When Is Enough Enough?

For years librarians have been struggling with the dilemma of how to provide their scholars and students with the journal articles they need for their research and studies within a materials budget that has never kept pace with the rate of inflation of much publishing output, notably in the disciplines of science, technology, and medicine (STM). If this dilemma is news to anyone, that person has been living the life of Rip Van Winkle.

The literature of librarianship, and of higher education in general, is replete with invocations to librarians, faculty, and administrators to change the ways which they do business, and in particular change the system of scholarship that places so much faith in "quality" publications that are essentially monopolies. "Anyone who thinks we can conduct our library business as we have done in the past is asleep at the wheel," says Myles Brand, who is president of the University of Oregon and chairman of the AAU Research Libraries Steering Committee. ¹

What is new is the impact of journals in electronic format, and particularly journals published by the very small handful of publishers that seem to provoke the most outrage among librarians for prices and policies that almost seem extortionist in nature. Publishers once afraid of "new technologies" have become adept at combining the use of electronic information technologies to proffer information with the complicated legal structures of licenses. "Libraries, as is now well understood, no longer own anything; they become mere 'knowledge pumps' and instead of opening up a free, public space for readers, they find themselves saddled with the unlikely task of policing access to 'legitimate users.' ²

In fact, librarians are hard pressed to know what new idea publishers will come up with for squeezing money out of an increasingly sparse book budget. When offered access to a publisher's entire stock of journal titles six years ago, my then-library could not justify turning down the apparently good deal that we were getting. Instead of access to the fifty-five of the publisher's journal titles we were then subscribing to, we would gain access to all 155 titles for no more than the cost we had already been paying for paper subscriptions. Never mind that on our campus we didn't really require access to many of those journals; it was still too good to pass up. In the backs of our minds stirred the suspicion and fear that in the future we would not be offered a license on such good terms. It seemed that today was today, and tomorrow someone else would have to deal with the problem.

And a problem it has become. Among the tactics that are being used are:

Sizable increases in licensing fees for contract renewals—often double-digit or more; Stringent caps on how much a library can cancel and yet remain with the electronic product; 1 percent is often heard as the most an institution is allowed to cancel; Incredibly short notice of surprise price increases beyond what had been anticipated. One library had expected a 7.5 percent increase, but was told that its increase would be 12.5 percent this year, then over 9 percent in the coming two years, by a publisher who only recently vowed publicly to never again use double-digit increases; Continuation of assessment of page charges to faculty for publishing their articles, thereby charging the academic institution twice for the knowledge that was created by the institution with either institutional or government funding in the first place; A steady but inexorable increase in the mergers of publishing companies, with rises in subscription prices an inevitable outcome of such actions; A decline in the quality of at least some journals, as reported by some faculty to their librarians; Attacks, through Congress and the Executive branch, on government agencies that have until now provided information to scientists and researchers; the Department of Energy's PubSCIENCE database is no longer available, and at...