From: Bill Cohen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 08:37:16 -0400

Sally,

One can surmise theories.  Listserve recipients would know how
accurate these are.   Some university "libraries of record" in the USA
still collect the print because of...

1) institutional inertia?

2) pressure from older faculty members?

3) "specialized collection" status? (i.e., smaller special collections
for Schools of Public Health, Social Work, Anthropology, etc.) where
the number of core journals needed by the faculty could be limited.

4) existing ownership of relatively long runs of print journals?

5) sufficient funding/budgeting for print journal ownership and maintenance?

6) fear of "loss of content" because of server problems from online
journals, coupled with lack of practical knowledge about whether
disparate journals/journal packages utilize backup services?

These are a few that come to mind.

 Bill

On 4/5/13 4:59 AM, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 11:11:15 +0100
>
> It has been noted repeatedly how much these costs would fall if libraries
> would drop print journals entirely. Yet they don't - why not?
>
> Sally
>
> Sally Morris
> South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
> Email:  [log in to unmask]
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Odlyzko <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 22:38:04 -0500
>
> The latest report from ARL, published last fall, "ARL Statistics 2010-2011,"
> shows (from chart on p. 5, in the Overview section, there is much more
> detail in the 180-page report) that among the university members of ARL,
> materials (books, serials, databases, ...) consumed 42.8% of the budgets.
> For the historical evolution of this figure (which has grown, from 33% in
> the 1989-1990 report), see the tables and figures in my recent paper, "Open
> Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general
> commerce,"
>
>     http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf
>
> The 42.8% figure actually overstates how much is spent on acquisitions.
> ARL statistics do not take into account things like employee benefits, as
> well as (in many cases) maintenance of buildings, and so on.  Those appear
> to add another 25% to the ARL-defined library budgets, so that acquisitions
> are more like 33% of the total cost of ARL libraries.
>
> An extreme case is that of the Library of Congress, which had a budget of
> $690 M, of which $28.4 M went for acquisitions.  The next highest budget was
> that of Harvard, where out of $109 M, $17.6 M went for acquisitions.
>
> So yes, library internal expenses are far higher in general (although
> perhaps not for Mayo) than acquisition spending, and that seems to be key to
> scholarly publishing economics.
>
> Andrew