PRESENT: Martha Bayless, Mark Blaine, Deb Carver, Grant Castner, Julie
Hessler, Chris Jones, Andrew Marcus, John Miller, Gina Psaki, Lee
Roth, Ray Weldon, Michal Young
ABSENT: Val Burris
University Librarian Deb Carver convened the meeting. Deb extended a welcome to everyone; introductions followed.
MATERIALS BUDGET UPDATE
Deb provided an overview of the library’s materials budget. The library
has received two permanent increases, a budget correction for the campus
and inflationary factors built in by OUS during the last session. The beginning
materials budget for 05/06 is $5.7 million, compared to $4.9 million last
year, which includes a $712,000 carry forward from recent cancellations.
This augment will help to postpone future serial cancellations, restore
some of the cuts to fund lines, and fund several new electronic resources. The
library currently has online the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Smithsonian
Global Sound, Anthrosource, and BioOne. We will be getting
access in the near future to ArtStor, Jstor Arts and Sciences
III collection, Database of American Recorded Music,among
others.
Deb added that for serials, the library’s costs have doubled over
the last twelve years, resulting in approximately 3,500 titles being cut. On
the average, monograph prices inflate 3-4% each year.
ACCREDITATION PROCESS UPDATE
The UO is preparing for its accreditation process and the chairs of the
Accreditation Steering Committee – Joanna Gray and Dave Hubin – attended
the meeting to give a brief overview of the process. Standard 5
of the accreditation process focuses on library resources and services.
The process will not be using the standard accreditation template, but
rather will be doing a narrative self-study on a set of issues. The
Accreditation Team is asking campus groups to put together a list of
challenges facing the campus. The accreditation team will then formulate
a set of overall campus issues to focus on. The Steering Committee
will revisit the various campus groups in the spring to report on their
progress.
SENATE RESOLUTION/BERGSTROM & MCAFEE OPEN LETTER
The committee received a copy of an open letter sent to university presidents
and provosts concerning journal costs. The letter, authored by T. Bergstrom
and K. Preston-McAfee, recommended two policy changes for recovering
overhead associated with journal publishing and pressuring commercial
publishers to unbundled products. This background led to a discussion
of what the ULC can do to keep campus attention focused on this issue.
On March 14, 2001, Gina Psaki, as chair of the ULC, issued a report to the UO Senate asking for their endorsement of a proposal, Crisis in commercial scholarly publishing and serials costs. That letter/proposal can be viewed at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~libcom/dir00/ulcmemo.fin.html Pasted below are the minutes from that Senate meeting and also from the April Senate meeting, in which the resolution was passed.
University Library Committee Report. The University Library Committee, chaired by Gina Psaki, romance languages, has developed a written report for the senate (see report on the web at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~uosenate/dirsen001/LibComRpt14Feb01.html) regarding the library committee’s concern over the crisis in commercial scholarly publishing and serials costs. The report describes this crisis, lays out some possible local and national approaches to dealing with the crisis, and requests that the UO Senate address the recommendations made.
The rapidly rising costs problem is complex, prompting extensive research and discussion by the research library community and university faculties. Initiatives such as Open Archives, SPARC and Create Change are aimed at reconfiguring the way scholarly research is disseminated and acknowledged. (An appendix to the report contains links to web page URLs and a bibliography of documentation and further information on this issue.) During the past decade, due largely to the commercialization of scholarly publishing, journal subscriptions costs have increased at an average of 9-11% per year, forcing the UO faculty to identify journal titles to cancel. As a result, 14% of our titles -- $850,000 or 2,400 titles – have been cut since 1992. These decreases are two-and-a half times the average of research libraries nationwide, indicating an acute situation at the UO that must be addressed.
The new budget model does not dedicate an increase to cover the costs of inflation in books and journals. The serials inflation rate is approximately 8.5%. Even if we assume an annual budget increase of 4-5%, another round of cancellations of about $400,000 will be needed in 2003-2004.
One way to address the problem is not just at the point of purchase but rather at the point of generation of the research. Universities are subsidizing and producing research but then must purchase the same research at absurdly inflated prices. The library community is beginning to respond with a variety of approaches aimed at reforming the entire system of scholarly publishing. Ms. Psaki referred the senators to a list of five recommendations in the committee’s report, and asked for further discussion in the senate and action on the recommendations after they have been reviewed.
When questions were invited Senator Jim Schombert, physics, requested a listing of the cost of journals. Acting Head Librarian Deb Carver responded that the library is in the process of putting together a database of all the journals. Also, by retaining copyrights, there is an attempt to have some control of our intellectual material and possibly not have to purchase the material.
Vice President Nathan Tublitz, biology, stated that there is a grassroots effort in progress asking that all scientific publications release material on the web. This movement has gained so much strength that it is the cause of a major discussion in large publishing houses. Senator Tom Wheeler, journalism and communication, remarked that faculty are being encouraged to disassociate themselves from publishing companies with unethical pricing structures. He asked if there are other aspects to pricing structure that might render a pricing structure unethical. Ms. Carver responded that she describes unethical pricing structures as something that involves inflationary increases of 15-20% every year. There are other questionable practices that do not necessarily involve pricing, but involve access and ability to share information.
With no other comments or questions regarding the report, the President Earl thanked Ms. Psaki for the report and moved on to new business.
