The UC library system is negotiating its contracts with publishers in an effort to maintain access to research materials for students, faculty and staff.
Escalating commercial journal prices, compounded by the state’s budget crisis, threaten to undermine the UC’s ability to maintain its extensive, up-to-date collection of scientific journals.
“The state and university budget crunch has directly hit the libraries, as it has almost every other entity in the university,” said John Ober, director of education and strategic innovation at the California Digital Library. “But the real problem is the unsustainable nature of the commercial journal prices,” Ober said.
The CDL is carrying out negotiations on behalf of the UC with several large publishing companies, including Elsevier, a company Ober says has increased prices of the journals it publishes at rates that far exceed inflation.
It costs the UC millions of dollars a year – about 50 percent of the UC’s online materials budget – to access the journals published by Elsevier, which provides access to over 1,100 online journals.
But the cost of Elsevier journals does not match their use, said Biomedical Reference Librarian Janice Contini.
Elsevier journals only comprise about a quarter of UC systemwide online journal usage, Cortini said.
“If you look at what faculty is actually using, 25 percent of (it) is Elsevier,” she said.
The UC will not be able to afford the rights to access Elsevier journals at the current price level.
“Simply put, the library cannot afford to continue to do business as usual,” wrote Gary Strong, a UCLA librarian, in a statement on the UCLA library Web site. “The annual subscription for a journal in the sciences may easily cost more than a new car.”
The university’s current contract with Elsevier ends on Dec. 31, 2003.
Librarians fear the lack of availability of prominent, up-to-date journals might compromise the university’s position as a leading research institution.
Cynthia Shelton, associate university librarian for collections and technical services at UCLA, said successful negotiations are crucial to maintaining the quality and diversity of materials students, faculty and researchers currently enjoy.
“(Librarians) would be faced with the difficulty of having to, campus by campus, identify and select core titles that our faculty depend on,” Shelton said.
Budget cuts and high journal prices already forced the UCLA library to cancel 1,400 subscriptions this summer, and Shelton estimated UCLA would probably lose about 700 journals if negotiations fail.
The UCLA Library’s budget was cut by 6 percent when the state budget was signed in August, leading to a $700,000 reduction in its collections funding and a $1.4 million reduction in its operations funding.
The UC’s current contracts allow for systemwide access to Elsevier journals, meaning that any university within the UC system can access and use the journals.
Shelton said maintaining systemwide rights is important because UCLA could not afford to buy the rights to all the journals alone.
Veronica Villasenor, a fourth-year psychology student, is concerned about possibly losing access to materials she uses now.
“Usually, when I do research papers, I depend on what’s accessible online,” Villasenor said.
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