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The challenge of managing journal collections
Libmty Acquisitions: Pmctice & Theoty, Vol. 14,pp. 127-130,1990 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
0364-6408/!30 $3.00 + .OO Copyright 0 1590 Pergamon Press plc
PUBLISH OR PERISH: THE FUTURE OF JOURNAL COLLECTIONS IN LIBRARIES
THE CHALLENGE OF MANAGING JOURNAL COLLECTIONS JERRY D. CAMPBELL University Librarian Perkins Library Duke University Durham, NC 27706
I have the bad luck of writing on a topic that requires me to begin with a confession of a certain degree of failure. It is not a confession in which I stand alone, but a corporate confession on behalf of our profession. We have not exactly managed our journal collections well, if by manage we mean to have maintained some larger understanding of what has been going on with journal publications and by virtue of that understanding to have influenced those publications in a way which served the best interests of scholarship, libraries, and educational institutions. We have, rather, been late in our analysis and understanding and correspondingly marginal in our efforts to have a salubrious effect on journal publishing, particularly the publishing of journals by commercial agencies and the generally perceived declining quality of journal articles brought about by intense pressures for faculty members to publish. We are, I am pleased to say, rectifying the matter of inadequate understanding of the larger situation surrounding journal publications. We have many individual libraries and librarians to thank for that as well as our various library associations and their subgroups. I call your attention to one of the latest analyses of the problem. This is an excellent study conducted by the Association of Research Libraries entitled Report of the ARL Serials Prices Project (ARL: Washington, D.C., May 1989). The heart of that report is two studies, one being “A Study of Trends in Average Prices and Costs of Certain Serials over Time” conducted by an independent corporation, Economic Consulting Services, Inc., and the other being an exceedingly perceptive study of the many complex factors that have given rise to the current situation with regard to journal and other serial prices. I commend this report to you. Our growing understanding aside, there are some things that we simply do not manage. Journals have become and are presently the key medium in the advance of science and technology. We have been made acutely aware of the increasing rapidity of the advance of human knowledge in these areas. Even if we were to cure the problems of quality control, multiple 127
128
J. D. CAMPBELL
authorship, and so forth, appropriately chronicling the advance of knowledge would still be overwhelming. We cannot manage, certainly not control, the rate at which human knowledge is expanding. In practical terms for journals, this means that we cannot reasonably expect to curtail entirely the expansion in the number of pages printed annually, nor can we prevent the continuation of the phenomenon we have come to call stemming. These are more readily determined by the discovery of new branches of knowledge, by interdisciplinary endeavors, and by increases in the number of scientists. And so, I think that we must anticipate continued growth in the number and size of journal publications. We have also had little success in managing the costs of journal subscriptions. We have been in, so to speak, a journal seller’s market, with publishers being virtually unrestrained at naming their prices. The resulting, egregious pricing policies of certain commercial publishers is now thoroughly and well documented. I refer you again to the ARL report. The intersection of these two areas basically outside of our control-growth in human learning and predatory pricing policies-creates the context within which we presently endeavor to manage our journal collections. The outcome is somewhat ironic. We find ourselves building proportionally shrinking knowledge bases for an expanding universe of knowledge. The benchmarks of our efforts to manage journal collections in this context are familiar to all of us: -We have reaffirmed our century-old commitment to interlibrary cooperation. In this regard we have sought new and creative ways of sharing journal material within legal parameters. We coined the now familiar phrase, document delivery, and made it a part of everyday library existence. Fax machines are rapidly becoming standard equipment in libraries. -We have, often successfully, urged our constituencies to provide new funds in order to maintain status quo journal collections. -We have also reprioritized our libraries’ budgetary commitments. In this regard, we have most often reassigned monies from monographic expenditures to journal subscriptions. -And we have pruned and refined our journal subscriptions. Most often we have cancelled larger numbers of low to moderate cost journals rather than the few high cost and highly visible journals. -Finally, to reiterate my opening comment, perhaps the most useful thing that we have done, individually and collectively, to manage our journal collections thus far is to begin to ascertain just what has been going on to cause such problems. While these activities may seem rather more like coping than managing, they have helped us considerably in the short run. Because of these activities, the subscriptions that we have maintained are the most refined and justifiable group of journal titles that we have held in years. They have caused us to think afresh about what manner of documentation is really essential in order for the process of research to continue and the history of the growth of knowledge to be chronicled. And they have focused the attention of the academic community on the unfortunate aspects of a generation of publish or perish policies. Not least it may be said that in the short run such activities have allowed study and research to continue without debilitating consequences.
