From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 27 May 2016 00:53:28 -0500

These two paragraphs come from a talk i gave back in 1997:

There are many things awry in the system of scholarly communication
today, but I want to focus my remarks here on just two of them: the
inequities that now exist more than ever among different academic
specialities in the prospects for publication of books; and the need
to view scholarly communication as a system of many interacting parts
if any viable long-term solution to the crisis is to be found.

But first it may be useful to offer some historical perspective on
this so-called crisis. It has, in fact, been with us for so long now
that maybe "crisis" is really a misnomer--"chronic illness" may be a
more accurate description. The librarians in this audience will be
familiar with a now classic NSF-funded study by Bernard Fry and
Herbert White published in 1975 that found, for the period 1969-1973,
that the ratio of book to journal expenditures in the largest academic
libraries had dropped over that five-year period from better than 2 to
1 to 1.16 to 1 (Fry/White 1975: 61), with every expectation that this
trend would only get worse--as, indeed, it has. (Recent ARL statistics
show the decline in monograph purchases since 1986 among these
libraries to have been nearly 25%.) Fry and White's prognosis for
university presses was particularly gloomy: their situation, they
said, "can be described, without exaggeration, as disastrous. Already
heavily encumbered by operating deficits..., university presses
appear...to be sliding even more rapidly toward financial imbalance"
(Fry/White 1975: 11).

This is the full citation for the Fry/White study.

Fry, Bernard M., and Herbert S. White. 1975. Economics and Interaction
of the Publisher-Library Relationship in the Production and Use of
Scholarly and Research Journals. Washington, D.C.: National Science
Foundation.

The ARL annual statistics have tracked this ratio for a very long time.

Sandy Thatcher


At 8:31 PM -0400 5/26/16, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: adam hodgkin <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 26 May 2016 12:39:41 +0200

Dear Colleagues:

Can anybody point me to some published research on the breakdown of
funds for the acquisition of periodicals (and serials) and books in
university and college libraries.

I would be interested to have some definite and reliable data on the
relative balance between these two types of expenditure over the last
5, 10, 20 or 30 years. I would be interested in the trends by global
total, by major regions or countries, or even for specific
universities. The global trend would be particularly interesting but I
guess it may be hard to discern.

I have not been very successful at trying to pinpoint such data
sources from Google  -- but I am sure some members of the community
know exactly where such data can be found.

Thanks

adam
Adam Hodgkin