Whose electronic library is it, anyway? Christine Roysdon and Brian Simboli Lehigh University

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Whose electronic library is it, anyway?
Christine Roysdon and Brian SimboliLehigh
University
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Lehigh in 1878

• Late 19th century book buying adventures
• Demonstrated that Lehigh intended to be elite
  institution, with rare literature, history,
  science works

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Among the early acquisitions
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100 years later (around 1978)

• Overall size of the journal collection
• Esoteric titles, languages
• Depth and age rarity, complete runs
• Number of current subscriptions
• Symbol of institutions research strength

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Whose subscription list is this, anyway?
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Price increases continue to diminish our
subscription resources
Library type 2002 increase 2003 increase 2004 increase 2005 increase 01-05 increase

ARL 7.76 8.67 9.83 8.44 39.46
College University 7.86 8.56 9.33 7.91 38.15
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Price per download

• 2004, Tetrahedron letters 11,017/729
• Cost per download 15.12
• 2004, Organic letters 3121/982
• Cost per download 3.17

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Ten things you can do to help in the scholarly
communication crisis, NCSU, 1992

• Send a signal to publishers by protesting current
  pricing policies.
• Resign from the editorial boards of journals
  published by companies that practice exorbitant
  pricing.
• Educate colleagues in professional societies
  about the hidden danger in contracting with
  commercial publishers to publish society
  journals, which often results in higher
  subscription prices for libraries.

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Ten things you can do to help in the scholarly
communication crisis, NCSU, 1992

• Encourage your professional associations and
  societies to resist the temptation to raise
  prices based on the models of commercial
  publishers.
• Encourage university presses to undertake the
  publication of scholarly, refereed journals.
• When submitting an article to a journal, consider
  the journals pricing policies and select the one
  with the fairest prices.

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Cancellations continue
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Once there was one
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In 2005

• Nature
• Nature Biotechnology
• Nature Cell Biology
• Nature Chemical Biology
• Nature Clinical Practice journals
• Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine
• Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology and
  Hepatology
• Nature Clinical Practice Oncology
• Nature Clinical Practice Urology
• Nature Genetics
• Nature Immunology
• Nature Materials

• Nature Medicine
• Nature Methods
• Nature Neuroscience
• Nature Physics
• Nature Structural and Molecular Biology
• Nature Reviews journals
• Nature Reviews Cancer
• Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
• Nature Reviews Genetics
• Nature Reviews Immunology
• Nature Reviews Microbiology
• Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology
• Nature Reviews Neuroscience

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Whos subscription list is it, anyway?

• Diminished in size and variety
• Driven by immediate needs, as evidenced by usage
  statistics, faculty surveys, and citation data

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Generic journal collections
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Content can be found elsewhere

• Nature of roll to spiral-defect-chaos
  transitionX Li, H Xi, JD Gunton - Physical
  Review E, 1998 - link.aps.org Xiao-jun Li 1 ,
  Hao-wen Xi 2 , and JD Gunton 1 1 Department of
  Physics, LehighUniversity, Bethlehem,
  Pennsylvania 18015 2 Department of Physics and
  Astronomy ...

• Cited by 75 - Web Search - arxiv.org - lehigh.edu
  - adsabs.harvard.edu - all 5 versions

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Whose (electronic)subscription list is it,
anyway?

• No longer perceived as a front end of a long-term
  collection present is disconnected from the past
• Diminished in size and variety by journal
  inflation
• Strategic and opportunistic -- driven by
  immediate needs
• Significant component of generic packaged
  content, rather than a distinctive, cultivated
  set of titles
• Subscription content can often be found
  elsewhere -- easily

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Whose electronic archives are they, anyway?
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Archives issue

• Clearly the whole underpinnings of libraries
  and culture are at stake depending on the
  outcomes of the archiving dialogs that are in
  place now and will surely outlast our lifetimes
• Ann Okerson, Yale, 1997

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Lehigh policy for eonly conversion, 2001

• Rights to archived materials for which we had
  paid electronic access fees
• Journal archive would be preserved through
  distributed backups and distributed archives
• Access to archives in the event of
  discontinuation, sale, repackaging, or cessation.
  
•  
• Has been violated continuously!!

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Drexel, 2005

• Another factor contributing to our decision to
  go electronic was the beliefthat, in the
  electronic environment, preservation should no
  longer be the responsibility of many individual
  libraries. The model that makes sense in this new
  order is for a mix of organizations with national
  and international scope to step forward and
  assume archiving roles. This is, in fact,
  happening

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Best case, electronic archives

• JSTOR
• ACS, AIP
• Highwire
• Euclid

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The instability of archives

• Institutions that cancel punished with loss of
  paid backfile
• Publisher mergers, lost titles
• Rolling/broken off backfiles
• Electronic journal archiving must be approached
  in an opportunistic, strategic way

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Accidental vs. intentional preservation

• Accidental preservation occurs with print
• There is no accidental preservation in the
  electronic library

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The return of accidental preservation
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Urgent Action Needed to Preserve Scholarly
Electronic Journals

• Preservation of electronic journals is a kind of
  insurance
• Qualified preservation archives would provide a
  minimal set of well-defined services
• Libraries must invest in a qualified archiving
  solution
• Research and academic libraries and associated
  academic institutions must effectively demand
  archival deposit by publishers as a condition of
  licensing electronic journals
• Statement endorsed by ARL, October 31, 2005

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Whose electronic library will it be?

• Local digital library infrastructure
• Metadata knowledge and project experience
• Expertise can be directed to new publications and
  to archives