Given the currently dire and highly unpredictable budget environment for higher education, 2010 is a rather frightening time to be a librarian. For the same reasons, this must be an absolutely terrifying time to be a scholarly publisher. Scholarly publishers are looking at libraries right now and seeing what has always been the best and most reliable market for their products suddenly changing into a highly unreliable one. There is very little likelihood that library budgets will grow significantly (if at all) anytime soon; in fact, there is a strong likelihood that they will shrink again next year—in many cases, for the second year in a row. Furthermore, even if budgets begin growing again, it is highly unlikely that they will ever rise to their pre-2008 levels or that libraries will resume buying books the way they did in the past. Traditional library collection development has meant buying large amounts of materials in the hope that those materials will turn out to be what patrons need, but financial constraints are now forcing libraries to move in a more patron-driven and less speculative direction.
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There is nothing to stop Elsevier or Nature or any other scholarly publisher from retreating entirely from the library model and reverting to a retail, title-by-title model for faculty and students. This would not be a painless transition for them, but it is not at all clear that they have the option of continuing with business as usual. Likewise, continuing with business as usual is simply not an option for a library experiencing drastic budget cuts. As long as libraries remain the primary customers of scholarly information products, publishers’ fortunes will continue to be tightly aligned with those of libraries.
The article is based on a podcast interview with Sue Kriegsman, Harvard U. conducted at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) 2010 annual meeting by Gerry Bayne, EDUCAUSE multimedia producer. Listen to the Complete Podcast
Here's One Exchange from the Transcript:
Bayne: What are the funding considerations around open-access publishing?
Kriegsman: Some of the funding considerations around open-access publishing have to do with whether the university is going to start supporting its own open-access content with a repository to store the materials and a way to push the materials out. At Harvard, we decided not to put a lot of effort into the front end of our repository; instead, we are putting more effort into the back end to make sure that our data is being pushed out to search engines, indexing services, places like Google Scholar. So when somebody uses Google Scholar, that person is going to hit on materials that we are storing in our repository.
The other thing happening with open-access publishing is that sometimes open-access journals have an author's fee associated with publication. In September 2009, Harvard was one of the first institutions to join the Compact for Open access Publishing Equity (COPE, http://www.oacompact.org/). The compact states that the university will provide a durable, sustainable model for supporting open-access publishing. Through the Harvard Open-access Publishing Equity fund (HOPE, http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/hope), if an author wants to publish in an open-access journal that has an author fee, Harvard will help pay the fee if the journal is a pure open-access (not hybrid) journal.
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