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