Newsletter on Serial Pricing Issues 074 (March 15, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/nspi/nspi-ns074 ISSN: 1046-3410 NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES NO 74 -- March 15, 1993 Editor: Marcia Tuttle CONTENTS 74.1 FROM THE EDITOR, Marcia Tuttle 74.2 ARL/MELLON REPORT RECOMMENDATION, Peter Graham 74.3 ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING, COPYRIGHT, AND US, Ann O'Neill 74.4 HAMAKER'S HAYMAKERS, Chuck Hamaker 74.5 FROM THE MAILBOX 74.1 FROM THE EDITOR Marcia Tuttle, tuttle@gibbs.oit.unc.edu. He told me I didn't have to apologize, so I won't! When Scott Pietenburg sent me a fax with the message that appeared in no. 73, the cover sheet print was very dim and I could not make out the spelling of his last name. I was going to call him before I sent the newsletter, but I forgot -- which is why one of the items in no. 73 is by "Scott" or "Scott ?" I'm embar- rassed to have sent out an unfinished newsletter, but worse things have happened.... 74.2 ARL/MELLON REPORT RECOMMENDATION Peter Graham, Rutgers University Libraries, GRAHAM@zodiac.rutgers.edu. May I enthusiastically recommend the just-published report from ARL and the Mellon foundation, _University Libraries and Scholarly Communication_, by Anthony M. Cummings [et al], November, 1992 and just now hitting the desks of ARL directors and their University administrators. It is available at $8 a copy from ARL and is over 230 pages. The report is in two parts. The first part addresses the crisis in collec- tion building, i.e., the increasing quantity of material published, its cost, and the relative decline of library budgets. The second part addres- ses the new and uncharted opportunities provided by electronic technology. The report sees the two as linked, though it admits the link is in no clearly predictable way. The first part is a very welcome collection of historical statistics for ARL libraries (and in one chapter on a set of college libraries) which documents much of what this newsletter has been discussing and much more. As the report says, little of it will be news to librarians; but for Uni- versity administrators it is an authoritative statement from a credible source. 74.3 ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING, COPYRIGHT, AND US Ann O'Neill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Information and Library Science, ONEIA.ILS@mhs.unc.edu. I love my chosen profession, I have to; I'm not going to get rich doing this. And because of that, I understand that librarians are only human, and therefore share many human failings. One of those that tends to stand out most is looking for a scapegoat upon which to lay all the blame for a prob- lem. To me, this is one of our biggest failings as a profession; we're too eager to blame something, or accept a technology, as the cause or cure for our problems. Recent discussions about electronic publishing and copyright seem to be yet another instance of this problem. I'm concerned that we will all accept e- journals as _the_ solution. If it's electronic, it won't cost us. Yeah, right. As if Elsevier, Springer, Pergamon, et al will give up their profits without a fight. What about storage costs, equipment, printers, access, etc. Not to mention all those "poor" people in the social sciences and humanities who will be left in the lurch. Let's not forget that most of this technology is aimed at the well funded, glamorous hard sciences. Copyright is another issue. Recent discussion here makes it seem that if universities would "only" wrest copyright control away from the publisher and give it to the author, serials prices would drop and never increase again. All will be right with the world. Uh-huh. Speaking as an author, who hopes to one day get tenure, I don't want every professor, student, copy shop coming to me for permission to use my work (should it ever come to that). I have better things to do, and my publisher is equipped to handle this. On the other hand, I don't want them charging huge fees for my death- less prose. Students have better things to spend their money on, like food and shelter. There are many issues and forces at work here. I don't claim to understand all aspects of all, or even a few, of them. But as a _community_ of pub- lishers, scholars, librarians, authors, and vendors we can work things out. One finger in the dike won't stop the flood, only a concerted effort by all of us to repair the current system will help. Remember about 12 years ago there was this thing called Thor Power Tool. We were convinced that the end of book publishing would occur just because of this one ruling. Yet nothing much has happened. There were forces at work here we were unwilling to tackle as a group, and unwilling to understand as individuals. Let's learn from our past, there isn't _1_ issue or problem that will fix the current state of affairs, there are several which affect _all_ of us. It's not us versus them, it's US. 74.4 HAMAKER'S HAYMAKERS Chuck Hamaker, Louisiana State University, notcah@lsuvm.bitnet. The new 1991-92 ARL statistics are out, and they are not pleasant reading. Kendon Stubbs, in what has become his annual review of the stats, notes some striking numbers. For the ARL members, subscription costs for 1992 were 15.7 million dollars more than for 1991, but on the average each li- brary had 600 fewer subscriptions than the year before, or around 60,000 fewer serials among all ARL libraries. The libraries purchased some 100,000 fewer monographs than in 1991 but paid over $300,000 MORE for them. I have a been intrigued by another insight offered by Stubbs in his answer to Michael Boswood's Pergamon letter laying the "problem" in ARL libraries at the feet of insufficient funds for libraries from parent institutions. (Kendon Stubbs answered yes, but that HAS NOT slowed the growth in serials expenditures!) In his September, 1992 letter to ARL directors, Stubbs noted that ...In its Science and Engineering Indicators, 1991, the National Sci- ence Board displays a table showing that from 1981 to 1987 the number of US scientific and technical articles increased by only 2% while R&D expenditures in real dollars increased by 40%. That is, simply put, when Research and Development funding increases in the US there is NO evidence that article output has increased similarly. How- ever, journal PRICES increase at about the same rate as R&D! In tracking worldwide scientific article production, the National Science Board relies on ISI's database for _Science Citation Index_, which annually in its Journal Citation Report records the overall number of "source items" in the journals indexed. In the JCR section listing each journal, ISI re- cords the number of source items in each journal. At LSU we took a group of titles for which we had already put 1988 and 1983 prices and 1988 source items data into our own database. We updated (actu- ally I shouldn't say we, it was Natalie Palermo) to include 1983 source item counts for each title. When "we" were finished, there were 480 titles on which we had complete information for those two years. One third of the titles, 156, DECREASED in terms of number of source items published, and the decrease was over 18%! In the same six years, however, the price in- creased, for these titles, by 63%; i.e., the annual rate of increase in price averaged 8.4%, while the annual average for DECREASE in source items was -3.27%. For the other 324 titles source item production did increase, about 4.77% per year, while price increased at an annual rate of 11.32% per year. OVERALL, however, the effect was an annual average increase in source items of 2.77% a year, and an average price increase for the whole group of 10.6% a year. While growth rate for the group was UNDER 3% a year, the price increased about 90% over the six years. These numbers tell me that you can't win for losing if you are an academic library, and you can't lose for winning if you are a publisher -- EVEN IF YOUR TITLES ARE DECREASING IN PRODUCTIVITY! Library budgets are clearly being raided whether there is an increase in productivity and production or not. This price increase implies a doubling rate in price of 6 years. And this increase is destroying li- braries as culture's repository of the literate word. Clearly the solution for serials is not MORE MONEY for serials, it is more responsible actions by publishers. And common cents management by libraries. 74.5 FROM THE MAILBOX The mailbox is: tuttle@gibbs.oit.unc.edu. >From Peter Graham, Rutgers University Libraries, GRAHAM@zodiac.rutgers.edu: Mr Albert Henderson's lengthy reply prompts me to make two comments. First, he seems to be saying he is on the side of libraries and researchers as they try to get more research funding from University administrations. I hope we get few more such friends, whose hectoring and antagonistic tone won't be any better received by funding agencies (whether private or pub- lic) than by those whom he is attacking. Second, I once again want to ask a little more about Mr. Henderson; what is his experience based on, and what organization does he represent. Finally (yes, that's three), let me urge what ought in these sorts of dis- cussions to be obvious: the truth does not lie wholly on one side. In the discussion of journals pricing, for example, I have consistently seen those conducting the library side adjust their position to take into account real cost issues faced by publishers (for example). Mr. Henderson's advocacy is that of the lawyer rather than of the partisan: no point can be allowed as (he seems to believe) it would damage his case. The unwavering stance he takes makes it difficult for me, not as directly knowledgeable as I would like to be on these issues, to take him as a credible witness. ----- >From Toby Burrows, University of Western Australia, tburrows@uniwa.uwa.edu.au Greetings from one of your more distant readers! Several Australian libraries have been querying the latest instalment of Carswell's *Canadian Abridgment* publication: 12 bound volumes which cumu- late citations for 1876-1990. Our Law Library does not want this cumulative reprint of previously issued material, which is costing A$1900. But the Australian agent, Law Book Company, told us that we could not refuse these volumes without cancelling our subscription. This is a not uncommon ploy among legal publishers, especially with *definitive* series like this. Do law libraries in North America object to this practice? Our library paid A$6500 for 10 items in this series in 1992 and $5200 for 8 items in 1991. ----- >From Richard H. Werking, U.S. Naval Academy, q92148@n1.usna.navy.mil: Readers of this newsletter who are following the Pritchard/Henderson con- versation AND are keenly (at least) interested in investigating further the interplay of the ARL statistics, journal price increases, the CPI, librar- ies' doubling times, etc., might find it useful to look at my article in the January 1991 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES, "Collection Growth and Expenditures in Academic Libraries: A Preliminary Inquiry." Note #6 iden- tifies an ERIC document containing still more detail. ----- >From Jim Thompson, University of California, Riverside, THOMPSON@UCRAC1.UCR.EDU: I understand that Gordon & Breach continues to have setbacks in its litiga- tion against Professor Henry Barschall, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics. In its various suits filed in Switzer- land, Gordon & Breach had sought preliminary injunctions against Barschall and against APS and AIP. Both preliminary injunctions were denied and Gor- don & Breach appealed. The company pursued its effort to get a preliminary injunction against Barschall all the way to the Swiss Supreme Court, where, in January 1992, the three lower-court decisions against Gordon & Breach were upheld and the company was ordered to pay Barschall an indemnity of 4,000 Swiss Francs, in addition to the indemnities awarded by the lower courts. Now, another appeals court in Switzerland has upheld the denial of a pre- liminary injunction against APS and AIP, and ordered Gordon & Breach to pay an indemnity of 5,000 Swiss Francs to those organizations. The court also found that an affidavit submitted by Lewis Klein concerning the controver- sial FISC study -- Klein served as chair of the study -- did not deserve much weight because of Gordon & Breach's role in sponsoring the study and defining its parameters. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Statements of fact and opinion appearing in the _Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues_ are made on the responsibility of the authors alone, and do not imply the endorsement of the editor, the editorial board, or the Uni- versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Readers of the NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES are encouraged to share the information in the newsletter by electronic or paper methods. 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