Elsevier and cancellations

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

I am forwarding the following with the permission of the author, as I
think it is of general interest:

Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:12:35 -0500
From: Robert Michaelson <rmichael@nwu.edu>
To: slapam-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Elsevier & Cancellations

A library's motive is to provide access to important scholarship.
Elsevier's motive is to make large profits. ScienceDirect is a device to
enable Elsevier to make such profits forever, since the libraries and
consortia foolish enough to buy into it have forever committed themselves
to supporting whatever Elsevier decides to publish, however overpriced, or
mediocre (or worse) in quality.  Certainly OhioLINK didn't make a
cost-benefit analysis of ScienceDirect before going with it and I very
much doubt that they have done so since then -- I believe the same thing
is true of every other ScienceDirect customer.

For a great many years Elsevier (and, to be fair, many other for-profit
publishers) have extorted ever larger sums from academic libraries by the
simple device of adding-on extra volumes every year.  These add-ons often
include conference proceedings (unreferred or refereed to a very low
standard -- things that they couldn't sell to libraries as separate
pieces, but stick us with as part of our subscriptions); Festshrifts
(often composed of mediocre papers that embarass rather than honor the
subject of the Festschrift); and even basically worthless annual
bibliographies, which never get used.  It is not unknown for such
superfluous materials to make up on the order of half of the pages in a
year for a given journal! And yet by buying into everything, as
ScienceDirect (or for that matter IDEAL) customers do, those customers
give up any possiblity of influencing Elsevier (or Academic...) to stop
churning out this garbage at the libraries' expense.

Naturally the Elseviers and Academics would have you believe that it is
crucial to provide electronic access to all of their journals -- and
indeed it is crucial, for them!  It is not, however, crucial for you or
for your institution.  You have the obligation to make a considered
judgement on which electronic titles you provide access to, just as you
have that obligation in considering which print titles to subscribe to or
cancel. If these publishers don't offer title-by-title choices at
reasonable surcharges for electronic access, then their titles will be
used and cited less frequently and will decline, perhaps (with luck) even
fold.

So in response to Momota Ganguli I would say YES, it is ALWAYS a good idea
to consider cancelling Elsevier titles! We at Northwestern have cancelled
many of them, and none of those have been missed.  Naturally you will want
to plan your cancellations in a responsible manner: try to find out how
much a given title is used (browsed, checked out of the library, etc.),
how many of your own faculty publish in it or cite it, and perhaps what
the cost is per page (or per impact factor per page) compared with other
titles in the same general field. Talk with your faculty about it before
making your final selection of titles to be cancelled (and there are
probably publications from other publishers that you could cancel as well,
so don't ignore them just because they aren't from Elsevier). Finally, if
you have time it might not hurt to write to the publishers of the titles
you decide to cancel, explaining why you have decided that they aren't
worth your continuing support (remember, _we_ are the customers, _we_ are
the ones to decide what is a reasonable value for our money).

Bob Michaelson
Northwestern University Library
rmichael@nwu.edu
-- 
David Goodman , Biology Librarian, Princeton University Library 
dgoodman@princeton.edu