From: Bill Cohen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:43:05 -0400

I'm taken aback by the phrase--possibly not intended to be taken
literally--that the journal impact factor was of little importance to
the librarian.   Perhaps not personally, but I thought the journal
impact factor was of enormous importance to the librarian
professionally in  assessing both one-by-one journal subscriptions as
well as big deal packages.   Might this be clarified further for a
non-librarian, as elementary as this question is?

Many thanks!

Bill


-------- Original Message --------

From: "Friend, Fred" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 22:00:33 +0000

Rick is absolutely right. And another aspect of the different
perspectives of librarians and publishers lies in way value for money
is measured. In promoting "big deals", multi-volume purchases, or
number of hits on databases publishers assume that librarians equate
quantity with value for money. For the librarian value is measured by
the contribution the content purchased makes to the teaching and
research within their institution. Likewise a measure such as a
journal impact factor is of importance to a publisher but of little
importance to a librarian - and arguably only of importance to an
author for research assessment procedures. There is indeed a "tragedy
of the commons" resulting from different ways of looking at the world
of scholarly communication, some of the different ways being of
long-standing while others have grown up as universities and
publishing businesses have changed over the years.

Fred Friend
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
http://www.friendofopenaccess.org.uk

________________________________________
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 22:02:18 +0000

>I would also be interested to learn from libraries. Most of us know that
>libraries do not have sufficient funding to keep up with the costs of the
>increased level of publication. At the moment this is mainly the cost of
>subscriptions. They really do want to save on costs.

I'd like to push back, gently, on the idea that librarians want to
"save on costs." It's important to remember that a librarian isn't the
same kind of consumer at work that he or she is at home, and doesn't
think about economies in quite the same way.

If I go to a bookstore to spend my own money, my goal is to get as
much book as possible at the lowest possible cost. When choosing
between two books that I desire equally, I'm going to buy the cheaper
one, and if I have money left over after buying my books I will
experience that savings as a reward for my frugality. As a librarian,
my goal and my incentives are different. Notably, I have a budget that
needs to be spent completely -- instead of being rewarded for having
some left over at the end of the year, I will be punished for failing
to spend all of it. For this reason, my goal each year is not to spend
less money; on the contrary, I'd like to spend _more_ money every
year. My goal is to use my budget as efficiently and effectively as
possible, which is a very different goal than cost savings. Getting
good prices figures importantly in my pursuit of efficiency and
effectiveness, but "saving money" is not the goal.

Why am I splitting this hair? Because I think it's important for
publishers to understand that when we talk about their annual price
increases being unsustainable, it's not because we're trying to save
money. It's because we're trying to keep spending our money -- all of
it -- on the products our patrons need. The faster the rate of price
increase (note that I'm not using the euphemistic term "inflation")
the less capable we are of continuing to spend our money -- all of it
-- on those products. Of course, I realize that no individual
publisher is going to care about our continued ability to buy stuff
from other publishers. This is what economists call the "tragedy of
the commons." Note also that I'm not making a "should" argument here
about how publishers ought to set their prices. I'm making an "is"
statement about what will happen if they continue to raise their
prices according to past patterns, and if library budgets continue to
grow at current rates.

Rick Anderson
Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
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