From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2019 17:08:58 -0700

Brian, you make good points and I still worry.  One of the ways we get where we are is through the expectation that we will provide access to what I could call minor or niche journals.  Why?  I can think of a live example right now:  contingent faculty member hired to teach a rather second order subject (one that nobody here actually majors in) wants their students to have access to the top four journals in that marginal field.  Students will benefit and indeed that struggling-to-make-a-career faculty member will also benefit.  Do any of your categories give weight that would help this request?  Should we write it off and let that faculty member twist in the wind?  Goes against the culture, to say the least.  Is it arguable that the now-traditional big packages get us a lot of undoubtedly useful stuff of lower priority?  If so, how would we address such needs?

Here's a data question that could be interesting.  How large was the universe of academic journals held in American universities in 1995?  How many titles?  Now, how many do we have now?  I pick 1995 as the year in which big deal pricing began more or less and the big publishers started offering e-access.  

All the best,
Jim O'Donnell
ASU




On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 4:55 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Brian Simboli <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 21:42:14 -0500

There is a prior question I think in the discussions about criteria for U Cal campuses etc. to use in evaluating what Elsevier journals to restore. This question ranges well beyond Elsevier journals. The question is: what are the "first principles" relevant to deciding what is a desirable stock of journals to maintain? Now is a good time to address this question. Time to recalibrate what titles are really needed. This could incrementally put downward pressure on the ridiculous expectations of the tenure and promotion system, which fuels the glut.

Considerations in answering this question:

--determine what journals have proved themselves over a long period of time, in terms of a stable trajectory of citations being made to those journals
--punish journals that show year over year price inflation in excess of some benchmark such as CPI, or a corrected "CPI" just for journals.
--impact factors are problematic for various reasons, one of which is that they are not a good proxy for the quality of specific articles published in them since a small proportion of articles in any issue buoy up the impact factor. A better basis is needed or at least a correction factor is needed to wash out this tendency. 
--definitely take into account faculty survey data as one consideration in the mix, but not the only one
--also, weight review journals very heavily because of their great value to scholarship
--correct for types of journals (for example, protocol journals) that might not see as many citations just because they're not the sort of thing people cite.

 
-- 
Brian Simboli
Science, Mathematics, and Psychology Librarian
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Lehigh University
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