The Challenge of Managing Journal Cqllections
129
All of these management practices, however, are insufficient to solve our problems in the long run. Those aspects of journal publishing which we cannot control-namely, rapid growth and predatory pricing-do pose long-term threats. Excessive costs for library resources combined with high costs of facilities, laboratories, and so on are beginning to test the financial viability of our institutions. Similarly, the volume of published materials prompts us to ask how we will afford to bring it under bibliographic control with present practices and how we will afford to store it in perpetuity. And these questions, in turn, suggest that the real longterm threat is to the scholarly process itself and to the dissemination of scholarly knowledge. We may postulate that if technology has recently facilitated the acceleration in the growth of knowledge, it should also have provided some new means for librarians to deal with it. This, however, has not been precisely the case. Technology has more quickly been adopted to the production of knowledge than to its storage and retrieval by libraries. The reasons for this are at least twofold. On the one hand, libraries do not have a tradition of maintaining positions for research personnel. Those who develop new technology and technological applications more commonly are found in industry or on university faculties. Consequently, if they develop new technology or applications suitable for library needs, neither they nor librarians are likely to be aware of it. Technological solutions for effective storage and retrieval of information, therefore, have been slow in coming. On the other hand, because of the well-known and typical restrictions of current copyright law, we have been legally restricted from moving quickly into electronic solutions to the storage and retrieval of journals. Together, these two major obstacles have proven insurmountable. There is, however, some hope on the horizon. And it is hope not only with regard to advancing electronic solutions to the control of burgeoning numbers of scientific journal publications, but hope as well for managing if not controlling what have recently been runaway subscription costs. We have, as you are aware, looked diligently for some reasonable means to restore costeffective access to journal literature. It has been a frustrating search. To qualify as a reasonable means, any course of action must meet some difficult criteria. It must save us more money than it costs; it must be powerful enough to alter the corporate policy of commercial publishers; it must be simple enough to be put into practice widely and quickly; and, of course, it must be legal. Our proposed solutions have consistently failed one or more of these measures. We do, however, have one clear course of action that meets each and every one, and it is the key to regaining management control of our journal literature. What I have in mind may be most simply described as university copyright policy. The first purpose of a university copyright policy will be to claim that which has always existed but has heretofore gone unclaimed, namely, a university’s rightful ownership interest in the intellectual property produced by its faculty. Such ownership interest exists because faculty authors most often compose their works while on full or part salary, or through use of university resources, facilities, laboratories, equipment and support staff, or a combination of these. Universities have, of course, long since taken such action with regard to the intellectual property represented by inventions. As a consequence, university patent policies are commonplace. Why? We were aware from the outset that the financial stakes in patentable, marketable inventions by university faculty were sufficiently high to warrant protecting rightful university interests. Thus policies were developed which, incidentally, protected faculty members as well. Such policies typically are reinforced by legal staff, and often, by staff devoted to working with potential corporate partners in the customary steps of arranging nondisclosure agreements and, eventually, licensing the rights to market the product. A happy
130
J. D. CAMPBELL
result is that not only are university interests established, but faculty also have much better guidance and much larger financial rewards as their inventions are brought to market. Copyright policies certainly are not new and have been considered in the past. As far as I can ascertain, the reason they have not been put into place is simply that the incentives were i~~~~ent. Little was to be gained. Royalties to authors of academic works have always been comparatively small, and universities have chosen to allow what little accrues to be returned to faculty authors as rewards for their intellectual productivity. There is no reason, in my opinion, to change this arrangement. The incentive to adopt university copyright policies, however, has changed. The cost of some journals in particular has reached a sufficient magnitude to suggest that our best interests would now be served by adopting copyright policies. I suspect that I am also safe in saying that the chief executive officers of our universities are sufficiently aggravated over the so-called “serials crisis” that they will undertake this action with some satisfaction. While