Re: Elsevier and cancellations

[Tom Williams <twilliam@jaguar1.usouthal.edu>]

It will also be important that libraries support the "alternative"  
initiatives such as SPARC and individuals such as the fellow who founded
and was editor of Environmental Ecology.  The journal was purchased by
Kluwer who upped the price by 30% right away.  The editor resigned in
protest and has started a new journal, with the support of SPARC, entitled
Environmental Ecology Reviews which will cost about 1/3 of the original
but with many of the same contributing authors.  We should all cancell EE
and purchase EER, which I believe will commence in January, 2000.

For more information on the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition(SPARC) check out www.arl.org/sparc

It has the support of ALA, MLA, ARL and others.

Tom

Thomas Williams, Director			(334) 460-6885
Biomedical Library and Media 			(334) 460-7638(fax)
   Production Services
University of South Alabama			twilliam@jaguar1.usouthal.edu
College of Medicine				http://southmed.usouthal.edu
BML 326B
Mobile, Alabama 36688-0002

On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, David Goodman wrote:

> 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
> 
>