Perspective on Publishing

The Changing Landscape of Academic Publishing

Two Librarians’ Perspectives
Rick Anderson; T. Scott Plutchak

W hen it comes to library collections, it is critical that we

not confuse means with ends. The purpose of the library
is not to have a great collection; the purpose of the library is
impact in health sciences libraries, where collections are much
more skewed toward journals and databases. The typical bio-
medical library spends only 7% of its collection budget on mono-
to meet the teaching, learning, and research needs of those it graphs.1 This makes the selection process even more challenging
was established to serve. The collection is a tool that we use in because adding a new journal or database resource is potentially
pursuit of that goal, but it is not the only tool, and the collection a multiyear commitment. When we buy a book, there is usually
itself is certainly not the goal. One problem with building collec- no point in paying much attention to usage data. The book is
tions (as traditionally understood) is that it involves guesswork, (usually) a 1-time purchase, so there is no way to “cancel” it
trying to guess ahead of time which exact books, journals, and if it turns out to have been the wrong choice. Journal and data-
databases our users will need. But inevitably, we guess wrong. base subscriptions, however, represent ongoing commitments of
We are very good at selecting relevant and high-quality books funding, and we can bail out of them later if they turn out to be
but not very good at selecting the exact titles that our patrons will returning low value in terms of ongoing, real-world usage.
need. So in many libraries, we have been moving aggressively So there is a great deal of interest in ways to extend the
in the direction of what is called patron-driven or demand-driven demand-driven model to article acquisitions, although it has
acquisition: We put records in the catalog for electronic books been challenging. In the past, we relied on interlibrary loan to
that we have not yet purchased, and purchase is driven by the obtain articles from journals for which we did not have sub-
actual use of those books. Even better, the process of purchase is scriptions. Now we find that even though we can fill most
completely transparent to the patron, so the only thing the patron requests in <24 hours, even a few hours may be unacceptably
experiences is access to a much larger collection of titles than long for some of our primary clientele (particularly in academic
we could possibly offer by preemptive purchase. The result is medical centers). Standard pay-per-view charges are often too
not likely to be a better collection (in terms of coherence and
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high to be a practical substitute, but services like the Copyright

completeness), but if the result is that our patrons are better able Clearance Center’s Get It Now can provide an appealing option.
to do their teaching, learning, and research, then many librarians Participating publishers discount the price they would normally
will consider that to be an acceptable tradeoff. charge, and libraries can split the cost with the requester, cover
The model that built the great research collections was a it entirely, or pass the entire cost on, making it manageable
reflection of the limitations of the print world. When print runs depending on local circumstances. DeepDyve, which pioneered
for scholarly monographs were modest and moving individual article rental, offers another promising avenue. We hope to see
books from one institution to another was time consuming much more experimentation in this area.
and costly, buying monographs just in case they were needed Services like these still operate very much at the margins,
made sense. The principles behind building a balanced col- however. With open-access articles still providing only a frac-
lection were well understood. For the disciplines in which an tion of available content, librarians are very focused on trying
institution had doctoral programs, that institution attempted to make the best decisions they can about what resources to
to collect everything that was published in that field. Masters license.
programs could be a little more selective, and for bachelors Librarians have been slow to change our models to accom-
programs, general works could usually suffice. A consequence modate the radical changes in the environment. For electronic
was that many items were never used, but if that meant that a books and journals, a limited print run is meaningless, and
scholar rarely had to resort to interlibrary loan, this was sim- moving an item from one place to another is virtually without
ply the cost of doing business. We did not have the kind of cost (leaving aside, for the moment, the substantial invest-
usage data that would have enabled us to do things differently. ments in infrastructure that make this possible). We can get
Although the move toward demand-driven acquisition has a level of usage data unimaginable to our colleagues from
been revolutionary in large research libraries, it has had less decades past. Now we have to figure out how to use that data
wisely.
From University of Utah, Salt Lake City (R.A.); and University of
Alabama at Birmingham (T.S.P.).
Correspondence to Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Collections and The Role of Usage in Making
Scholarly Communication, Marriott Library, University of Utah, 295 S Collection Decisions
1500 E, Salt Lake City, UT 84014. E-mail [email protected] Librarians, perhaps unwittingly, overemphasize usage data
(Circulation. 2016;133:2212-2214.
DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.116.023073.) and give publishers the impression that they play a larger,
© 2016 American Heart Association, Inc. more stand-alone role in our decision making than is often
Circulation is available at http://circ.ahajournals.org the case. Provosts would love to know the magic number, the
DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.116.023073 specific cost per use above which we would always cancel
2212
 Anderson and Plutchak   Librarians’ Perspective   2213

