Re: The Big Deal/Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potenti=

["B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>]

I'm reminded of Ken Frazier's "The Librarians' Dilemma:
Contemplating the Costs of the 'Big Deal.' D-Lib Magazine, March
2001, Volume 7 Number 3.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html

Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN

--- On Mon, 5/18/09, Colin Steele <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au> wrote:

> From: Colin Steele <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>
> Subject: The Big Deal/Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential
 Budget Cuts
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Date: Monday, May 18, 2009, 7:40 PM
>
> John Shipp, the Librarian of the University of Sydney, and I,
> obtained Government funds in Australia in 1994 to support
> publisher Big Deals for Australian universities. We were
> following on the initiatives of Lynne Brindley, Derek Law and
> others in the UK.
>
> In one sense, the fact that the Government funded a significant
> portion of the costs over a number of years was a good thing,
> but it did generate an expectation of continuance from the
> academic community, who traditionally are distanced from the
> realities of subscription policies. The process undoubtedly
> helped the transition from print to electronic which occurred
> far earlier in countries like Australia because of currency
> devaluations, than elsewhere, such as the United States. The
> Big Deals also undoubtedly placed more material on the desktop
> of the university researcher than they previously had from the
> specific publishers involved.
>
> The consequences of the Big Deal in terms of the allocations
> within library budgets have been well documented, eg the
> increasing proportion of the total budget taken by them in
> contrast to the output of smaller publishers, learned
> publishers, and especially the scholarly monograph. This,
> however, should not be directly laid at the feet of the
> publishers, rather librarians bowed to the pressure of their
> academic communities. One remembers the efforts of the late
> Peter Lyman at the University of California Berkeley in his
> efforts to curb Elsevier subscriptions there, which foreshadow
> some of the current debate.
>
> I think there is no doubt that in the 1990s there was little
> combined global resistance to the double digit annual rises
> imposed by some of the major STM publishers. I remember one
> significant UK serial publisher, now absorbed in one of the
> multi-nationals, telling me that he/she simply increased their
> subscriptions significantly because they could undertake that
> within the STM diaspora and no one would notice. This was also
> a time when the US major research libraries were less active in
> this regard, and clearly the US Library downturn in finances,
> is very significant in perhaps triggering changes in scholarly
> publishing practice.
>
> Where we go from here will be assisted by US developments,
> although Gold OA, without dismantling the existing serial
> subscription structure is largely a case of a double-whammy. I
> would agree with Sandy Thatcher that Gold OA in the Humanities
> is a long way off unless the scholarly communication frameworks
> are dramatically changed. One can understand Stevan Harnad's
> frustrations here in terms of Green OA, although the two OAs
> can and will co-exist.
>
> At the ANU, with its restricted subject fields, we once asked
> our subject advisory committees which journals they wanted of
> the major packages, and in the end, only 40-50% of the journals
> in the major packages were deemed essential. The
> multi-nationals pricing, however, of the reduced packages, at
> that time, was not much less than the whole package, which was
> certainly an effective marketing ploy.
>
> In the longer term, to pick up Fred's point, it will be
> interesting to see how long some of the big deals pan out for
> 2010, without going into such issues as to whether we really
> need serials in their present form, often simply replicating
> the previous print formats. Branding, reputation and peer
> review are essential, but do we need, in the digital era,
> articles to be amalgamated into a traditional serial format
> rather than single article access under the journal banner?
>
> Colin Steele
> Emeritus Fellow
> Copland Building 24
> Room G037, Division of Information
> The Australian National University
> Canberra ACT 0200
> Australia
>
> Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
> Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au
> University Librarian, Australian National University
> (1980-2002)
> and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)