Newsletter on Serial Pricing Issues 084 (June 19, 1993) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/nspi/nspi-ns084 ISSN: 1046-3410 NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES NO 84 -- June 19, 1993 Editor: Marcia Tuttle CONTENTS 84.1 COPYRIGHT TOPIC OF JOURNAL PRICES DISCUSSION GROUP AT ALA, Marcia Tuttle 84.2 CLARIFICATION OF KRUYTBOSCH CITATION BY HENDERSON IN NEWSLETTER 81, Kendon Stubbs 84.3 CONSUMERS, EXERCISE YOUR RIGHTS! David Salt 84.1 COPYRIGHT TOPIC OF JOURNAL PRICES DISCUSSION GROUP AT ALA Marcia Tuttle, UNC-Chapel Hill, tuttle@gibbs.oit.unc.edu and chair, ALA/ACRL Journal Prices in Academic Libraries Discussion Group. ALA/ACRL JOURNAL PRICES IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES DISCUSSION GROUP Saturday June 26, 2:00 - 4:00 pm New Orleans Convention Center, Room 91 ----- COPYRIGHT: THE TRLN DOCUMENT "UNIVERSITY POLICY REGARDING FACULTY PUBLICATION IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL SCHOLARLY JOURNALS" A joint committee of faculty, librarians, and university press editors from Duke University, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has drafted a model policy for author or university ownership of certain rights of publication. This proposal has generated heated debate among librarians, scholars, and journal publishers, both for and against the policy. Gary Byrd, Assistant Director for Finance and Planning, Health Sciences Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and chair of the committee responsible for the document, will discuss the reasons for the policy and the committee's expectations. Four panelists, each with a different perspective, will respond to Byrd: A LIBRARIAN: Paul Mosher, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, University of Pennsylvania A COMMERCIAL PUBLISHER: Eric Swanson, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. A SOCIETY PUBLISHER: A.F. Spilhaus, Executive Director, American Geophysical Society A SCIENTIST: Jack Timberlake, Department of Chemistry, University of New Orleans Following these brief presentations there will be a general discussion of the issue of author or university retention of copyright. The committee, represented by Byrd, is eager to receive your comments on the issues treat- ed in the policy. A revised version of the document, including an essay justifying the policy, is scheduled to appear in this newsletter next month. The current revision of the document appeared in Newsletter 46. It can be retrieved by sending a message to: listserv@gibbs.oit.unc.edu saying: get prices prices.46 84.2 CLARIFICATION OF KRUYTBOSCH CITATION BY HENDERSON IN NEWSLETTER 81 Kendon Stubbs, Acting University Librarian, University of Virginia Library NEWSLETTER 81 contained a note by Carlos Kruytbosch, Senior Specialist in S&T Indicators at the National Science Foundation, on a sentence taken from an unpublished memo that I wrote for the Association of Research Libraries last fall. The note questioned my use of data from Table 5-26 of NSF's SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS - 1991, and stated that I erred in claim- ing that the table showed a 2% growth in U.S. scientific and technical articles. Since Table 5-26 clearly indicates a 2% growth in U.S. articles, and since I had been aware that 5-26 was based on the ISI fixed set of journals, and since the subject of my memo, from which the peripheral sentence in ques- tion had been taken, was increasing expenditures for a constant or slightly decreasing set of serials in ARL libraries, I e-mailed Mr. Kruytbosch on 5/18 to ask for a clarification of his note. He replied on 5/25 that "Had I known the context my response would have been less testy, and I probably would have bothered to recalculate the 2% increase in US share of publica- tions in the fixed journal set and find that you were correct." And "It seems that these days much public debate consists of people addressing the unpublished remarks of others as quoted by still others." I asked him by e- mail if I could send his reply to the NEWSLETTER to correct his previous note. In reply, he sent a formal clarification of this "tempest in a tea- pot," leaving it to posterity, however, to decide the meaning of different interpretations of Table 5-26. Appended below are my message to Mr. Kruytbosch and his formal reply. ----- STUBBS TO KRUYTBOSCH, 5/18/93 ----------------------------- My attention has just been called to your note in Albert Henderson's "CLAR- IFICATION OF STUBBS CITATION BY HAMAKER IN NEWSLETTER 74" in the May 9 issue of the _Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues_. I