A Tale of Two Journals: Comment

David Henige¹ has blown dust off of an old and indigestible chestnut in the manner of a morality play. Grossly overpriced journals are common in many fields, yet they are also usually successful in attaining a wide circulation (mainly to libraries), which seems illogical. Although Henige casts doubt on at least some of the criteria that librarians employ to determine their 'retained list,' there is little doubt that they usually 'know their constituencies [of faculty and students] and collect the most in-demand items first.'² It is the demand for these journals by the 'constituencies' that really promotes their success (or otherwise). My experience in my own field, palaeontology, is that many journals provide a similar product, but that publishing-house journals explore particular facets of the speciality, making them essential reading to a (commonly large) subset of the potential audience.

Although Henige concentrates on the aspect of value for money, many criteria can be identified to support the continuation of subscriptions to expensive journals on the library budget, although I accept that cost is usually the most important. Among these criteria, I propose that two factors particularly act to maintain the status quo, one intrinsic – the high profile such journals have among researchers – and the other extrinsic – the resistance (one might say apathy, in some cases) of the 'constituencies' to change.

Profile

A new, expensive Journal Ex produced by an international publishing house is, from the first issue, an international journal. The publishers of such journals are at pains to emphasise that Journal Ex is immediately 'important' within its particular field. In contrast, a new, reasonably priced Journal Why published by a learned society or university press, and covering a broadly similar field to Journal Ex, may have to work harder to attain the same level of acceptance for several reasons. At the very least, Journal Ex will have a devoted budget for advertising, it will make an annual appearance in a glossy catalogue, it will appear on a high-profile Web site, and it will have a large editorial board drawn from the great and the good. It may also appear as multiple volumes within any given calendar year, so in a relatively short time it will have published more issues than some journals founded in the nineteenth century! Authors will continue to submit to Journal Ex as its costs increase, because publication in such a journal is well thought of by, for example, tenure and promotion committees,³ and they do not have to bear the cost of publication (no page charges here, just expensive library subscriptions). In short, with admirable ease, it will take only a short period for Journal Ex to find itself in an exalted position among the publications in its specialist field. Journal Why will probably not be able to match some or any of these criteria, relying as it does on the good name of its parent society/press to define its initial profile and influence potential subscribers. It will be reasonably priced, however, and thus more attractive to personal subscribers.

Library Representative Apathy

Expensive publishing-house journals are unattractive to any library, but particularly so to institutions in the Third World. I was formerly library rep for the Department of Geology, University of the West Indies, Jamaica (UWI). Following consultation within the department and encouraged by the Science Library, I requested that subscriptions to two expensive geological journals be dropped. These were replaced by twelve other journals that were considered more relevant to research and teaching in the department. This resulted in a saving of foreign exchange for the library budget at the same time that the department was receiving better support for its work. Although I may look positively saintly in this explanation, I should also say that both of the journals we cancelled were more relevant to the research programs of members of faculty who had departed than to the interests of the current staff. How many other libraries continue to subscribe to journals disconnected from the current research of their faculty? Yet none of us really want to lose the...