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Inside Iowa State
September 8, 2000

Faculty have key role in fighting high journal costs

(Second of a two-part story on the financial situation at the library.)
by Linda Charles
Last year, a plan to help the library cope with rising costs and numbers of journal was under way. It called for adding $200,000 to the base budget for three years to build up an electronic library, providing access to more journals electronically. The library received the first installment, plus another $175,000 to upgrade a server for the electronic library.

This year, because of an overall university budget shortfall of $8 million, the second installment of $200,000 didnt materialize. The library received only a 4 percent inflationary increase for journal and book acquisitions, not enough to keep up with the 10 to 12 percent inflation costs of the journals. The library also had to give back to the university a little over 1.5 percent of its non-acquisition budget, which included information technology funds.

Still, Olivia Madison, dean of library services, says she is optimistic.

"Overall, we're making good progress," Madison said. While the major obstacle for libraries across the nation is the increasing cost of academic journals, money is not the only answer. There are other fronts where the battle must be waged.

For example, the Board of Regents, State of Iowa, has become involved. This fall, the regents' Interinstitutional Committee on Educational Coordination (consisting of provosts from each of the three state institutions) will begin a campaign at the three state universities to inform faculty, administrators, the regents and others about the crisis in scholarly communication, Faculty Senate President David Hopper said. Last fall an ICEC-appointed task force examined both library acquisition issues and broader national issues contributing to local difficulties.

The initial ISU task force members were Hopper (at the time Faculty Senate vice president), Susan Carlson (University Library Committee chair), Madison and Kris Gerhard (library collections officer). A task force brochure called Crisis in Scholarly Communication: What is the Impact on the Iowa Regents Institution will be sent to all faculty at the three state universities.

The brochure points out that the regents' universities have canceled more than 6,000 journal titles since 1990, for a savings of $1.8 million, with $1 million of that coming in 1999.

The brochure notes, "The major players in science journal publishing, and increasingly in social science journal publishing, are commercial publishers who report profit margins of 20 to 40 percent."

" It also describes how faculty lose control of copyrights, which can result in faculty paying fees to use their own research on their Web sites, in their classrooms or for further research.

Faculty can help

The brochure urges faculty to modify contracts with commercial publishers to ensure their rights to use the work, including posting on public archives. It also suggests that faculty examine the price, copyright and license agreements of commercially published journals they contribute to as authors, reviewers or editors. Faculty are urged to allow electronic publications that meet quality standards to be considered during promotion and tenure decisions.

"Our major issue is to get the word out that this still is an issue," Madison said. "We need to talk to the faculty about what they can do, such as encouraging scholarly societies to continue publishing their journals instead of selling them to the big publishing companies."

"This isn't going to go away," Madison added. "We're doing everything we can to cope."

Collaborating on solutions

One way the university is coping is by joining in collaborations, such as the public-private sector one that recently launched BioOne, an electronic aggregation of the full texts of dozens of leading research journals in the biological, ecological and environmental sciences. Five organizations including the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, the University of Kansas and Allen Press collaborated to provide for the first time a common electronic database of leading journals that will be available at acceptable prices and usage terms.

SPARC is an alliance of libraries that has partnered with publishers in hopes of creating a more competitive marketplace and reducing the price of journals. Madison credits it with keeping the costs of journals down. This year, for the first time in a long time, major science publishers had lower than double-digit inflation, Madison said. "I firmly believe if SPARC wasn't there, we would be looking at higher inflation costs," she said. "The major commercial publishers are getting nervous. "We've made tremendous strides toward having reasonable cost access to scholarly publications," Madison said. "But we need to keep the momentum going on campus, regionally and nationally." "At the heart of an excellent university is an excellent library," Hopper said. "It is absolutely imperative that, particularly in the information age, the university have the best information sources available. Until this crisis in scholarly communication is addressed, Iowa State simply will not be able to attain its goal of becoming the best land-grant university."

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