am writing to ask your assistance in clarifying what seems to be a misunderstanding. As background, last fall Pergamon and Elsevier publishers distributed in- formation to a wide audience of scientists using data from Table 5-1 of SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS - 1991 to argue that research library expenditures had not kept pace with U.S. R & D expenditures, and that re- search libraries were therefore not being funded adequately for providing literature to the science and technology community. At the request of the Association of Research Libraries, as their consultant on library statis- tics, I prepared a memo and graph showing that the increasing expenditures for serials by the 100-some university library members of the ARL had in fact been keeping pace with the growth in total U.S. R & D. When regressed on U.S. R & D expenditures over time, ARL serials expenditures indeed show a remarkably high r-square. And the increase in expenditures for serials, paralleling that of R & D, has held true even though the numbers of serials in ARL libraries have been steady or declining slightly. That is, the seri- als in research libraries have been a kind of surrogate fixed set for some years. So even though the numbers of serials have varied by only a few percentage points, the expenditures for those serials have been rising at rates as high as those of R & D expenditures. As a peripheral comment in this memo, I made the statement quoted by Mr. Henderson, which I am now surprised to find has been detached from its context and made into a federal case (or more precisely, an NSF case). I was of course aware of and have myself used the ISI source of the 3,200 titles on which table 5-26 in the Indicators is based. Writing an unpub- lished memo for a general audience, I followed the imprecise wording of the title of table 5-26 in my sentence -- "U.S. and world scientific and tech- nical articles, by field: 1973-87." More substantively, since the context was a discussion of the "fixed set" of ARL serials in recent years, it seemed appropriate also to use the fixed set from table 5-26. (Incidental- ly, others who have referred to my sentence, such as Hamaker in Newsletter 74 and Okerson in the latest ARL Newsletter, have also been looking at increases in expenditures for a given set of journals.) I will be grateful if you will clarify one point on which your note says that I erred, namely in finding a 2% growth in U.S. articles in the fixed journal set of table 5-26. In the table subsection headed "Number of U.S. Articles" I used the data 132,278 for 1981 and 134,497 for 1987, and from those data calculated the 2% growth (actually, 1.7% before rounding) for U.S. articles between 1981 and 1987. The corresponding growth of world articles from the data under "Total number of articles" (368,934 in 1981 and 378,313 in 1987) is presumably 2.5%, or 3% rounded. Am I misunderstan- ding the table in drawing these conclusions? ----- KRUYTBOSCH TO STUBBS, 5/28/93: ------------------------------ Clarification of remarks on the growth of scientific literature Carlos Kruytbosch, National Science Foundation, 5/28/93 In a letter of 3/15/93, Mr. Albert Henderson requested my views on a quota- tion from Mr. Kendon Stubbs which was printed in an enclosed copy of NEWS- LETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES No.74, March 15, 1993. The quotation was characterized as from a letter from Kendon Stubbs to the directors of the Association of Research Libraries. It read as follows, "In its Science & Engineering Indicators, 1991, the National Science 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 ex- penditures in real dollars increased by 40%." On 3/19/93 I wrote back to Mr. Henderson expressing with some irritation that it was meaningless to compare total overall constant dollar increases in R&D expenditures with the increase in the number of articles in a FIXED JOURNAL SET of 3,200 journals, which does not represent the total increase in S&T literature. More articles within the same journal set means either that the size (page length) of journals is increasing and/or that the aver- age page length of articles is decreasing. Measuring the true growth of S&T literature (for an appropriate comparison with R&D expenditures) requires capturing all the new journals that mushroom every year, and no one has yet devised an accurate method for doing this. Further, in my letter, with more testiness than wisdom, I incorrectly stated that Mr. Stubbs had further erred by claiming that US scientific and technical articles had increased by 2% over