Re: Interview with Springer's Derk Haank

["Diane Grover" <grover@u.washington.edu>]

The University of Washington has been and continues to experience 
exactly what Ivy Anderson warns in her excellent posts.  Budget 
decreases, mid-year rescissions, and threatened further cuts have 
left us with our backs against the wall.  To borrow from Ivy, 
we've already hit the proverbial iceberg.

The big deals have been priced based on historical subscriptions. 
If we still were able to maintain our own subscription lists, we 
would have been cancelling journals that are included in bundles 
for the last several years. But the bundle deals insist on zero 
to minimal cancellations, percentage increases, and even require 
adding titles the publishers start up or take over from others. 
If costs go up every year, and our revenue goes down, there is 
clearly a sustainability problem.

Over the last couple of years, we have discontinued one big deal, 
and several smaller ones.  We have not joined any new ones.  We 
will very likely have to leave other big deals going into the 
next fiscal year.  In the case of the one big deal we left, it 
was consortial and the consortium collectively had enough budget 
issues that many libraries cancelled titles. We cancelled 23% of 
our spend (about equal to our accumulated budget cuts) and lost 
about 67% of our access to this particular bundle.  Why couldn't 
we re-negotiate a package with 23% less access?

Maintaining the remaining bundles has cost our book budget, 
databases, and independent journals dearly.  The remaining large 
bundles account for an ever increasing portion of our budget. 
Ebook bundle deals from publishers seem completely out of reach.

So to Mr. Haank: we have to say we definitely don't have access 
to all the journals we could ever want.  Sadly, it's not so much 
the libraries, but the researchers who are hurt by this.  I hear 
publishers say all the time that they want their content 
available and read by the researchers and scholars. This can no 
longer happen in our environment.

Is it our fault for not advocating well enough?  you would have 
to judge for yourself, but we respectfully disagree.

Diane Grover
Electronic Resources Coordinator
University of Washington Libraries
206-543-4786
grover@u.washington.edu

Tim Jewell
Director, Information Resources and Scholarly Communication
University of Washington Libraries
206-543-3890
tjewell@u.washington.edu


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ivy Anderson" <Ivy.Anderson@ucop.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 4:06 PM
Subject: RE: Interview with Springer's Derk Haank

