Colleges Try to Cope With Rising Costs of Journals

The next time a UC San Diego scientist needs an article from Biological Cybernetics, or from the Journal of Labeled Compounds, he will have to look elsewhere than in the university library. Along with more than 1,500 titles across all disciplines, those specialized serials have been axed at UCSD because of skyrocketing circulation costs.

Graduate students under history professor Steven Hahn can face monthlong waits to receive microfilmed documents for their American South studies because UCSD now shares the cost and storage of materials for the growing program with the UC Irvine library.

And book purchases at the UCSD library, the largest research facility south of Los Angeles and a major resource for the San Diego community, have been cut more than a third to maintain 30,000 serial subscriptions vital to sustaining the world-class science research, both on campus and in surrounding high-tech neighborhoods.

The fact that UCSD is not alone in the financial squeeze from scholarly journals--all 120 members of the nation’s Assn. of Research Libraries find themselves in similar binds--is little solace to its administrators in trying to cope with the price of the world information explosion. UCSD ranks 31st in serials among research libraries. Harvard is first, followed by UC Berkeley and UCLA.

For all these major institutions, few short-term solutions exist other than cutting back on those titles whose disappearance would affect the fewest professors and students, and arranging more inter-library cooperation, which lead to delays for research projects if material is not readily available.

In the longer term, the promise of electronic publishing and instant retrieval, together with the inability and unwillingness of libraries to continue to pay yearly circulation increases of 50% or more, may reconfigure the way research materials are obtained.

The average annual cost of periodicals, especially those in scholarly fields, has jumped 57% in five years, while the cost in chemistry and physics serials has soared more than 70%, UCSD records show. For example, the one-year subscription to the mathematical and general sections of the Journal of Physics rose 28% the past year, to $7,266 from $5,717. Tetrahedron, an engineering journal, costs the library $4,256 this year, 79% more than its $2,375 price in 1987.

The Handbook of Organic Chemistry, an annual review of the important published chemical literature, runs $21,000 a year, although the West German publisher has just slapped a mid-year $1,300 supplementary charge on the subscription.

Three Publishers Dominate

The most pernicious increases have come for those serials issued by commercial publishers, in particular European houses that an Assn. of Research Libraries study this spring concluded have substantial control of serial publications in important scientific, technical and medical areas. Three publishers alone--Elsevier in the Netherlands, Pergamon in the United Kingdom and Springer-Verlag in West Germany--issue more than 1,300 major journals in the fields, the study said.

“With the space and the biotechnology revolution and the growth of many new specialty fields, those commercial publishing houses saw a great business opportunity and they started up journals, got distinguished boards of editors and began to attract papers,” said George Sutton, the 20-year editor of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics journal, a nonprofit publication.

Sutton, vice president at the Jaycor defense consulting firm in Del Mar, said the company has had to cancel a certain number of subscriptions in its internal library, relying more on the UCSD collection.

The prestigious aeronautics and astronautics journal is representative of the traditional academic publication, issued by a nonprofit scholastic society or association with a part-time editor and volunteer readers to judge submissions from professors and other researchers. The costs of these journals have risen less precipitously than those from commercial publishers, although Sutton said that paper and postage costs have caused serious problems for all publications.

“The scholarly associations missed a bet on market segmentation that the commercial publishers grabbed,” said George Soete, associate UCSD librarian for collections.

“In part, the commercial houses encourage growth in titles and

pages, a proliferation of

reports,and that drives up costs,” said Duane E. Webster, Assn. of Research Libraries executive director. “And there is a sense that they have more unevenness in terms of quality” than society-issued journals.

Profit Ratios Up to 137%

The Assn. of Research Libraries study found that the increases demanded by the European publishers are higher than can be explained by exchange-rate fluctuations and general inflation. A consulting firm’s review of commercial pricing between 1983 and 1987 compared to publishing costs, done for the library association, found that profit ratios ranged from 40% to 137%. The publishers consistently have maintained that cost increases result largely from a weakened American dollar.

Whatever the causes, the traditional law of supply and demand does not apply to attempts by librarians to deal with the situation, Soete said.

“Within reason, we want to get everything we can, since, in many cases, no respectable collection (at a research library) can do without these journals,” Soete said.

But budget figures show the juggling and cutbacks now required. The UCSD library’s annual budget has increased 24%, to $3.7 million, during the past five years. However, after adding in annual inflation and other increased costs from publishers, the budget actually has decreased 27% in terms of purchasing power.

As a result, despite a 22% increase in faculty and a 25% increase in students, the number of additional volumes purchased by UCSD this year contrasted with 1984 has dropped 28%. The ratio of serial-to-book material has grown to 65%-35% from 58%-42%. And the ratio of science to non-science purchases has swelled to 61%-39% from 54%-46% five years ago.

Fewer Retrospectives

“Basically, we have dropped the purchase of retrospective books, those books published over the last 100 years--such as the complete works of a particular 19th Century author--that libraries need to build adequate collections in the social sciences and humanities,” Soete said. Because UCSD is only a quarter-century old, its retrospective requirements are greater than those at competing universities because of the lack of existing older collections, he said.