the period, whereas this actually referred to "world" S&T arti- cles. Mr. Henderson published my letter to him in the May 9, 1993 issue of the NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS AND PRICING ISSUES, No.81. Mr.Stubbs asked for clarification of my remarks in an e-mail message to me on 5/18/93, in which he also explained the context of his original quota- tion and made clear that he was quite aware of the fact that this was a fixed journal set. He was especially concerned about my critique of the statement in the quotation concerning the 2% growth of US S&T literature during the period. Recalculating the numbers on percentage growth between 1981 and 1987, WITHIN THE FIXED JOURNAL SET, shows them to be: a) world (including US) article growth = 2.54%, (can be rounded up to 3%); and b) US article growth = 1.67%, (can be rounded up to 2%). Mr. Stubbs's statement was thus substantially correct. I leave it to posterity, however, to inter- pret the meaning of these differences. 84.3 CONSUMERS, EXERCISE YOUR RIGHTS! David Salt, University of Saskatchewan Library, salt@sklib.usask.ca. Regarding the firm price issue, why, oh why, do some of us keep making excuses for serials publishers exploiting us? When will we realise that we are CONSUMERS, and scholarly journals a prod- uct subject to the same forces as any other consumer product? In my opinion, certain commercial scholarly publishers have recognised suckers when they see them, and have been exploiting our blind consumerism for all that it is worth. They have seen that even while we librarians have begun realising that this merry-go-round must be changed, too many of us are still in thrall to the astronauts from another planet (faculty journal junkies), who have yet to realise the new reality of funding cuts. How many of the magazines you subscribe to personally, and aimed at the "regular" consumer, send you supplementary invoices well into the subscrip- tion period (even from other countries)? On the other hand, how many give you a SUBSTANTIAL discount if you renew before expiry of the current sub- scription? Don't use the excuse of small subscription numbers, or specialisation -- many of the magazines I am thinking of fall into the same category. Most such magazines are subject to the same vagaries of the market place that scholarly publishers and their apologists use to justify their pricing and invoicing practices for their products aimed at the academic market. While we are foolish enough to continue acquiescing to the publishers dic- tating the working of the market for their products, we deserve what we get. It is about time we started behaving like discriminating consumers, and hard-nosed business people, letting the producers know exactly what we want from a product, and on what terms, or no sale. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. We would appreciate credit if you quote from the newsletter. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES (ISSN: 1046-3410) is published by the editor through the Office of Information Technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as news is available. Editor: Marcia Tuttle, Internet: tuttle@gibbs.oit.unc.edu; Paper mail: Serials Department, CB #3938 Davis Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC 27599-3938; Telephone: 919 962-1067; FAX: 919 962-0484. Editorial Board: Deana Astle (Clemson University), Jerry Curtis (Springer Verlag New York), Janet Fisher (MIT Press), Charles Hamaker (Louisiana State Universi- ty), Daniel Jones (University of Texas Health Science Center), James Mouw (University of Chicago), and Heather Steele (Blackwell's Periodicals Divi- sion). The Newsletter is available on the Internet, Blackwell's CONNECT. and Readmore's ROSS. EBSCO customers may receive the Newsletter in paper format from these companies. Back issues of the Newsletter are available electronically. To get a list of available issues send a message to LISTSERV@GIBBS.OIT.UNC.EDU saying INDEX PRICES. To retrieve a specific issue, the message should read: GET PRICES PRICES.xx (where "xx" is the number of the issue). To subscribe to the newsletter, send a message to LISTSERV@GIBBS.OIT.UNC.EDU saying SUBSCRIBE PRICES [YOUR NAME]. Be sure to send that message to the listserv- er and not to Prices. You must include your name. To unsubscribe (no name required in message), you must send the message from the e-mail address by which you are subscribed. If you have problems, please contact the editor. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ *****ENDOFFILE*****ENDOFFILE*****ENDOFFILE*****ENDOFFILE*****ENDOFFILE*****