Scholarly communication can be defined as the process by which scholars and scientists conduct their research and make the results of their work known. Encompassing both formal and informal means, scholarly communication is critical to the advancement of knowledge and a scholar's career. In the formal process of publishing, researchers, building on the works of others, write up their findings and give them essentially without charge to publishers. In turn, publishers manage the peer-review process, provide editorial improvements, and distribute the work widely through inclusion in scientific journals. The journals are then purchased by libraries which organize, provide access to, and preserve them for future generations of scientists.Evidence has accumulated over the past 15 years that this system is in crisis and is badly in need of repair. Libraries were the first to experience the effects of the breakdown as they struggled to keep up with the exploding volume and cost of journals in science, technology, and medicine. As the unit cost of serials in major research libraries soared, libraries were forced to cancel millions of dollars worth of subscriptions. At the same time, scientists, eager to exploit the potential of the networked digital environment, have been hindered by the inability to efficiently search and access distributed, proprietary information resources. This paper will explore the success of an initiative-SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition-launched by the library community to begin to address the scholarly communication crisis. Understanding that libraries are but one stakeholder in scholarly communication, SPARC was designed to build partnerships with scholarly publishers and scientists in its efforts to create change. This particular paper, however, will address the issues and the progress of SPARC through the perspective of libraries. I. The Crisis in Scholarly CommunicationLibrarians were the first to experience the consequences of a breakdown in the scholarly communication system. For the past 15 years, their ability to build collections in support of the teaching and research needs of their faculties has been severely impaired by an increasingly evident dysfunction in the journals market-place.Data collected by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) (2001), a membership organization of over 120 of the largest research libraries in North America, reveal that the unit cost paid by research libraries for serials increased by 226% between 1986 and 2000. (In comparison, over the same time period, the consumer price index increased by 57%.) With serials costs increasing at 8.8% a year, and library materials budgets increasing at only 6.7% a year, libraries simply could not sustain their purchasing power. Even though the typical research library spent almost 3 times more on serials in 2000 than in 1986, the number of serial titles purchased declined by 7%. Even more dramatically, as libraries diverted resources to support journal subscriptions, book purchases decl...
Mergers and scholarly publishing While mergers and acquisitions in publishing reflect a general global trend, librarians have been concerned with the growing concentration within scholarly publishing, especially as it has affected scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals and legal serials publications. Enhanced revenue, improved effi ciencies, and reduced costs are often mentioned by companies as the justification for mergers. Within scholarly publishing, however, librarians have watched the number of com panies shrink while prices rise and service declines. Individually, library associations in the United States have conveyed their con cerns about major mergers to the Department of Justice. These included the 1991 purchase of Pergamon Press by Elsevier Science, the ThomsonWest merger of 1996, the proposed merger of Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer in 1997, and the purchase by Reed Elsevier of Harcourt General in 2001. All of these transactions were allowed to proceed, although Thomson and West were required to divest a small number of journal titles that overlapped in content, and the Reed Elsevier/Wolters Kluwer deal was ultimately abandoned by the companies.
Objective – The purpose of this study was to explore in the current academic library environment, the relationship between library collections data (collections’ size, expenditures, and usage) and faculty productivity (scholarly output). The researchers also examined the degree to which new and existing library metrics predict faculty productivity. Methods – Demographic data (e.g., faculty size, student size, research and development expenditures), library budget data (e.g., collection expenditures), collection use data (e.g., full-text article requests and database searches), and publication output for 81 doctoral granting universities in the United States were collected to explore potential relationships between research productivity, collection use, library budgets, collection size, and research expenditures using partial correlations. A hierarchical multiple regression was also used to ascertain the significance of certain predictors of research productivity (publications). Results – A correlation existed between the number of publications (research productivity) and library expenditures (total library expenditures, total library material expenditures, and ongoing library resource expenditures), collection size (volumes, titles, and ebooks), use of collection (full-text article requests and total number of references in the articles), and research and development expenditures. Another key finding from the hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that full-text article requests were the best predictor of research productivity, which uniquely explained 10.2% of the variation in publication. Conclusion – The primary findings were that full-text article requests, followed by library material expenditures and research expenditures, were found to be the best predictor of research productivity as measured by articles published.
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