“Open Horizon”for transforming scholarly

communication in engineering

Presentation by Kenneth FrazierLibrary Director, University of Wisconsin-Madison

IATUL 23rd Annual ConferenceJune 3, 2002

Unsustainable Costs and Monopoly Markets

• Journal costs continue increasing at 8% annually

• More consolidation in the information marketplace

• Most databases owned by big journal publishers

• Public universities cannot afford rising costs

Percent Increase in Prices1996-2000, Selected Subjects

Military & Naval Sci74.5%

Business & Econ 56.9%

Sociology 49.5%

Technology 49.1%

Engineering 48.9%

Political Science 46.9%

Education 45.0%

Health Sciences 44.3%

Biology 44.1%

Psychology 43.8%

Library Journal

Chemistry 39.4%Physics 35.8%

Math & Comp Sci 35.6%

Anthropology 34.9%

Law 31.2%

History 25.2%

Music 23.7%

Philosophy & Religion 21.2%

Language & Lit 16.9%

Art & Architecture 7.8%

High Cost Scientific Journals

1995 2001 % Change

Brain Research $10,181 $17,444 71.3%

Biochim. Biophys. Acta $7,555 $12,127 60.5%

Chem. Phys. Letters $5,279 $9,637 82.6%

Tetrahedron Letters $5,119 $9,036 76.5%

Eur. Jrnl. of Pharmacology $4,576 $7,889 72.4%

Gene $3,924 $7,443 89.7%

Inorganica Chim. Acta $3,611 $6,726 86.3%

Intl. Jrnl. of Pharmaceutics $3,006 $5,965 98.4%

Neuroscience $3,487 $6,270 79.8%

Nothing can explain the high cost of journals…

Chemical Physics Letters $ .83/page

Tetrahedron Letters $ .95/page

Colloid and Polymer Science $1.42/page

Biophysical Chemistry $3.32/page

Progress in Solid State Chemistry$4.46/page

…except the fact that librarians will pay it.

Journal of Biological Chemistry $ .04/page

Journal of Organic Chemistry $ .14/page

Applied Spectroscopy $ .24/page

Chemistry Letters $ .30/page

Nucleic Acids Research $ .36/page

Cost of Library Materials1986 - 2000

Cost of Journals +226%

Cost of Books +66%Consumer Price Index +57%

Oxford University Pressfine publishing at twenty-five cents per

page

Persistent Value of Print Publishing

• Books still preferred for sustained reading

• Unplanned obsolescence of electronic devices

• Here today/gone tomorrow content on Internet

• Worldwide growth print publishing

• Extremely high costs for commercial digital products

“The Librarians Dilemma”D-Lib, March 2001

Case Against the Big Deal

• Easy to get in – hard to get out

• Librarians lose power to shape market by selection

• Publishers win market share and market power

• Libraries accepting licensing terms that forbid knowledge transfer to public

Libraries the Big Deal    

    New financial support from institutions and government

•  End adversarial relationship with commercial publishers  

• Expand electronic access to valuable journals  

• Strongly supported by faculty

“Hostages of the Big Deal”The 21st Charleston Conference: October 2001

The Stockholm Syndrome Strikes Librarians

Hostages of the Big Deal• Defending costs that exceed budget growth

• Cutting back on low-cost, high-use content

• Apologists for onerous licensing terms

• Giving up responsibility for collection management

• Trading diverse print collections for uniform commercial databases

Dubious Claims and Strange Statistics

• Newly available titles more heavily used than titles formerly subscribed to in print (OhioLink)

• All Big Deal titles have significant online use

• Big Deal lowers cost per use for e-content

• Use of Big Deal content is dramatically increasing

NERL Usage Data challenge

Big Deal claims

• 25 subscribing NERL Libraries

• 173 AP IDEAL journals & 30 archival titles

• Harcourt Health Science journals excluded

courtesy of Phil Davis, Cornell University Library, and NERL

Major differences in e-journal usage

• Usage patterns vary in different institution

• Usage patterns tightly grouped by type of institution

• No institution used every title

• Some titles used heavily

• Many titles used infrequently

NERL data confirm value of selection and collection

management

• Use of title ten times higher when library owned subscription

• Small portion of titles accounted for majority of uses

• High-use titles are the “usual suspects”

