Reason minus zero, no limit. Trying to Bring It Back Home (Tom Reich)---
Negotiations over database renewals remain critical. Academic libraries face an ever-consolidating marketplace, often accompanied by disruptive cost increases that toss sound reasoning aside. This as higher education confronts losses of state funding, changing demographics, reduced FTE’s, equating to even less budget dollars, declining infrastructures, needs for academic program reorganization, and institutional restructuring. As an example, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP) in 2018 and 2019 made the national news, as campus administrators reacted to a triad of state budget cuts, tuition freezes, declining enrollments, by proposing to cut 13 majors, primarily in the Humanities. A huge outcry fought against that “Point Forward” plan for restructuring and saved those programs. Then again, saving academic programs, and the reorganization of such, did not (and does not) guarantee the continuation of library resources that support department accreditation, course needs, curricula development, scholarly research, program changes and growth. Simultaneously, the UW system-wide renewal of two databases (IEEE Xplore and ACS) turned into an instance of super-exponential renewal cost increases immediately transfiguring once reasonable shared-collection management practices. Seemingly, reason hit zero, and sound criteria was to befall to unsustainable subscription levels and inappropriate access models. UWSP and other UW’s leveraged to manage funds, lobby system VP’s, and once again secure system-wide support, with partial success. Loaming on the horizon is the titanic Elsevier “Freedom Collection” renewal. UWSP, other UW’s, and all academic libraries, need to look to erstwhile movements trying to bring reason back home. Vendors need to be alerted, even challenged on their pricing and rationale. The time is now, to talk of many things: Cooperative negotiations and collective action by academic libraries, unified calls for sustainable pricing models, and taking a stand for open access and full discovery.
Your IR is Not Enough: Exploring Publishing Options in Our Increasingly Fragmented Digital World (Adam Blackwell)---
When people talk about the downside of open access publishing, they typically focus on things like high article processing charges and the difficulties that arise in differentiating between reputable peer-reviewed journals and low-quality journals from predatory publishers. But when OA publishing is equated with making articles and other academic content available exclusively via OA sites like (most) institutional repositories, there is arguably an even more serious downside: the effective quarantining of scholarly research.
In this session, we will explore how institutional mandates to promote a library’s IR sometimes override a researcher’s desire to make research available to peers via Google Scholar and other common workflows. Without losing sight of OA’s core mission to provide access to information on the basis of need rather than an ability to pay, we will consider several perspectives on OA publishing. Our objective will be to reconcile tensions not only between librarians and researchers but also between universities and publishers.
What We Can Learn from the Big Deal that Never Was (Carol Cramer)---
Wouldn’t it be great to know about the possible impacts of cancelling a Big Deal before going through the big hassle of actually cancelling one?
Since my institution never entered into a Big Deal journal package with a certain major academic publisher, I could examine various data regarding this publisher to help imagine what might happen if we were to cancel an actual Big Deal with a comparable publisher. Examples of data used are interlibrary loan statistics, price history, and new purchase requests. I will share my findings and will present ideas so you can conduct a similar analysis at your institution.
EBSCO EDS vs. Sci-Hub: Which do students’ prefer? (Monica Rysavy, Russell Michalak)---
Sci-Hub describes itself as “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers”. Controversy continues to surround Sci-Hub from the academic and vendor communities alike. As Rick Anderson shared in a recent Scholarly Kitchen post, “Sci-Hub and similar pirate portals will lead (or are already leading) libraries to cancel journal subscriptions has been a fraught one for some time, and the debate doesn’t seem likely to settle down anytime soon”. We wanted to know: do our students prefer the experience of searching with EBSCO EDS or Sci-Hub? So we conducted a focus group to find out. This presentation shares the results of that focus group with undergraduate students during the spring 2018 semester, specifically, summarizing their reflections on their experiences searching EDS vs. Sci-Hub - including which platform they preferred and why.
