion from our studies is that, within some disciplines, there
is little value remaining to faculty members in continuing to acquire
print versions of current issues. (In some cases, journals with specific
readership profiles, such as clinical subscribers or scholarly society
members, might have additional demand for individual, but not
institutional, subscriptions in print format.) Many librarians also
appear ready to make a transition away from print and probably would
support this for appropriate disciplines, so long as the preservation of
electronic versions was assured in community-acceptable archives.

At the same time, it is critical that publishers consider not only
reader-side demand for print, but also the author-side demand to appear
in a print publication. Some preliminary work on this topic has already
been completed by Diane Harley and Jud King at Berkeley, with more to
come (see
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/scholarlycommunication/index.htm).

I hope our survey findings are helpful to this discussion. I would be
happy to work further with you or others individually on these very
timely questions.

Roger Schonfeld
Manager of Research
Ithaka

151 East 61st Street
New York, New York 10021
(212) 500 - 2338
rcs@ithaka.org
www.ithaka.org