David Ferriero: Four Publishing Changes Facing Libraries
The University Librarian discusses some trends in scholarly publishing that is putting pressure on university libraries
Thursday, April 17, 2003
The following excerpt was taken from an April 14 talk on "Scholarly Publishing: Emerging Approaches to an Expanding Crisis," held at the Franklin Center.
The research library's role in the scholarly communication process has been to acquire, organize and provide access to primary resources and new materials and to preserve them for future generations of scholars. Four major changes have taken place in the environment in which we now find ourselves:
High costs for print journals and books
Research libraries in the United States spent 210 percent more to purchase 5 percent fewer journal titles in 2001 than in 1986. While the consumer price index rose 62 percent during the same period, the cost of journals rose 215 percent. A little closer to home, here at Duke we have spent 258 percent more to purchase 38 percent more journal titles in this period.
Journals have gone up in price by an average of 9 percent a year since 1986, while the consumer price index has increased only 3.4 percent a year.
The major players in science technology and medical journal publishing are commercial publishers who consistently report high profit margins.
Research libraries in the United States are purchasing 9 percent fewer monographs today than they did in 1986 due to the high journal prices and resources in electronic formats. At Duke, the shift away from monographs has been less severe. We have actually acquired 8 percent more monographs since 1986.
High costs of electronic publishing
Electronic publication offers the opportunity of greatly improved access to information, with the ability to search and manipulate information far more flexibly than in the print environment. However, electronic information is not free. Commercial publishers often charge as much or more for electronic publications as for print counterparts, penalize us in pricing if we cancel print equivalents and provide inconsistent pricing models across institutions and groups of institutions.
Delivering electronic publications to the campus depends upon a robust and regularly refreshed technology infrastructure. High speed printing is an example of a cost that might get overlooked in examining the costs associated with electronic publishing.
Almost all of the electronic resources available here at Duke and at our peer institutions are governed by licenses that often restrict how the community can use the content and prevent or severely limit the ability of libraries to share journal articles and other such information through interlibrary loan.
Finally, we are all concerned about the long-term preservation and archiving issues raised by electronic media. Publishers have traditionally looked to libraries for the preservation and archiving responsibility. In the electronic publishing world, the roles of the players are being sorted out anew.
Loss of control in the marketplace
Commercial journal publishers are expanding their market control through acquisitions, mergers and the purchase of individual titles from learned societies. Societies sometimes sell their titles to commercial publishers, who capitalize the expansion of the journal through significant increases in the subscription price to libraries.
As you have heard, university presses reject quality manuscripts with limited market potential because they cannot recover their costs. And subsidies from granting agencies and universities for publishing in the humanities have virtually disappeared in the last 15 years.
Loss of control through copyright
Copyright transfer agreements often require you to transfer exclusively all of your copyrights to the publishers, thereby losing control of any subsequent public distribution of your research. Copyright restrictions may limit personal distribution for teaching and research purposes (as on your personal Web site) or restrict posting on publicly available Web archives.
Furthermore, current legislation and proposed changes supported by some commercial publishers seeks to restrict access to electronic information even more severely.
David Ferriero is university librarian and vice provost for library affairs.
