November 17, 2003

A crisis on campus

Librarians have been concerned for decades about the rising costs of academic publications, sometimes referred to as the 'serials pricing crisis'. Scholarly journal prices have been rising faster than inflation, and faster than library budgets, for more than thirty years. The transition to electronic access should have brought relief for librarians - but instead they are now embroiled in lengthy negotiations with publishers who are demanding high prices for electronic site licenses. Open Access Now talked to Beverlee French about her challenging job as the Director for Shared Digital Collections at the California Digital Library.

The California Digital Library (CDL) is a collaborative effort of the ten campuses of the University of California (UC). Drawing upon expertise from across the UC system, it selects, develops, and manages systems for the use and preservation of high-quality digital content. The CDL also works together with California's other libraries, archives, museums, and diverse 'memory organizations' to provide access to the cultural and historical resources of California.

"One of the basic goals when we started the CDL was enhancing resource sharing by system-wide licensing," says French. "We also set one of our goals to be influencing the market place. I think we have been successful in many ways." The library has handled the UC transition from print to electronic library services, and it has put pressure on publishers to replicate online all editorial material that was available in print. "We also insisted that we should have perpetual rights to online material so we don't purchase the same content over and over again," adds French.

Librarians as negotiators
"As a representative of all the UC campuses, I have been involved in negotiating with publishers for systemwide access to titles for the entire UC system," says French, emphasizing that the problem of unsustainable journal price increases and growing bodies of knowledge is not new to university librarians. "The subscription costs have always exceeded budget increases. The old way of dealing with the problem was that each library trimmed around the edges and dropped titles where it felt it could."

"In the mid to late 1990s the publishers had experienced many cancellations, from our institution and others, and they were beginning to launch electronic versions of their journals." This required new methods for acquiring and providing access. "At UC we are lucky to have a single system with a long history of library cooperation," explains French. "We were successful in the short term to transition our methods of resource-sharing activities - from the old way which was making photocopies and sending them in the mail on request, to striking agreements with publishers under which we would share the titles we held amongst us all by taking electronic subscriptions."

In this way, university libraries were able to give the publishers stability for several years in exchange for some price-increase caps. "This gave us a deal that was better than the rate at which they were increasing subscription prices," notes French. But she points out that the increases were still two or three times the rises in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and inflation.

"This has been a fairly mutually happy situation for several years," says French. "Publishers have had some stability and have been able to invest in their online systems. But we are coming to the end of some of these negotiated contracts at a bad time in terms of our budget." The CDL had hoped to partner with some commercial publishers to work together on developing print and digital archiving strategies. But instead it is finding that the deals that it struck with publishers have actually created greater inflexibility in the way tight budgets have to be managed.

"Faculty are more engaged in the library issues and recognize the inter-relationship between them and their editorial and authorial activities"

Beverlee French

"There is a pressing need to control costs, but you can't really cut costs the old way, which was that each campus dropped a few titles," notes French.

"The inflexibility that comes from having so much money tied up in some of these publisher packages means that the only way to stay within budget is to renegotiate the terms of the package. One has a lot more leverage before signing the online contract than after: once online, the convenience is so seductive that it's very difficult to turn something off - especially if it is high-use, important material."

Engaging the faculty
The UC library system prides itself on how it has managed to engage the UC faculty in the decision-making and review of library content. "Our faculty have started to ask questions - they want to know what's going on," says French. "They are very involved in the business and the administration of the University because it directly affects their research and teaching. They have been asking in San Francisco 'Why don't we have online access to Cell Press?' for a long time - and for a long time we have said that the cost is several times what we are paying in print and we don't have the funds to pay for that."

French is referring to failed negotiations between the UC libraries and Cell Press, an imprint of the global publishing giant Elsevier (see Box). "We started talking to Cell Press in 1998," she recalls. "We were given quotes for the price of our online access that were based on the numbers of individual subscriptions expected to be lost within the entire region if we had system-wide online access." The librarians were disturbed by the lack of an objective pricing structure and felt that the quotes they were given were too high and without sufficient openness and explanation.

