The Continuing Saga of Lack of Access to Full-text Resources

http://thisthatotherthing.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/the-continuing-saga/
As any librarian at a small college will tell you, discovering information resources is always easier than obtaining them in full-text.  Over the last 30 years, the number of journals in publication has increased exponentially.  While subscriptions to high quality abstracting and indexing databases as well as aggregator databases are expensive, it pales in comparison to the cost of a large collection of the journals indexed by these databases.  Small colleges are at a greater disadvantage than larger universities because their library budgets are much smaller.  While almost all libraries have been forced to cut back on journal subscriptions in recent years, small libraries find this process even more difficult since they may have been short handed to begin with.  This is an incredible challenge for a small engineering library like Rose-Hulman.  For a college like ours that values teaching as its number one priority, professional research is a lesser concern.  Thus, laboratories and equipment are given a higher funding priority than the library.

Thus, since we are in the middle of winter quarter and most student research is being done now, we are continuing to feel the onslaught of student’s disappointment of finding resources that we do not have immediate access to.  The frustration increases with newer generations of students who are more Googleized and expect immediate access to resources they find.  As a result, ILL requests decrease.  While I gain great satisfaction in assisting students find valuable information resources they once did not know how to discover, I am becoming increasingly fatigued and frustrated over the increasing number of times we find a useful resource that a student either needs immediately or does not feel like making an ILL request for and which we do not have access to.  What’s a librarian to do without a magic money-wand to increase the periodical budgets by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity

While all colleges and universities are suffering from the ever increasing cost of journal subscriptions, small libraries tend to suffer the most.  Rose-Hulman’s already small journal budget was recently threatened with being cut by 1/3.  Luckily extra funding has been pulled together and so some hard decisions have been diverted for at least one more year.  It is widely accepted that the current scholarly publishing model cannot sustain itself.  Much attention has been given to the open access movement as a possible solution.  Open access journals have spawned concerns about quality of the research and the peer review process, and the economic viability of open access journals.  A common practice of open access journals is to charge authors a fee, usually ranging from $500 to $3,000 to publish an article.  The obvious challenge for universities is how to manage this new cost on top of already enormous subscription costs.  Five leading universities including Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley have signed the “Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity” pledging to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions’ scholars.  While it remains to be seen how this is to be done, the hope is to create a system which allows for less reliance on journal subscriptions and to have a market impact to lower subscription cost, or level the playing field.
So how does this effect small college libraries?  Well, immediately it doesn’t since it is mostly larger universities that have the financial resources to cover some of the costly publication fees.  Researchers from smaller colleges need to reply mostly on grant money to support such publications, something not in abundance for humanities and social science research.  As a librarian at a small college, my hope is that these larger universities will be able to have a positive impact on the economic models for open access journals which will someday trickle down to smaller colleges while at the same time lowering prices for commercial journals.  I can only hope.

Further information can be viewed in an Inside Higher Ed article.