we are only now working out the parameters for university copyright policies, I can suggest that they may be rather more simple than complex. They might, for instance, require that publishers hold educational institutions blameless for any and all uses of journal materials. They will prohibit faculty authors from giving away total copyright ownership. As an alternative, they will probably allow the consig~ng of specific rights only, like the right to print on paper, or the right to print on paper in one edition only. All other rights, including the rights to the work in electronic form, would be explicitly retained by the author. Best of all, there would be absolutely no need even to consider altering current copyright law. Faculty member have needed such protection for some time. We have, unfortunately, let them unwisely relinquish all their rights to their own work in the past. Whatever final form copyright policies take, I think that the approach is sufficiently simple and com~l~ng that it can be in place in North American u~versiti~ in a very short time. With any luck, it will encompass virtually every academic author on this continent. This is to say that publishers will be compelled to agree to terms if they wish to continue publishing. The most significant benefits of this approach lie precisely in the context of managing our journals. On the one hand, I anticipate that the advent of university copyright policies will provide for a new and more cost-effective publishing environment. It will do this primarily by supplying us with a much needed momentum for alternate publis~n~ ventures, some of these, as has been widely advocated, from within universities themselves. On the other hand, it will give us the legal right to experiment with the electronic exchange of scholarly knowledge and to begin in earnest what will be the next generation in storage, retrieval, and exchange of information. This it will accomplish by refraining from consigning ownership of the electronic records to commercial interests. While we will continue to purchase access to now existing records only at great price, we can achieve cost-effective and virtually unlimited access to info~ation produced in the age of university copyright policy. Even though we may not expect to manage the great outpouring of human learning, we may certainly expect to manage the form and the cost of our access to it. And I believe that we have now found the proper management tool.
0364-6408/!30 $3.00 + .OO Copyright 0 1590 Pergamon Press plc
PUBLISH OR PERISH: THE FUTURE OF JOURNAL COLLECTIONS IN LIBRARIES
THE CHALLENGE OF MANAGING JOURNAL COLLECTIONS JERRY D. CAMPBELL University Librarian Perkins Library Duke University Durham, NC 27706
I have the bad luck of writing on a topic that requires me to begin with a confession of a certain degree of failure. It is not a confession in which I stand alone, but a corporate confession on behalf of our profession. We have not exactly managed our journal collections well, if by manage we mean to have maintained some larger understanding of what has been going on with journal publications and by virtue of that understanding to have influenced those publications in a way which served the best interests of scholarship, libraries, and educational institutions. We have, rather, been late in our analysis and understanding and correspondingly marginal in our efforts to have a salubrious effect on journal publishing, particularly the publishing of journals by commercial agencies and the generally perceived declining quality of journal articles brought about by intense pressures for faculty members to publish. We are, I am pleased to say, rectifying the matter of inadequate understanding of the larger situation surrounding journal publications. We have many individual libraries and librarians to thank for that as well as our various library associations and their subgroups. I call your attention to one of the latest analyses of the problem. This is an excellent study conducted by the Association of Research Libraries entitled Report of the ARL Serials Prices Project (ARL: Washington, D.C., May 1989). The heart of that report is two studies, one being “A Study of Trends in Average Prices and Costs of Certain Serials over Time” conducted by an independent corporation, Economic Consulting Services, Inc., and the other being an exceedingly perceptive study of the many complex factors that have given rise to the current situation with regard to journal and other serial prices. I commend this report to you. Our growing understanding aside, there are some things that we simply do not manage. Journals have become and are presently the key medium in the advance of science and technology. We have been made acutely aware of the increasing rapidity of the advance of human knowledge in these areas. Even if we were to cure the problems of quality control, multiple 127
128
J. D. CAMPBELL
