On OA Millennialism, unholy embraces, and additive markets
Glenn Hampson
Revisiting an oldie but goodie from Joe on strategic scenarios for publishers in an OA world : https://bit.ly/3BtKZ0F
“A show of hands, please, among the librarians reading this. How many of you have gone to your provost to say that you want to reduce your materials budget by 30% because the widespread availability of OA makes your current level of expenditure unnecessary? How many expect to have this conversation in three years? In five? Yes, let’s now ask the big question: What about ten years, don’t you think OA will have made your traditional collections budget irrelevant by then?
The votes are in and we see that not only do librarians expect to spend more money in three, five, and ten years, but the possibility that anyone would even consider sharp cuts to library budgets is something of a heresy. Librarians, in other words, are in an unholy embrace with the publishers they despise. If one goes, the other goes with it, and thus they are likely to continue to support each other. This does not have to be a friendly relationship; it just has to be an economically persistent one.”
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Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2022 4:31 AM
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Mel DeSart
I will post here the comment that I just submitted for approval to TSK in response to Joe’s posting today. Mel
Joe, you asked for a show of hands of librarians who have gone to their Provost and asked for less money because of more wide-spread access to OA content. We have not. But we HAVE talked with our Provost about how and on what we’re spending our existing funds. And for this particular fiscal year the Provost gave us LESS money that we needed to cover journal inflation, but then gave us $400K in reinvestment funding – money that will be spent specifically in support of OA publishing initiatives of various kinds. The first allocation from that $400K reinvestment fund is going to a scholarly society to bring us in line with their new publishing/support structure, which will better support our institutional authors who publish in that society’s venues and will result in an overall reduction in our spend across the entire university with that society. The _Library_ will spend more, but the overall university spend will decrease.
The result of the Provost not meeting our journal inflationary needs meant we needed to cut subscriptions this year, and we did – partly via cutting individual title subs and partly through reducing our spend with one of the largest commercial publishers, where our multi-year deal with that publisher was ending as of 12/21. Our multiyear deals with two of the other largest commercial publishers are ending soon as well, one at the end of 2022 and one at the end of 2023. We anticipate going through spending reductions with those publishers similar to what we did with the first, and reinvesting those savings in/with publishers or other initiatives that better reflect our library and institutional values. The one sentence description that is being used to describe these efforts is: “We will be increasing investments to create community-owned infrastructure and shared digital resources, which may require less spending on purchasing content from proprietary, closed, for-profit scholarly information providers.”
So we may not be spending less, but who is getting what we DO spend is changing, and with the support of our Provost. A resolution being introduced into our Faculty Senate, that extends and expounds upon the one-sentence statement above, will hopefully result in similar support from our faculty.
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