Just in case or just in time - serials and electronic access issues at the University of British Columbia

by Johann van Reenen

This article appeared in "At Your Service," An EBSCO quarterly publication for serials librarians & information professionals, Jan/Feb/Mar 1996, Number 35. Contents may be reproduced with permission of the editor.

Editor's note: The following is a reprint of a speech given at an EBSCO Executive Seminar for Health Sciences Librarians in August 1994. The speech has been updated by the author to include recent data.

During the summer of 1994 a subcommittee of the Senate Library Committee of the University of British Columbia (UBC) examined the relationship between serials and electronic technology, including the principles which should underlie holding or accessing journals and producing electronic publications locally. A report was published at the end of the year. This article is based on my experience in working with this task group and does not mirror the final report. Recommendations have been made regarding critical factors which the university will need to address as it moves in the direction of a "virtual library."

The relationship between serials and technology is complex and multifaceted, embracing the faculty member as author, the university as employer, the interaction of copyright and publishing, the academic tradition of freedom in knowledge exchange, and the long held notions of appropriate use and fair access. Libraries are caught between these issues, user demands and ever increasing subscription costs. At the UBC Life Sciences Libraries (LSL), we canceled 28 percent of our subscriptions between 1992 and 1995. Data prepared by the Task Force on a National Strategy for Managing Scientific and Technical Information (1994) show a similar trend for academic libraries in general, i.e. more spent on serials (while buying fewer titles) and less and less spent on books and staffing.

"Just in case" collections

Serials collecting has been driven by the "just in case we need it" rationale for a long time. Furthermore, Noll and Steinmuller (1992) observe that, "The demand for journals is driven by two factors. One is the budgets of university libraries, and the other is user demand within the academic community.... The fundamental factor determining faculty demand for academic journals is the desire by faculty to have their work published" (p.33).

This has resulted in an unbalanced trading relationship between subscription costs and journal usage:

• The number of journals continues to increase.
• New journals are more specialized and have low circulations.
• With added competition, journal production quality rises to include more color, graphics, etc., so production costs increase.
• Publishers have to charge more to retrieve first copy costs.
• Libraries are under great pressure to subscribe to all journals, just in case a faculty member might use one in the future.
• Utilization studies point to two tiers of journals: a primary tier, considered important to all academics; and a secondary tier, considered important to a small subset of academics. This "secondary market" is unprofitable for publishers to publish and expensive for libraries to buy. Until recently, faculty has been insulated from the financial consequences of continuing to purchase expensive but little-used journals. Librarians have added to this deception by cutting into monograph budgets to protect serials collections.

Assigning collection value

In the LSL we have begun a process to define our "core" journal list and our "areas of strength" journal list. More than 50 faculty representatives on four library advisory committees provided four years of input into our cancellation projects. This information has been added to our serial records and each title is coded with a "value to collections (VLC) code, based on the accrued information, ISI Impact Factors and use statistics. VLC 1 denotes the Core List; VLC 2 and 3 denote the secondary list (which will eventually make up the areas-of strength list); and VLC 4 and 5 denote what is slated for cancellation this or the following year.

In researching and reviewing literature in conjunction with our study, we became particularly interested in the following phenomena and developments:

The author-reader problem

Over 60,000 journals are currently published. (UBC subscribes to about 27,000.) It has been discovered that, of this prodigious volume, only a small percentage of scientific journals are ever read by any sizable audience. Any given article is likely to be read by less than 1 percent of the journal's readers (Mahoney, 1985) and cited even less often. (See also Odlyzko's work, 1993 and later, on the use of mathematics journals.)

Electronic journals and document delivery technology

Journals in electronic format, whether transformed from paper format (scanned) or produced only electronically, can potentially be browsed for usefulness, read in electronic format, or, if found useful enough, can be subscribed to in hard copy. This broadens the range of access options available to libraries. The RightPagesTM program being developed at AT&T represents a further step toward creating customized individual and institutional collections (Hoffman, 1993) and paying only for what you use--this can be as little as a portion of an article.

Hard copy publishing has resulted in bulky publications that are expensive to produce and maintain. A huge publishing infrastructure has evolved around the reporting of scholarly work, editing, proofreading, printing and distribution of journals. Another large infrastructure has evolved from libraries acquiring, processing, shelving and making these journals accessible. As Odlyzko stated, "In short, paper journals are not convenient" (1993, p.10). Electronic publishing offers many more possibilities for academic exchange. With the development of multi-media and connections to the World Wide Web, it is easy to conceive of "journals" which include sound, manipulable graphics, text, direct e-mail access to the author and his or her picture!

University publishing

Local electronic publishing at universities is feasible and will increase once such published products become acceptable for promotion, tenure and salary increases. An early role for the university as publisher could be to serve as a site for FTP of pre-prints and other manuscripts. Local documents are already being "published" on gophers and Web sites. The University of Virginia Library has announced its "Online Scholarship Initiative," which enables faculty to make available on the Internet pre-print copies of articles to be published and post-print copies of articles already published. This move was logical and inevitable, as the source of almost all scientific publishing is academic faculty and researchers (who are the legal copyright holders in the first instance).

Quinn (1994) sees every research library as an e-publisher, permanently maintaining a file of reviewed and edited papers that are freely accessible over the Internet. The universities would manage the editorial structure to maintain standards. Departments would become "sponsors" of Journals. Such a system may result in savings for libraries and an additional role for vendors (e.g., as collection agencies).