The library has also dropped certain purchases of recreational fiction books, general-interest magazines including San Diego Magazine, Road & Track and Readers Digest, and titles supporting student and faculty interests such as travel guides for study abroad.

Scientists rely much more heavily on scholarly journals than monographs or books because of the rapidity in which information is developing in their fields. But reluctantly, the library has had to prune about 1,000 journals in the scientific area as well.

“We look at our various academic programs, our bibliographers--our subject specialists--talk with individual faculty, all in trying to come up with lists,” Soete said. The library has eliminated many foreign-language journals as well as some serials from smaller departments and duplicate copies in two or more departmental libraries.

“You can’t say that a journal in German is less useful to the researcher using it, but you can say it is in a language less useful overall,” Soete said. And most professors ask that subscriptions for journals from commercial publishers be continued equally with those from professional societies, even though some academics argue that they are less useful for research.

Study Results in Lawsuit

A University of Wisconsin professor completed a study in the journal Physics Today last year of 200 physics journals, showing that articles from commercially published journals are cited less than one-third as often as those from nonprofit associations and are therefore not as cost-effective on a cost-impact ratio. (The author, Henry Barschall, and the American Institute of Physics are being sued by a British publisher, Gordon & Breach, in several European countries because it alleges the article was not research but an advertisement for the society’s journal.)

“I don’t think you can generalize,” said Lea Rudee, UCSD engineering dean. “Some society journals are super, others are not, and some of the most prestigious journals are private, such as Acta Metallurgica in my field.”

Nevertheless, prominent scientists, including the leadership of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, have argued that professors should transfer their research more to association publications, especially since most research is supported by public funding, mostly federal, and thus should not end up having to be purchased through commercial channels.

Robert C. Ritchie, UCSD associate dean and history professor, said the cutbacks have affected all the faculty in some fashion. In his field of early-American history, Ritchie must now visit the private Huntington Library in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino for historical journals from individual states and counties.

Cutbacks Affecting Everyone

“You worry a lot about training graduate students because you want them to have the experience of just browsing through books in the library and being able to work with a significant number of major and minor books the same way that I had,” Ritchie said. “And, while I can still obtain things that I want from the Huntington or through inter-library (agreements) with UCLA, UCLA and everyone is suffering the same pressures so what happens when they, too, have to cut back further?”

Already, the UCSD library has had to reinstate several publications that it had canceled, ranging from Special Publications of the British Ceramic Research Assn. (vital to high-tech research) to the Journal of Behavior, Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, and Archives of Toxicology.

Soete, who serves on a special task force of the American Library Assn., has joined with colleagues at several other UC campuses in trying to come up with solutions.

The UC libraries have joined together to share translations of Soviet scientific research that, while terribly important to American researchers, are very expensive. Each library has responsibility for certain documents that, if needed by a scholar at another campus, will be faxed to him.

Similarly, the campus libraries are collaborating on the collection of corporation and other private trade journals from East Asia and Pacific Rim areas. Another project to share collections of specialized East Asian newspapers is also under way.

Colleges Collaborating

A three-way project among UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and UCSD involves the coordination of their purchases and cancellations of science and engineering journals, Soete said. “We’re doing this obviously in a semi-automated fashion with the centerpiece the ability to fax needed articles directly between campuses,” Soete said.

The potential for obtaining research in new ways goes far beyond these initial inter-library projects, however.

“Rationally, we can do a lot of dissemination regionally,” said Webster of the Assn. of Research Libraries. “But realistically, the faculty wants material today, now.” So Webster said he believes that direct electronic publication, especially for science research, will grow significantly in coming years.

Already, many scientists distribute abstracts of research or new ideas directly to colleagues through computer networks or by fax machines. At UCSD, several newsletters on Latin American politics and culture are received by computer. Webster said a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received tenure recently without having published a single paper, but having instead provided his research for review and comment entirely by computer.

“But I think we have to be cautious,” Soete said. “So far, there is a real psychological attachment by many scholars to the book, to the physical item of printed matter.”

Quality Control an Issue

Sutton said further that the question of quality control needs to be answered before any large-scale use of computer networks would be feasible. Without adequate peer review of research, a scholar would be left uncertain over the value of what he received, Sutton said.

“I could program my computer modem to send an article to 10,000 people, but that would omit peer review and then how to handle graphs and photos?” Sutton asked.

Ritchie noted that in non-science areas, statistical data already is available only through computer tapes or disks. “The Census of the United States will never again be available in printed form but only on electronic memory, and it will be up to libraries to have computers for us to manipulate the data, or to loan it out,” Ritchie said.

“A lot of material is also being made available to private companies for them to publish, and often it is in a form where you need a specialized microform reader. So not only do you have to buy the material but also the device for reading it.

“We’re entering a brand-new era of change, but right now libraries are looking at the downside of things.”