Lecture 10, IMS5016, IMS3616, Information Access

Lecture 10, IMS5016, IMS3616, Information access,

Costs, selection, collaboration: 16 May 2005.

Contents.

1. Three news items.

1.1.Journal costs in Australia.

1.2.Loss of government publications from websites.

1.3.Dutch academics challenge journal publishers.

2.Exam preparation.

2.1.There is publicised information, known to everyone.

2.2.General principles for effective revision.

2.3.Fear of the unknown.

2.4.Examiners’ expectations.

3.Diagram for guidance in assignment two.

4.Collection costs.

4.1.Academic journals.

4.2.Defining costs in information collection and provision.

4.3.Value and costs in relation to logistics.

5.Selection principles.

5.1.Costs.

5.2.Up-to-dateness; built-in obsolescence.

5.3.Treatment, level of appeal

5.4.Format quality

5.5.Compatibility with existing collection content and systems

5.6.Rarity, scarcity

5.7.Ease of use

5.8.Conformity to norms

5.9.Content quality

5.10.Review.

6.Work flow and structure of the virtual library.

7.Three solutions to the isolated library.

7.1.Consortiums ( = consortia).

7.2.Gateways.

7.3.Dissolve barriers between virtual institutions.

7.4.AARLIN.

1.Three news items.

1.1. Journal costs in Australia.

Bill Pheasant, ‘Technology Threatens Old School Ties,’ in

Australian Financial Review, Education, 8 March 2004, p 29:

Linux did it for Microsoft, fronting a popular campaign against corporate ownership of computing. Now, a global groundswell seeking open access to academic journals is denting the profitable futures of the dominant players, including market leader Reed Elsevier.

PLoS (Public Library of Science) has joined BioMed Central amid a host of new ‘free’ offerings, each attempting to solve a growing unease about the control of research data, which is frequently paid for and peer-reviewed out of public funds. Elsevier, along with Blackwell Publishing, gave evidence before a British parliamentary science and technology committee last week that heading down the open access path would damage academic research, end the peer review system and mean more costs for universities to subsidise their researchers.

Today , before the same committee, the promoters of a new way will cry ‘viva la revolucion!’ Elsevier, the UK-based publishing house, last month reported a 75 per cent profit increase in 2003 to $1.24 billion on slightly lower revenues of $11.8 billion in a tight business environment. Other big players in the industry include Blackwell, Kluwer and Taylor & Francis. But it is evident that the foundations of a 300-year-old arrangement between scientists, learned societies and their publishers are getting shaky.

Two weeks ago Deutsche Bank analysts cut their recommendations on Elsevier from buy to hold, and took 12 per cent from their 2005 earnings estimates. BNP Paribas's initial assessment last year was underperform. In Australia, university libraries across the country face the same issue: technology has given researchers unimagined access to the global pool of knowledge, but the cost of entry is becoming prohibitive. In 2002, according to information given to the Council of Australian University Libraries, the $4.9 million periodicals publication budget for the University of Adelaide was 86 per cent of its new material expenses; the remainder was largely spent on books.

For the University of Queensland, journals accounted for 85 per cent of its $11.8 million budget, and the Australian National University spent 88 per cent of its $7.3 million library budget on periodicals. One of the country's largest academic institutions, Monash University, added 29,791 titles in 2002: 28,100 were part of aggregations of electronic collections as part of bundled services, giving students access to a potential 70,000-plus titles.

The data in the United States tells the same story of escalating costs. In 1992, Cornell University in New York State spent $US4.1 million on journals; in 2002, the cost was 65 per cent higher. At Stanford, the price rose by 140 per cent in the decade to $US11.9 million. According to the web log of Peter Suber , one of the academics pushing for open access, the provost of the University of Maryland, William Destler, last week issued a statement supporting the university's libraries, which cut their bundled collections to retain the ability to cancel specific Elsevier titles.

Quoting information consultants OutSell, Suber said Stanford's faculty senate had also adopted a resolution supporting library moves to cancel some subscriptions and encouraging faculty to withhold articles from certain publishers. Cornell last year started a free internet publication service, and the administrators of Columbia University are now considering actions over journal prices.

In Australia, the battle for the $220 million university library content budget has made librarians ‘the meat in the sandwich’, according to Madeleine McPherson. McPherson is the president of CAUL, and her firm view is that publishers have been exploiting market power for profit.

‘The academic publishing industry, particularly the STM journals science, technology medicine, the high-prestige ones have become more and more expensive. That is very largely as a result of an exploitation by commercial publishers of their monopoly position in the market: that is, you cannot substitute one journal for another,’ she told The Australian Financial Review.

