|
HomePage |
|
|
|
|
[Carol Fleishauer, associate director for Collection Services, MIT Libraries, explains what's happening in the world of electronic journals, and what faculty can do to help make the situation better.]
Most of you have discovered the large and diverse selection of electronic journals that the MIT Libraries license for your use. They enable you to do a considerable portion of your research from your lab or office desk. They allow your students to work from their dorms or apartments, and on the 24x7 schedule that is pervasive at the Institute. In addition, you may have found that these on-line journals enable you to find sources you haven't previously used, to search more deeply within articles, and to combine information sources more flexibly.
In spite of the tremendous advantages of this new mode of information distribution, there is cause for concern. A new constraint in licensing journals has been introduced by publishers. The licensing of bundled "packages" of journals now seriously endangers the Libraries' flexibility in providing a full spectrum of information resources.
Many of you are already familiar with the high price of journals that started in the 1960's and 70's when commercial publishers began to play a significant role in journal publishing. By the 80's and 90's, these companies had become highly profitable and controlled much of the science and engineering journal literature. Their market concentration enabled them to increase prices regularly by double-digit percentages during those decades.
In response to those increases, the MIT Libraries carried out four significant cancellation processes, making title-by-title decisions to rebalance the budget. While the process was painful, the decision-making was collaborative and careful, and the faculty understood that we were using the Institute's resources for the titles most needed by MIT faculty and students.
With the transition to dual-format publishing (that is, publishing journals in both print and electronic form), publishers have developed a new set of strategies aimed at maintaining market share in this changing environment:
The Effects
Continual price increases for journals, combined with limited purchasing flexibility, result in reduced opportunities to buy books, or add new print journals or new databases. Licensed packages constrain the Libraries' ability to make title-by-title journal selection or cancellation decisions related to the needs of the MIT community.
If the Libraries should need to reduce expenditures, these packages provide few options:
What Can Be Done?
Reducing the dominance of high-profit commercial publishers in the research results marketplace requires pressure at several points in the chain of scholarly communication. Many believe that a trend toward focusing tenure decisions on quality of publication rather than quantity of publication offers a starting point.
Fostering alternatives to commercial publishers is also important. University presses, scholarly publishers, and other alternative models for distribution of research results should be supported. The Association of Research Libraries has initiated SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/, to create direct competition for commercially published journals. The Public Library of Science, http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/plosjournals.html a non-profit organization founded by a coalition of scientists, is establishing a publishing program with unrestricted rights to access, distribute, and use all articles. The MIT Libraries' DSpace http://www.dspace.org is one of a growing number of institutional repositories developed to provide a permanent record of the research output of universities. Over time, it is likely that these and other initiatives will affect the role that commercial publishers play in the distribution of scholarly information.
As a parallel effort, individual faculty can have a potent impact in their choices of where to publish and where to volunteer their editorial services. Faculty can also exercise greater care in the transfer of intellectual property rights to publishers. While publishers prefer this to be an all-or-nothing transfer, it is possible and beneficial to transfer only limited rights to the publisher, retaining rights to use publications freely in one's own classroom, for instance, or to post articles on a Website.
Reclaiming responsibility for the scholarly record for current and future students and faculty requires a long-term and broadly-based set of solutions. In the short-term, in the current period of fiscal constraint the Libraries may have to make difficult decisions. The Libraries' staff will work, as always, with the Faculty Committee on the Library System to develop our decision-making processes.
|
HomePage |
|
|
|
|