French is keen to emphasize that the UC libraries have maintained their print subscriptions to Cell Press titles, with multiple copies on some campuses if required. The UC campuses currently spend some US$30,000 on print subscriptions to Cell Press journals. "We used to feel that institutional pricing was quite reasonable. And individual pricing was quite reasonable too, such that there were a lot of individual subscriptions."

French is unclear how the deadlock in the negotiations will end. "We take our lead from the faculty," she says. "And I think that it's very interesting that our faculty have become more engaged in the library issues and recognize the interrelationship between them and their editorial and authorial activities. I have heard people saying 'We can edit and publish our papers in other top journals.' This is the first time that I have seen faculty become so engaged in the overall issue of scholarly communication."

"When faculty hear the total amount that we pay to some of these publishers there is shock and awe"

Beverlee French

French thinks university faculty are tired of the way things work and tired of constantly telling the librarians which titles to cut. "I have done many serials cancellation projects in my career, where you show each title with its list price. But we are no longer dealing with list prices of individual journals but with publishers' packages. When faculty hear the total amount that we pay to some of these publishers there is shock and awe."

She notes a number of factors that have contributed to the heightened cooperation between librarians and faculty. "First, e-mail and the internet make it easier to communicate with faculty nowadays. Our libraries are trying to put some of our human resources into promoting alternatives for the faculty - we think we have to play every game there is. The CDL has established an electronic repository for working papers and preprints, as well as an eScholarship platform and software. We have also launched our own Open Access journals."

"The UC libraries have funded institutional membership to BioMed Central and we have tried to advertise and promote it as an alternative publishing outlet, and we will also try to promote the Public Library of Science," says French. "We are developing shared cataloguing of all the Open Access journals, and journal-article index linking mechanisms. And we are also planning more discussions with faculty - such as a future forum focusing on scholarly communication - to try to get more ideas from academics about what sort of support they need." She adds that the library is keen to help departments that wish to incorporate Open Access publishing as a criterion in the evaluation of candidates for recruitment and tenure. She says that faculty have asked for information - such as costs and usage statistics - from the library that will help modify faculty behavior.

Finding solutions for the 'scholarly communication crisis' is clearly top of the agenda for French and her colleagues at the CDL. They have shown how librarians and faculty can work together to develop the most useful resources for sharing and accessing information. "We are really trying to help faculty in their teaching and research. But I think that we could still do more."

www.cdlib.org

UCSF faculty call for a boycott of Cell Press

Two senior scientists at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) have appealed to colleagues to boycott all journals published by Cell Press, to protest against the prices of electronic access. Peter Walter and Keith Yamamoto wrote a letter to UC faculty explaining that Elsevier, which owns Cell Press, asked the University for an additional $90,000 annually to provide electronic access to the six Cell Press titles, including the prestigious journals Cell, Molecular Cell, Immunity and Neuron. The University, which has already paid Elsevier $8 million for online access to its other journals, has refused, saying the price is too high.

"By denying institutional electronic access for the last five years, Cell Press has enjoyed a bonanza of personal subscriptions," states the letter. "They now cite the potential loss of personal subscriptions as the basis for setting a high institutional price."

"It is untenable that a publisher would de facto block access of our published work even to our immediate colleagues," write Walter and Yamamoto. "Cell Press is breaking an unwritten contract with the scientific community: being a publisher of our research carries the responsibility to make our contributions publicly available at reasonable rates."

Walter and Yamamoto urge colleagues to refuse to review manuscripts for Cell Press journals, stop submitting their papers to these journals and to resign from their editorial boards. "It is time that we reassert our values," write the outraged researchers. "We can all think of better ways to spend our time than providing free services to support a publisher that values profit above its academic mission."

A response from Lynne Herndon, President and CEO of Cell Press offered free electronic access to Cell Press titles to all UC researchers who registered a username and password via e-mail. Walter and Yamamoto rejected this temporary offer and reminded colleagues that Cell Press have offered trial electronic access in the past, and then withdrawn access when negotiations with the University broke down.

Walter and Yamamoto are keen to publicize the pricing tactics used by Elsevier and Cell Press. "The public and private agencies that support us should learn about the greed that is threatening the dissemination of new knowledge and important discoveries." It remains to be seen how the research community and funding agencies will respond to the boycott call.