Inside Iowa State
August 25, 2000
It started in the '60s
Iowa State's library is not alone in its struggle to pay for journals, said Olivia Madison, dean of library services. Libraries across the nation face similar financial woes.
The crisis began in the 1960s, when European publishers, such as Elsevier and Springer Verlag, jumped into the U.S. scholarly communications market. Before then, most scholarly works were published by scientific societies that often provided the publications to libraries for little or no cost.
Large numbers of nonprofit scholarly associations and societies began moving the publishing operations of their prestigious journals to the lucrative commercial sector. Libraries that once paid very low prices for these publications suddenly faced expensive subscription rates. Compounding the problem was a proliferation in the number of scholarly journals.
Research libraries, such as Iowa State's, began losing ground as they struggled to keep up. During the last five years of the 20th century, Iowa State's acquisition budget grew 38.5 percent -- not enough to keep up with the 55 percent national and international inflation rate of journals.
Like libraries across the nation, Iowa State's library responded to the dramatic increases by canceling journals. In 1980-81 and again in 1986-87, the library canceled journals to reduce its costs by 10 percent each time. In 1991-92, another round of cancellations reduced costs by 13 percent. In 1998-1999, a fourth cancellation project reduced costs by 14 percent.
That's when the Faculty Senate got involved. Senators, dismayed to see journal after journal disappear from the library shelves, appointed a committee to come up with ideas to avoid future journal cuts.
In February 1999, the committee released a report that laid out 27 recommendations based on three overall goals:
- Build an electronic library, ensuring adequate infrastructure and acquiring electronic-only versions of specific titles when feasible.
- Reduce or eliminate future journal cuts.
- Involve faculty, administrators and library officials in national efforts to encourage competitively priced journals.
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