authorship, and so forth, appropriately chronicling the advance of knowledge would still be overwhelming. We cannot manage, certainly not control, the rate at which human knowledge is expanding. In practical terms for journals, this means that we cannot reasonably expect to curtail entirely the expansion in the number of pages printed annually, nor can we prevent the continuation of the phenomenon we have come to call stemming. These are more readily determined by the discovery of new branches of knowledge, by interdisciplinary endeavors, and by increases in the number of scientists. And so, I think that we must anticipate continued growth in the number and size of journal publications. We have also had little success in managing the costs of journal subscriptions. We have been in, so to speak, a journal seller’s market, with publishers being virtually unrestrained at naming their prices. The resulting, egregious pricing policies of certain commercial publishers is now thoroughly and well documented. I refer you again to the ARL report. The intersection of these two areas basically outside of our control-growth in human learning and predatory pricing policies-creates the context within which we presently endeavor to manage our journal collections. The outcome is somewhat ironic. We find ourselves building proportionally shrinking knowledge bases for an expanding universe of knowledge. The benchmarks of our efforts to manage journal collections in this context are familiar to all of us: -We have reaffirmed our century-old commitment to interlibrary cooperation. In this regard we have sought new and creative ways of sharing journal material within legal parameters. We coined the now familiar phrase, document delivery, and made it a part of everyday library existence. Fax machines are rapidly becoming standard equipment in libraries. -We have, often successfully, urged our constituencies to provide new funds in order to maintain status quo journal collections. -We have also reprioritized our libraries’ budgetary commitments. In this regard, we have most often reassigned monies from monographic expenditures to journal subscriptions. -And we have pruned and refined our journal subscriptions. Most often we have cancelled larger numbers of low to moderate cost journals rather than the few high cost and highly visible journals. -Finally, to reiterate my opening comment, perhaps the most useful thing that we have done, individually and collectively, to manage our journal collections thus far is to begin to ascertain just what has been going on to cause such problems. While these activities may seem rather more like coping than managing, they have helped us considerably in the short run. Because of these activities, the subscriptions that we have maintained are the most refined and justifiable group of journal titles that we have held in years. They have caused us to think afresh about what manner of documentation is really essential in order for the process of research to continue and the history of the growth of knowledge to be chronicled. And they have focused the attention of the academic community on the unfortunate aspects of a generation of publish or perish policies. Not least it may be said that in the short run such activities have allowed study and research to continue without debilitating consequences.
The Challenge of Managing Journal Cqllections
129
All of these management practices, however, are insufficient to solve our problems in the long run. Those aspects of journal publishing which we cannot control-namely, rapid growth and predatory pricing-do pose long-term threats. Excessive costs for library resources combined with high costs of facilities, laboratories, and so on are beginning to test the financial viability of our institutions. Similarly, the volume of published materials prompts us to ask how we will afford to bring it under bibliographic control with present practices and how we will afford to store it in perpetuity. And these questions, in turn, suggest that the real longterm threat is to the scholarly process itself and to the dissemination of scholarly knowledge. We may postulate that if technology has recently facilitated the acceleration in the growth of knowledge, it should also have provided some new means for librarians to deal with it. This, however, has not been precisely the case. Technology has more quickly been adopted to the production of knowledge than to its storage and retrieval by libraries. The reasons for this are at least twofold. On the one hand, libraries do not have a tradition of maintaining positions for research personnel. Those who develop new technology and technological applications more commonly are found in industry or on university faculties. Consequently, if they develop new technology or applications suitable for library needs, neither they nor librarians are likely to be aware of it. Technological solutions for effective storage and retrieval of information, therefore, have been slow in coming. On the other hand, because of the well-known and typical restrictions of current copyright law, we have been legally restricted from moving quickly into electronic solutions to the storage and retrieval of journals. Together, these two major obstacles have proven insurmountable. There is, however, some hope on the horizon. And it is hope not only with regard to advancing electronic solutions to the control of burgeoning numbers of scientific journal publications, but hope as well for managing if not controlling what have recently been runaway subscription costs. We have, as you are aware, looked diligently for some reasonable means to restore costeffective access to journal literature. It has been a frustrating search. To qualify as a reasonable means, any course of action must meet some difficult