New Challenges

As I see it, there are five important issues or challenges facing us:

1. New ways of working. When information in its richest form is immediate "Learners in the new networked environment will be able to marshall faculty, libraries, laboratories and other resources at their own pace, according to their own schedule, in a setting of their own choosing and in close contact and cooperation with other learners" (Peters, 1994). In other words, the library will be involved with mind-to-mind contact vs. the library as a place. This will require new roles for librarians.
2. Free or for a fee? We must fundamentally change the way in which we think about accessing information at universities, where information is commonly regarded as free, regardless of the form it takes. The university will have to exercise great care in deciding what information will remain free and what mechanisms for obtaining information will be billable.
3. Copyright. The development of a comprehensive, integrated rights management system is essential to guarantee a fair return on intellectual and financial investments. A system needs to be created to charge for "chunks" of information, i.e. only that part of an article, journal, etc., which one finds useful.
4. Preservation and security. Because electronic text can be easily altered after it's published, we must develop new methods or techniques for intellectual preservation. There are three possibilities for text alteration: accidental change, intended change that is well meant, and intended change that is not well meant (i.e. fraud).
5. Principles of access. In the new paradigm the university will have to continue to adhere to principles of freedom of information and access inherent to the academic exercise.

Preparing our campuses

In the final report of our task group we made only two over-arching recommendations to the University Senate. I am taking the liberty of extrapolating these into more specific issues to be addressed on campuses everywhere.

1. Develop and execute a public, university-wide education plan regarding changes in scholarly publication and dissemination of scientific information.
2. Establish a list of Primary Tier journals (core list) through a credible, university-wide process.
3. Establish a list of Second Tier journals in areas of excellence.
4. Get from the faculty an agreement to purchase only journals from items 2 and 3. Develop ongoing criteria and processes for additions and deletions.
5. Re-allocate funding and develop sophisticated processes for rapid, just-in-time, access to the rest of the world's knowledge.
6. Provide incentives to encourage faculty to move from local to remote access so the library can develop in-depth collections in a few selected areas but provide remote access to a broad range of other collections. These incentives will be needed in both hardware and software. Appropriate wiring of all buildings and provision of a minimum number of intelligent workstations for each department should be a first step.
7. Study the university appointment, promotion and tenure processes to determine the contribution of each to excessive publishing. Join national and international initiatives to address these issues.
8. Encourage local electronic publishing pilot projects in which the faculty and the university hold copyright and maximize dissemination of such information.
9. Encourage authors (and perhaps their universities) to retain copyright of their work wherever they publish.
10. Start local accessing and archiving of useful ejournals currently available for subscription or free on the Internet.
11. Initiate a pilot project to scan unique or rare material (e.g. a recently microfilmed collection on the history of British Columbia at UBC) and make it available on the Internet.
12. Encourage and support national and international initiatives to improve security, integrity and longevity of electronic information.
13. Collaborate with other universities and associations in: resource sharing and rapid document delivery; the management, cataloging and ongoing maintenance of e-texts and ejournals (e.g. the CICNet project); and joint ventures with industry, publishers and vendors.

After our report was released, information sessions for faculty were held university-wide. The University Senate approved the recommendations that two committees be formed: one to deal with information technology infrastructure issues; and another to address electronic information sources and scholarly publishing. The library and the English department started an online, peer-reviewed journal in early modern English literature. The Life Sciences Libraries will be publishing the local Medical Library Association's journal online and have completed the second iteration of the LSL Core Journal List (i.e. titles that should never be canceled). We involved all librarians and 52 members of faculty and clinical staffs over a two-year period. The UBC Library is restructuring and reallocating to enable the development of the digital component of the library. An ejournals committee is creating policies and processes for making ejournals available from our OPAC. Twelve of these are currently available.

The future role of librarians

In conclusion, I would like to address the role librarians will play in the virtual library. I believe librarians, as the re-packagers of information, may end up as the most important players of all because of our traditional ability to search out "chunks" of useful information, which can now be customized, packaged and sent to the customer's workstation. Chunking and customizing saves the scientist time that is better spent on creativity, innovation and research. I anticipate that vendors will become gatekeepers, tracking the use of such information chunks to collect and distribute fees. Some traditional roles for vendors and libraries will continue for a long time. For instance, the 20 percent of serials that accounts for 80 percent of the in-house use will most likely continue to be published and acquired in the traditional manner.

Van Reenen was previously Head of the Life Sciences Libraries at the University of British Columbia. Beginning January 1996 he is Director of the Centennial Science and Engineering Library at the University of New Mexico.

Hoffman, M.M., et.al. (1993). The RightPages Service: An image-based electronic library. Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences, 44(8), 446-452.

Mahoney, M.J. (1985). Open exchange and epistemic progress. American Psychologist, 40(1), 29-39.

Noll, R., & Steinmuller, W.E. (1992, Spring and Summer). An economic analysis of scientific journal prices: Preliminary results. Serials Review, 32-37.

Odlyzko, A.M. (1993, December 13). Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals. Internet: E-mail message, pp. 1-20.

Peters, P.E. (1994, January/February). Is the library a "place" in the age of networks? Educom Review, 62-63.

Quinn, F. (1994, May 16). A role for libraries in electronic publication. Internet: E-mail message, pp. 1-7.

Comments on this excerpt can be made to jreenen@unm.edu.

Last updated/modified: September 30th, 1996

Comments to John Benedetto -- jbenedet@unm.edu