something. But it is not that simple. We also need to take service provide a mediated process for acquiring pay-per-view
into account who is using the resource and how it fits into the articles in a more cost-effective way.
university’s research and education priorities. That is much ReadCube is an example of another new service provid-
harder to quantify. ing a variety of options: One is temporary read-only access,
During the print era, collection building by prediction was which costs the library only a few dollars; the second is per-
the only option available to us, and this system resulted in manent read-only access, which costs more; and the third
some truly great library collections. But the problem is that it and most expensive is a downloadable, DRM (digital rights
does not matter much to the users we serve how objectively management)–free personal copy. Libraries that have experi-
great our collections are; what matters is whether our col- mented with such models report considerable success so far
lections actually contain the exact documents needed. The in terms of both patron satisfaction and library savings. With
universal existence of interlibrary loan departments in both these models, the cost-per-use cutoff becomes much more
medical and research libraries (and the fact that those services effective.
tend to be very busy) suggests strongly that even the great-
est collections fall significantly short of meeting the real-life The Rise of Institutional Repositories
needs of those they serve. And it is also worth pointing out that As we move in this direction, some questions are raised about
a vanishingly small percentage of library users have access to the roles that librarians (and the library as an organization)
great collections. play in supporting the diverse needs of their communities.
Cost per use is only 1 data point we must use in making As libraries reorganize to adapt workflows to the demands
cancellation decisions. That said, it is a very important one. If of managing digital content, we see shifts such as renaming
a journal is costing us $75 per download and we could have the collection development function “content management,” a
gotten those articles piecemeal at a unit cost of $30, then there reflection of the fact that we are not building collections any-
is a pretty strong argument to be made, not that we should more as much as we are developing services to help people
not provide access to the content but that a subscription is the
effectively access and make good use of content in a variety of
wrong way to provide it. However, other factors, some of them
forms. This shift has been more pronounced in medical librar-
political, also have to be taken into account. A more accurate
ies because of the heavy emphasis on licensing electronic con-
way to look at it is that a high cost-per-use figure does not
tent. For many of the disciplines that a research library serves,
trigger an automatic decision but rather a conversation. When
the print monograph collection will continue to be a major
that figure gets above the cost per article via interlibrary loan
investment for quite some time to come.
or document delivery, then we start looking critically at the
This shift is also reflected in the investments that many
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subscription. We do not necessarily cancel, but we start talk-