criteria. It must save us more money than it costs; it must be powerful enough to alter the corporate policy of commercial publishers; it must be simple enough to be put into practice widely and quickly; and, of course, it must be legal. Our proposed solutions have consistently failed one or more of these measures. We do, however, have one clear course of action that meets each and every one, and it is the key to regaining management control of our journal literature. What I have in mind may be most simply described as university copyright policy. The first purpose of a university copyright policy will be to claim that which has always existed but has heretofore gone unclaimed, namely, a university’s rightful ownership interest in the intellectual property produced by its faculty. Such ownership interest exists because faculty authors most often compose their works while on full or part salary, or through use of university resources, facilities, laboratories, equipment and support staff, or a combination of these. Universities have, of course, long since taken such action with regard to the intellectual property represented by inventions. As a consequence, university patent policies are commonplace. Why? We were aware from the outset that the financial stakes in patentable, marketable inventions by university faculty were sufficiently high to warrant protecting rightful university interests. Thus policies were developed which, incidentally, protected faculty members as well. Such policies typically are reinforced by legal staff, and often, by staff devoted to working with potential corporate partners in the customary steps of arranging nondisclosure agreements and, eventually, licensing the rights to market the product. A happy
130
J. D. CAMPBELL
result is that not only are university interests established, but faculty also have much better guidance and much larger financial rewards as their inventions are brought to market. Copyright policies certainly are not new and have been considered in the past. As far as I can ascertain, the reason they have not been put into place is simply that the incentives were i~~~~ent. Little was to be gained. Royalties to authors of academic works have always been comparatively small, and universities have chosen to allow what little accrues to be returned to faculty authors as rewards for their intellectual productivity. There is no reason, in my opinion, to change this arrangement. The incentive to adopt university copyright policies, however, has changed. The cost of some journals in particular has reached a sufficient magnitude to suggest that our best interests would now be served by adopting copyright policies. I suspect that I am also safe in saying that the chief executive officers of our universities are sufficiently aggravated over the so-called “serials crisis” that they will undertake this action with some satisfaction. While we are only now working out the parameters for university copyright policies, I can suggest that they may be rather more simple than complex. They might, for instance, require that publishers hold educational institutions blameless for any and all uses of journal materials. They will prohibit faculty authors from giving away total copyright ownership. As an alternative, they will probably allow the consig~ng of specific rights only, like the right to print on paper, or the right to print on paper in one edition only. All other rights, including the rights to the work in electronic form, would be explicitly retained by the author. Best of all, there would be absolutely no need even to consider altering current copyright law. Faculty member have needed such protection for some time. We have, unfortunately, let them unwisely relinquish all their rights to their own work in the past. Whatever final form copyright policies take, I think that the approach is sufficiently simple and com~l~ng that it can be in place in North American u~versiti~ in a very short time. With any luck, it will encompass virtually every academic author on this continent. This is to say that publishers will be compelled to agree to terms if they wish to continue publishing. The most significant benefits of this approach lie precisely in the context of managing our journals. On the one hand, I anticipate that the advent of university copyright policies will provide for a new and more cost-effective publishing environment. It will do this primarily by supplying us with a much needed momentum for alternate publis~n~ ventures, some of these, as has been widely advocated, from within universities themselves. On the other hand, it will give us the legal right to experiment with the electronic exchange of scholarly knowledge and to begin in earnest what will be the next generation in storage, retrieval, and exchange of information. This it will accomplish by refraining from consigning ownership of the electronic records to commercial interests. While we will continue to purchase access to now existing records only at great price, we can achieve cost-effective and virtually unlimited access to info~ation produced in the age of university copyright policy. Even though we may not expect to manage the great outpouring of human learning, we may certainly expect to manage the form and the cost of our access to it. And I believe that we have now found the proper management tool.