> Anthony,
>
> I don't think that adjustments to publisher packages are
> incompatible with stability in licensing arrangements.  The
> following scenario is to my mind perfectly reasonable:  Customer
> X and Publisher Y are in renewal negotiations for a multi-year
> agreement.  For budget or other reasons, the customer wishes to
> scale back its holdings;  this could be based on usage (as
> described in Tom Sanville's 2004 article, "An Orderly Retreat
> from the Big Deal"
> <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october04/gatten/10gatten.html>)
>
> or on some other criterion (e.g. cancelling specific titles with
> a clearly-understood licensed value).  Once scaled back, another
> multi-year agreement is entered into, assuring both parties of
> revenue stability for the duration of the renewal.  This is
> exactly what libraries need to be able to do in order to plan
> ahead in the face of double-digit budget declines.  This is not
> the absence of planning, but its opposite:  the responsible
> exercise of planning.
>
> The points I wished to make were two-fold:  1)  libraries must be
> able to reduce the amount of money that is locked up in these big
> deals today or they will choke to death on agreements they can no
> longer afford;  2) in adjusting these large publisher deals, the
> 'unit price' of the deal (however calculated) should be
> considered the actual unit price for the purpose of scaling back
> the agreement, not a special discount that is forfeited if the
> license is re-negotiated.
>
> I make this point in order to advance the view that the unit
> price gains of the big deal - which Derk Haank rightly noted as
> representing a correction to the pricing excesses of an earlier
> era - constitute a new normal, and not some special pricing that
> only obtains if the deal remains intact.  Otherwise - switching
> to a metaphor more appropriate to the wintry season perhaps -
> we'll go down like the Titanic, smashing among the icebergs.
>
> - Ivy
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony
> Watkinson
> Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 3:26 PM
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Interview with Springer's Derk Haank
>
> It seems to me that Ivy Anderson makes some very reasonable
> points but I would suggest that it is the "funding ebbs and
> flows" that will represent a problem for any publisher. It was my
> understanding that one of the advantages of the Big Deal for both
> libraries and publishers was that it enabled planning ahead for
> both parties. Those who invest in publishing whether they are
> learned societies or commercial entities demand this sort of
> planning ahead if they are to invest in the constant new
> developments which the user population demands.
>
> Can libraries really not plan ahead and if not why not? Surely
> universities are planning ahead? Is it possible that libraries
> have failed to convince the people in higher education who hold
> the purse strings that there is more research being funded and
> that this is likely (and does) lead to more published articles
> and that they have to be paid for? I have a suspicion that, if
> ARL graphs are anything to go by with their failure to relate
> increase prices to increased number of articles, that ARL as an
> organisation and many librarians have had their heads in the
> sand.
>
> Note - I am not suggesting that the Big Deal does not need to be
> restructured. Who does not? Publishers respond to pressure from
> authors who want to publish. The numbers of authors wanting to
> publish goes up. I am of course assuming (but I would believe
> rightly assuming) that these increased number of authors are
> producing much the same percentage of good papers.
>
> Anthony
>
> Anthony Watkinson
> University College London
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> [mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Ivy Anderson
> Sent: 26 January 2011 03:38
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Subject: RE: Interview with Springer's Derk Haank
>
> Apologies for weighing in a bit late on this thread, but I do
> think that some additional perspective is warranted on the
> questions that Sandy posed.  While I appreciate the views of my
> good colleagues Warren and Syun, as well as those of Mr. Haank,
> there is more to this story.
>
> The large publisher deals have indeed expanded access and lowered
> the unit cost of journals for many libraries.  ARL charts clearly
> show these effects beginning in around 2000, and it would be
> disingenuous to claim otherwise.  In this sense, Mr. Haank is
> right when he says that the big deals ameliorated the serials
> crisis of an earlier era.  What is less salubrious about these
> arrangements however, is the way in which they have locked up
> library budgets in large, single-block expenditures. If the great
> invention of sliced bread is the slices, then these deals do not
> qualify because the loaves are frozen and typically unsliceable.
>
> On top of that, unfortunately many structural problems remain in
> this market.  The problems can be illustrated by juxtaposing two
> other well-known charts, one from ARL documenting the long
> decline in the proportion of research university funding
> allocated toward libraries, and another reproduced by STM
> documenting the equally steady increase in journal publication
> over time.  These trends have long been on a collision course,
> one that's being hastened by the current economic downturn.  And
> as Sandy points out, the increasing budget share consumed by
> journal packages has squeezed university presses and other small
> market players to near-extinction and reduced the breadth and
> diversity of library collections, despite concomitant increases
> in book publishing.  Large packages of books, while arguably
> offering similar value to the journal big deal, are nonetheless
> no easier for libraries to fund than their individual
> counterparts when the aggregate spend is sufficiently large.  As
> more and more purchasing becomes locked in large block
> expenditures, it is becoming impossible for libraries to
> maneuver. And with double-digit declines still looming on the
> horizon for many libraries, maneuver we must.
>
> What to do?  Of course, there are many efforts afoot aimed at
> producing authentic transformation in the form of dramatically
> lower production costs and barrier-free access, as well as
> important initiatives to re-introduce more non-library sources of
> funding to sustain the academic publishing enterprise.  But on a
> more incremental scale, and within the market as it exists today,
> there is at least one key adjustment to these deals that can
> help.  We can collectively weather the current economic crisis by
> recognizing that the unit costs inherent in the 'big deal' are
> the new norm and making it possible to scale these deals up and
> down in proportional ways as funding ebbs and flows, without
> reverting to the truly unsustainable pricing of an earlier era.
>
> The unit-cost gains of the big deal that Mr. Haank rightly notes
> - redressing an old and egregious imbalance - need to be
> preserved in the face of current economic challenges.  It will
> have proven to be no gain at all if these arrangements cannot be
> proportionately dialed back to accommodate new funding realities.
> Unless we can find a way to do that, our frozen bread with the
> slices stuck firmly together will become inedible indeed.
>
> Ivy Anderson
> Director of Collections
> California Digital Library
> University of California, Office of the President