Resolution US00/01-5 -- Rising costs of scholarly journals and retention of copyright. Gina Psaki, romance languages and chair of the University Library Committee, presented the resolution which resulted from the recommendations made in a report from the library committee at the previous senate meeting. The resolution reads as follows:
A. Adopt a university-wide policy that all UO
authors try, to the best of their ability, to retain copyright on their
own work, including at the very minimum the right to:
1) distribute copies of their work to classes
and to individual scientists;
2) publish their work on their own web sites;
and
3) post their work on a local UO archive.
B. Immediately identify high-cost duplicate titles among the three research libraries in OUS and establish target amounts for cancellation, in areas in which cancellation would not harm present faculty research, with the ultimate goal of substantially reducing duplication.
C. Educate individual faculty and graduate
students to:
1) retain copyright on scholarly articles,
2) discover the pricing practices of journals
with whom they collaborate (as reviewer, as editorial board member, as
author),
3) disassociate from those with unethical
pricing structures,
4) lobby professional societies to put pressure
on Elsevier and other publishers of inordinately costly publications, and
work collaboratively with efforts such as SPARC in the development of lower-cost
alternative publications, and
5) encourage professional societies, where
applicable, to assume more responsibility for publishing in their field.
D. Begin a campus discussion about adopting the “Tempe Principles,” the Emerging Principles of Scholarly Publishing recently developed with the support of the AAU and the Association of Research Libraries. The principles provide a foundation for specific actions, such as those outlined above. By adopting these guiding principles, the UO would become part of a national effort to define new systems of scholarly publishing.
E. Ensure that promotion-and-tenure evaluation criteria favor this effort, by holding faculty harmless for declining to publish in journals with pricing structures detrimental to the free circulation of ideas.
During the ensuing discussion, President Earl pointed out that the proposed resolution is not legislation, but rather a resolution outlining ways to begin attacking the problem of rapidly escalating prices for scholarly journals delineated in the library committee report (see http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~uosenate/dirsen001/LibComRpt14Feb01.html).
There was a brief discussion about the price per page for a particular publisher and concern that canceling duplicate journal titles might be disadvantageous in some instances. Acting Head Librarian Deb Carver indicated that the library is continually striving to improve document delivery, utilizing other methods, such as fax, so that no one is disadvantaged. She also said the policy can be reviewed. Senator Maury Holland, law, questioned the definition of “unethical pricing”, wondering that referred only to high cost. Nevertheless, the sentiments expressed were generally that the proposed resolution provided reasonable suggestions for responding to increasingly unaffordable scholarly materials costs.
The question was called. Resolution US00/01-5 concerning the rising costs of scholarly journals and retention of copyright was approved by voice vote.
**********************************************************************
No further action has been taken since those meetings. What steps should
the ULC take this year to continue moving forward on the resolution?
The Bergstrom/McAfee “open letter” http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mcafee/Journal/OpenLetter.pdf takes more aggressive steps in dealing with rising costs of scholarly journals – recommending that that universities discourage the purchase of expensive journals and that universities recover costs associated with editing journals. There has not been a great deal of action as a result of the “open letter” but universities have started having conversations on how to approach the rising costs of journals.
The committee was interested in the rate increase of periodical prices over the last several years. The library sees an average of 8-10% increase overall (profit and nonprofit). Generally speaking, science journals have a higher inflation rate. An article that gives the history of periodical prices over a five-year period can be found at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA516819.html “Choosing Sides--Periodical Price Survey 2005.”
Referring to what the ULC might do this year in response to the Senate resolution, Gina reported that the campus has not addressed section E from the April 11, 2001 Senate meeting.
It is important to evaluate scholarship rather than the publisher. Other suggestions:
A subcommittee was appointed to begin discussing the possibility of the ULC putting together a new Senate resolution to address this issue. The committee consists of Gina Psaki, Michal Young, Andrew Marcus, and Julie Hessler. Faye Chadwell will serve as the library liaison.
ACQUISITIONS UPDATE
Faye Chadwell, Head of Collection Development and Acquisition provided
the following update:
Elsevier: In 04-05, in order to avoid future serial cancellations, the library sought to manage its remaining journal holdings more wisely, focusing on titles published by Reed Elsevier. In order for the library to maintain heavily used journals, core Elsevier titles were moved to e-only and made available on ScienceDirect platform. These subscription costs amount to approximately $400,000. Nearly $500,000 in Elsevier subscriptions were cancelled and moved to pay per view (PPV), which then opened up unmediated PPV, or document delivery, to all Elsevier titles available on ScienceDirect.
We estimate that PPV could cost the library close to $260,000/year. This
is half of what the library had been spending on subscriptions, plus users
are getting access to more information delivered to their desktops. This
access does include pre-2000 subscription titles. The library has
put together a working group to determine whether there would be any cost
savings with the library delivering articles from our shelves rather than
through the PPV environment.
Orbis Cascade Deal: Faye reported there is a new deal through
Orbis Cascade Alliance over the next three years, beginning January 2006. The
UO keeps important titles on e-only subscriptions with archival rights
back to 2000. The new deal’s archive access goes back to 1995.
Also, if the library opts to stop subscribing, it will still maintain
access to those titles from 1995 through the last year of the subscription. Since
they are subscriptions, they come with ILL rights.
Shared Title List: UO, OSU, and PSU have access to a shared list of approximately 880 ScienceDirect titles ($1.7 million value). Each library will pay $35,000-$40,000. This group purchase allows access to articles from 1995 to the present, with ILL rights.
Pay Per View: For content not included in the above, article downloads will cost $22 per article with the same unlimited online access to the article for 24 hours. Our PPV costs will decrease significantly.
WINTER TERM MEETINGS
Two meetings during winter term will be scheduled. [dates are January 27
and March 10]
Submitted by
Sheila Gray