‘Many titles they took over from scholarly societies, but they realised they were a licence to print money. Their responsibility is to their shareholders, and they do what any business would do.’ While CAUL acknowledges publishers' costs have increased with the addition of online services, it does not justify the massive increase in the fees being charged. ‘I think it will take a while to shake out [but] 2003 was a turning point,’ McPherson says.

Stephen May's Australian Academic Press, a Brisbane-based publisher of about 40 journals in the social sciences sector, is watching the debate with fascination. He believes the big players have over-reached, and that the reaction towards open access will continue apace. Not that he is joining up. May is a commercial publisher, but he claims his rates have gone down in some areas, partly due to the technology benefits for publishers. ‘As a small publisher I can put a journal up, and make arrangements with Medline or whoever, so it is part of the global network of journals,’ May says. ‘The big publishers are now so big that they go to the libraries and say 'Here are 800 of our journals. Why don't you buy these 800 titles, and we will bundle them into a package?'

‘The libraries say, 'We only want these 300', but as a package they tie up libraries' budgets,’ he says. ‘It has meant that they have been able to put the prices up. Academics are saying a toll is being placed on academic research, and that it is obscene.’

Janine Schmidt, University of Queensland's librarian, took on the publishers a few years ago and won substantial discounts. ‘Three years ago there were huge price increases. All the publishers were pushing up subscription costs much higher than the CPI [consumer price index],’ Schmidt says. ‘I think there was quite a backlash, with libraries all over the world cancelling subscriptions. We cancelled a significant number then too.’ UQ entered a joint purchase arrangement with other sandstone institutions and got a joint discount for a bundled service, an arrangement which offers vast numbers of extra publications, and also cuts administrative costs for the publishers.

‘This time last year we took a decision to move away from print to a large extent, to online only. So we have 19,000 titles available online only, and 13,000 print titles, compared with 20,000 titles previously,’ Schmidt says. The change has been welcomed by staff and students, she says, ‘but some of us are concerned long term about the reduction in ownership, and the pricing structures’. ‘Brain Research is the most expensive journal at $35,000 a year, compared with Sustainable Energy at several hundred dollars annually,’ she says. ‘We are all trying to advance scholarship. My concern is that the journals are consuming a greater percentage of our budget at the expense of the monograph [books]. It is really monopolistic behaviour.’

Taylor & Francis, another UK publishing house, holds about 1,000 journals, but offers them title by title rather than as block deals. It is also examining an author-pay scheme, similar to those being pushed by the open-access lobby, where the researcher or their university pays for publication. (Elsevier chief executive Crispin Davies told the parliamentary committee that each article could cost up to GBP30,000 ($AUD72,000) to publish.)

Chris Foster , director of the serials branch of the National Library of Australia, says the electronic use of serials is growing faster than any other sector. ‘We are seeing many publishers moving from print to online only. In terms of what libraries are able to offer their customers, in many ways it is a much better service. We are providing them with journals they would never have had access to before. It is a much wider spectrum of resources,’ Foster says. ‘Some of the downsides are that smaller publishers, if they can't join in with some of the bigger aggregators, might lose their readership and their place in the market.’

Like all universities, Melbourne gets almost all of its journals from overseas, so its costs are captive to global price changes.

Dorothea Rowse, collection management librarian at the University of Melbourne, has taken what she calls a ruthless approach to serial purchases, keeping cost rises to about 10 per cent over the past decade. ‘One of the things we do is called access versus ownership. We don't believe we have to own every journal, and one of the things we do is obtain material an article at a time via interlibrary loans. In science and medicine, they are very happy with this.’

The British Library's delivery service and a Canadian provider of technology and scientific information send the articles for about $US8 each. The university has 16,000 subscriptions, which includes major databases ProQuest 5000, adding tens of thousands more. ‘We do not bundle our journals with Elsevier. We have an agreement for titles which we have chosen, and we control the costs that way.’

However, there is still a big impediment towards any shift to open access publishing of research: university councils. ‘If you are looking for a promotion or a new job, you will be judged on the journals in which you have published, and the ones on BioMed Central and so on don't have any status at all at the moment,’ Rowse says. ‘If you want to improve your CV, you have to publish in the big commercial journals, so they do have a future.’

1.2.Loss of government publications from websites.

Toss Gascoigne, ‘History will vanish into the ether’, in The Australian, 11 May 2005.

TRACKING down government reports is a growing problem for researchers in Australia. Originally published on the web, many reports have become unavailable or difficult to find.