Consistent patterns of use

• 1 title contributed 15% of total use

• 11 titles (6%) contributed 50% of total use

• 48 titles (28%) contributed 80% of total use

• 80 titles (46%) contributed 90% of total use

• 108 titles (62%) contributed 95% of total use

Journal TitleNo. full-text downloads

No. Print Subs

Cumulative % Use

Journal of Molecular Biology 32629 19 15%

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications 19242 20 24%

Developmental Biology 13208 22 30%

Experimental Cell Research 8807 19 34%

Genomics 6666 14 37%

Analytical Biochemistry 6455 20 40%

Virology 6150 19 43%

Methods: A Companion to Methods in Enzymology 4163 12 45%

Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics 4006 20 47%

NeuroImage 3953 2 48%

Journal of Magnetic Resonance 3842 15 50%

How Individual Institutions Use the Collection

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0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180

Number of Journals

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Faced with long-term limits in budget growth, the University of Wisconsin Libraries adopted a new

strategy:• Aggressively cut high-cost commercial journals

• Provide high-speed document delivery to researchers and faculty

• Reward quality non-profit publishers

• Support new forms of scholarly communication

• Assess services and collections to understand what users really want and need

We discovered that many students derive little benefit from journal

databases• Students “choking” on the array of database

choices

• NERL data show “randomness” in undergraduate usage of Big Deal databases

• Good case can be made that students don’t know how to use full-text and bibliographic databases

• More & more students prefer to go to the Web

Engineering information users

• Never were traditional academic library users• Welcome scholarly communication alternatives • Accustomed to working in a team environment• Responding positively to information outreach

service• Prefer desk-top article delivery to old library

models• Tough-minded appreciation of need to change

system design for disseminating knowledge

Wendt Library: Leading change in the UW campus library

system• Piloted campus model for document delivery• Cut high-cost journals—add low-cost content• Successful outreach to faculty and students• Major contributor to digital library program• Innovative service model strongly supported by

the College of Engineering administration

Active partnership for radical change in engineering library• Cancelled 80 journals in 2001 (58 Elsevier titles)• $127 total ($100,000 Elsevier)• Unanimously supported by faculty library

committee• Full understanding and support of college deans• High-speed document delivery cost effective• Sustainable costs for articles and royalty payments• Cuts create “local deflation”— expanding purchase

of society and non-profit publications

Building the infrastructure for digital research library collections

• Provide digital storage & access for academic content

• Logical extension of the research library mission

• Platform for changing scholarly communication

• Financially within the reach for most libraries

Budapest Open Access Initiativehttp://www.soros.org/openacces

s/• Supported by $3 million from George

Soros’s Open Society Institute• Provide scholars with “tools and

assistance” of “self-archiving”• Launch scholar-led alternative models

of publishing on the Internet• Libraries provide reliable institutional

repositories for open-access

Understanding BOAI goals:

• Not proposing boycott of publishers

• Not saying all publishing can be “free”

• Not demanding copyright reform • Not suggesting mandatory use of

open-access publishing by academic authors

What is meant by “free?”

“We mean free for readers, not free for producers. We know that open-access literature is not free to produce. But that does not foreclose the possibility of making it free of charge for readers and users. The costs of producing open-access literature are much lower than the costs of producing print literature or toll-access online literature.”

from the BOAI FAQ

Which literature?

"The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment. Primarily, this category encompasses their peer-reviewed journal articles, but it also includes any unreviewed preprints that they might wish to put online for comment or to alert colleagues to important research findings."

Goals of library digital repository

• Secure archive for university digital content• More affordable method of sharing content • Collaboration with faculty to improve teaching• Promote alternatives to high-cost publications• Outreach to external constituencies (for us,

citizens and public schools)

Collaboration with Faculty

Access to Institutional History

Affordable new models of publishing

Outreach to Public Schools

Resources for Better Teaching

New Roles for Libraries• Create the repository for digital content • Collaborate with creators of knowledge• Expand access to primary research sources• Integrate research and teaching content

What university leaders must do

• Recognize and reward e-scholarship by faculty

• Publicly announce the end of the status quo for scholarly communication

• Provide institutional infrastructure for digital open-access publishing and archiving

What authors can do

– Publish anywhere you want, but…– Negotiate limited transfer of

copyrights – Demand rights for personal use– Post articles on the Web (no matter

what the license says)

“Online or Invisible?” by Steve Lawrencehttp://external.nj.nec.com/~lawrence/

What Librarians can do

• Liberate yourself from fund-raising for high-cost journals—it feels so good!

• Faithfully support low-cost publishers• Encourage “self-archiving” by authors• Build a digital repository in your library

(it’s not too soon or too late—start now)

Sense of danger must not disappear

The way is certainly both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you want but you will have to leap.

W.H. Auden; Leap Before You Look