libraries are making in institutional repositories (IRs). Although
ing about the possibility of canceling.
much of the focus on IRs in the library community has been
One drawback of comparing cost per use to interlibrary
on using IRs to provide open access to versions of published
loan costs, however, is how unappealing those loans can be to
articles, libraries are also using them to provide access to local
some segments of our clientele, particularly in the biomedi-
materials that fall outside the traditional publishing streams. At
cal arena. This will vary, of course, by whether the library
the University of Alabama at Birmingham, for example, the
charges for interlibrary loan and the expectations of the cli-
digital collections encompass short films from the ethnographic
entele. Several years ago, we held a series of focus groups
studies course, oral histories covering a variety of Alabama top-
at University of Alabama at Birmingham to investigate what
ics, a variety of the University of Alabama at Birmingham pub-
faculty and graduate students did when they were not able
lications, and masters and PhD theses and dissertations. At the
to get an article they wanted immediately. Interlibrary loan
University of Utah, students and faculty are invited to deposit
was not high on the list. Many of the participants were only
(or to let us deposit) versions of their published articles in our
vaguely aware of the option, and even if they were, they felt
IR, and we too use the IR as the depository for University of
that filling out the form, waiting for the article, and paying
Utah theses and dissertations. We are also increasingly looking
the cost were not worth it, even though we make it as easy,
for new ways to make the IR program useful on campus. In
fast, and cheap as interlibrary loans can be. Depending on
other institutions, we are seeing partnerships between libraries
the need, they were much more likely to try to find a differ-
ent article, rely on the abstract, do without, or, as many of and university presses expand as libraries start to move into a
our participants sheepishly admitted, contact a colleague at variety of publishing support services.
another university who did have access and would send them Activities like these may seem to move the library far
a copy. Given the nature of the focus groups, we cannot quan- afield from its traditional role of developing a collection of
tify that type of usage, but clearly, the black market in journal published materials for the use of the members of its com-
articles is thriving. munities, but they can also be seen as merely an extension of
the library’s traditional mission of connecting people to the
knowledge they need to do their work.
Alternatives to Interlibrary Loan
Given the limitations of interlibrary loan, there is growing
interest in alternative means for acquiring individual articles. Open Access
Purchasing directly from publishers is one avenue, although Although open access remains a hot topic for librarians and
often it is too expensive to be practical at scale. Services like publishers, it appears to have had little impact so far on
the aforementioned Copyright Clearance Center’s Get It Now the decisions that librarians make about what to acquire or
 2214  Circulation  May 31, 2016

license. Librarians are overwhelmingly supportive of the gen- “big data,” and it seems clear that library-based IRs, which
eral concept of open access because it reduces barriers to con- were set up to handle images and conventional text docu-
necting people to content, and most libraries will sponsor the ments, are not likely to be the home to really big data sets,
occasional workshop on author’s rights and do a fair amount but a lot of “small- to medium-sized data” are being produced
of one-on-one interaction as faculty have questions. Many on our campuses, and the IR has a vital role to play there at
research libraries are developing their own publishing services least. Librarians are engaging in ongoing conversations with
programs to help develop open-access content. Theoretically, the Office of Research, campus information technology, and
if we could get the open-access versions of articles as easily other units about how we can best help the campus solve its
as the publisher versions, we would be likely to consider can- data-curation problems, both current and future.
celing licenses, but the current state of things has open-access
versions scattered across multiple repositories, and there are Libraries and Institutional Priorities
no easy ways to determine whether all of the content of a jour- Our bottom line, regardless of the type or size of library, is
nal is available in some free and easy-to-access version. Even ensuring that what we acquire and the manner in which we
the National Institutes of Health’s public-access policy has not acquire it are tightly aligned with mission priorities. We can
affected this much. It is great that people can now find freely anticipate that this focus on local/institutional mission will
available versions of articles from journals we do not license, become more controversial as pressure grows on libraries to
but we do not see it leading us to significant cancellations any- act as agents of change in the larger scholarly communication
time soon. system, an orientation that inevitably pulls attention away from
meeting local, immediate needs even as it, we hope, creates an
Data Curation environment that will be more amenable to those needs in the
We can certainly expect to see an expanded emphasis on data future. Striking the right balance while remaining mission-crit-
curation: librarians working with the Offices of Research and ical to our sponsoring institutions2 is our constant challenge.
Sponsored Programs, along with information technology and
other university entities, to develop appropriate infrastructure,
About the Authors
policies, and services to support the research enterprise in
T. Scott Plutchak (Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies,
complying with regulations and requirements from funders at University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Rick Anderson (Associate
all levels and, increasingly, from journals. The Transparency Dean for Collections and Scholarly Communication in the J. Willard
and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines that were recently Marriott Library, University of Utah) are longtime friends and
announced (the American Heart Association is a signatory) colleagues.
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and similar efforts will require institutions to develop services

to support their investigators, and librarians have considerable References
unique expertise to add to these efforts. 1. Annual Statistics of Medical School Libraries in the United States and
Canada. 37th ed. Seattle, WA: Association of Academic Health Sciences
Data curation is a huge and complex topic, and it is not
Libraries; 2015.
yet entirely clear how the IR will work as a data host. Most of 2. Anderson R. A quiet culture war in research libraries: and what it means
the conversation over the past couple of years has been about for librarians, researchers and publishers. Insights. 2015:28;21–27.