Government departments are increasingly using the web as their primary means of publication. It's quicker and easier and gives much better access in our wired world. And they save money by printing fewer hard copies.

But problems arise when reports are removed from the web or relocated to a new website. This may be as time moves on and webmasters, under pressure to run a tidy site, decide to cut some of the older material. Or it may be when departments merge or split, and the material is moved to a new address but without leaving a trace behind so it can be tracked.

There are no national protocols for how web-based material should be selected and preserved and made available in a systematic way in Australia today. This is a cause of concern to researchers.

Just how significant is the issue? To find out, I asked this of subscribers to the newsletter of the Council for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences:

"The Australian Library and Information Services seminar, Digital Amnesia, will address issues relating to the access and management of government publications online. The context is a concern that a number of significant publications have disappeared from a range of government websites.

"Have you had experience of this? If so, could you provide details?"

It was quickly apparent I had touched a nerve. Within two days I had received more than 100 responses.

Respondents gave examples of reports that had disappeared; described their battles to track down material as departments were amalgamated or split; talked about the issues caused as new technologies replaced the old, and proposed possible solutions. Just over half said they had not encountered problems.

Material that had been available on the web but has now disappeared included:

* The AGPS Style Manual, available in full on the web a few years ago

* Ministerial releases issued before 2004 have been recently removed from the Northern Territory Government website

* The National Plan for Women in Agriculture and Resource Management [which] came out in the mid 1990s. It was endorsed by state governments and about 130 rural industry organisations, and formed the basis for policy and action for a number of years.

Typical of the stories was:

"I teach a course on Youth and Society. One of the essay topics is Youth Allowance. There was a major evaluation of the program online at the beginning of the semester and I included the website reference for students. Come week 6 when they are doing the essay the link has disappeared. There is simply a generic message saying the page cannot be found."

One librarian had asked her colleagues to nominate reports they could not find. She then set out on a determined hunt to see if they were really missing. She found them, but concluded that:

"All of the publications were still available somewhere, but that was often due to good luck, and not the good management of the government agencies that created them.

"Five of the seven titles had disappeared from the website of the creating agency, with no redirects or other assistance given to the would-be reader about how to find the new location."

The crucial point for her was that, while they remained available somehow, somewhere, their discoverability was almost impossible. All of the titles in this small study were reported missing by librarians, all sophisticated users of the internet.

"My impression from this small study is that to this point, we have not yet suffered a serious loss of government information. I have not yet been able to identify any significant government publication that has disappeared altogether. However, there are certainly significant government publications that have disappeared from the creating agency's websites. Government information is definitely dispersed, some of it is very hard to find, and the fact that some of it remains at all is thanks to the whim of the internet archive harvesting robot, rather than to any policy, strategy or plan of commonwealth agencies."

Why was this material moved from the websites? Sometimes it was because IT managers wanted to keep the websites manageable and streamlined, and moved old material off as pressures mounted. Old bookmarks become useless when websites are redesigned. And significant documents are sometimes not seen as significant at the time. It's only in hindsight that we realise they have important historical value.

The loss of old material seems to occur most often where a website has gone through an upgrade, change of staff or change of management, or when a significant project and its attendant publications have come to an end.

Usually older publications are relocated as the structure or focus of the

website changes, to make way for new versions or new publications - they are finally removed when they no longer attract much traffic or seem out of place.

One person said that he never expects to find reports more than a couple of years old on a government website: "I presume that a range of issues are involved, including changes of government, changes of bureaucrats at the top and a desire to take a different policy direction from the one mentioned in thereport."

All these issues were compounded by the march of technology: new software means old reports can become hard to read even if they are available.

Respondents were united in their call for the development of a protocol, funded and implemented across government. Some thought the answer lay in an expansion of the PANDORA archival system run by the National Library ofAustralia.

One correspondent from New Zealand pointed to new legislation passed there earlier this month. Perhaps the answer to the issue in Australia lies in the adoption of legislation with a similar intent to New Zealand's Public Records Bill:

"The bill establishes a framework under which public records can be managed; ensures that the record keeping requirements of the Bill extend to as broad a range of government activities as practicable; and provides for the preservation and accessibility of public archives. In order to achieve these objectives, it provides a legal framework under which public records are created, stored, preserved, disposed of and made accessible.

"The growth in email and the internet has created a new set of challenges, which the bill addresses by requiring agencies to create and maintain records and to make them available over time. Agencies will also need to seek the approval of the chief archivist before they destroy records."