Category Archives: Collection Management

Some things never change, and still don’t work

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On Monday I got a call from a publisher asking me to check on the renewal status of several periodicals. This is an old tactic; we don’t work directly with publishers, we work with a subscription agent, and when we cancel, the publisher often calls the library asking if we’ll please go check to see if we really truly meant to cancel that because surely we meant to renew?

We never meant to renew.

But it’s a shaming tactic, and one that relies on librarians to be the kind of eager-to-please business “partner” who says, “Oh, dear, that must have been an accident.” I’m not that librarian. Also, I’m the Director, not Collection Development Coordinator, at least update your records before you call…

And then today I got this email:

Ms. Rogers,

You recently spoke to one of my colleagues asking for a list of [our] titles that might have been cancelled.  I wanted to email you back to let you know which titles we were calling about.  This way you can reach out to your representative at EBSCO and figure out the status of each title.  Here are the titles listed below:

·         American XXXXXX XXXXXXX
·         XXXXXXXXX
·         Journal of XXXXXXX Research

Please let me know the status of the above titles.  Thanks and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

-Carol

This tactic should never have worked, and it won’t work with me. And I’m tired of it. So I replied:

Carol,

Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough on the phone. I am the Director of Libraries. I am not responsible for the day to day operations of our serials office, up to and including whether or not we’ve chosen to cancel a title, and I did not ask for any information. Additionally, I have the utmost confidence in both my librarians and our representatives at EBSCO. If you did not receive a renewal, it is because we chose to cancel the title. Any errors will be caught by our processes in-house. I have no question about the status of these titles, and I will not be checking on the status of these titles, as I have faith in my staff and their work. If you have a legitimate billing concern about our business relationship, please send the appropriate documentation so I might follow up with the appropriate staff.

Generally speaking, I have always viewed calls from publisher sales staff asking about the status of a subscription as cold calls in which you are attempting to “encourage” me to renew a subscription we have cancelled. I see no reason to view this call differently, and would appreciate it if you never call me without details of a legitimate financial concern again.

Best,

Jenica

Carol replied promptly with an apology and revealed the best bit of the whole thing: She doesn’t actually work for the publisher. She works for an outsourced call center that is, it appears, cold calling all the people who canceled subscriptions, and assured me that while she will ensure I don’t get any more calls during this “campaign”, she can’t promise I won’t be called by the publisher after her company has done their part. I can only assume, then, that I’m correct: the purpose of their campaign is to “encourage” libraries who’ve cancelled titles to renew them.

If you still think that by and large the publishers are our partners, and that they have anything but their own best financial interests in mind, please think again. They are not. They are not our partners, and they are not acting in the best interests of library users. They are vendors with whom we have a business relationship based on money. In this case, just one more example of that, a publisher is paying an external company to make guilt and confusion-based sales calls to libraries in an attempt to overturn our collections decisions. If this was about internal bookkeeping of subscriptions and sales, the call to “clean up” the records would come from in-house. That’s not what’s happening: this is not an internal control or customer-relations exercise. This is sales, and it’s dirty sales, too, based in an assumption that we will question our cancellation decision when asked about it directly.

No. I won’t.

You shouldn’t either. Don’t honor these calls. Don’t listen to them. Don’t spend your time following up on a sales pitch you didn’t ask for, and which directly contravenes your reasoned and rational decisions about your subscriptions and collections. Don’t play their game. Don’t let them set the terms.

Note: Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the vendor has been obscured because I’m not in the mood to fight about it.

friends and foes

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I have lots of thinks to write about, and no time in which to write them. So, instead, please go read what Kevin Smith has to say about the amicus briefs filed in the GSU copyright case. As always, he is readable and directly on point for academic libraries:

I was interested to see that one of the parties on the amicus brief filed by the Author’s Guild was a group called the “Text and Academic Authors Association,” of which I had never heard.  Was this really an group of academic authors opposed to fair use on campus?  Well, only sort of.  The website of this oddly named group (all authors write text; I think they mean “textbook”) shows that the majority of their leadership council is made up of non-academics or retired professors, who presumably no longer need to rely on fair use for good teaching.  And the strange perspective of the group can best be judged by this article arguing that textbook prices are justified and are not too high to interfere with quality education, a perspective thoroughly debunked by nearly every study as well as by day-to-day experiences on campus.  Indeed, the only sensible way to read the article is to recognize that every “myth” it undertakes to refute represents a demonstrable fact.

and

Note how clearly these friends of the court break down between those arguing for their own private gain versus those trying to uphold a public good.  Given all the rhetoric about copyright as primarily intended to benefit the public interest in hundreds of precedents, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals cannot help, one would think, but notice this disparity.

and

The ASERL brief develops this point a bit further, partly by pointing out that the licensing market touted so highly by publishers is already harming the ability of colleges and universities to teach students.  On every campus it is easy to find stories about how the inability to get permission, either because of the prohibitive cost of licensing or because no license for the particular work was available, forced a teacher to changed his or her plans and resort to “plan B” pedagogy.  Most librarians have had to assist such faculty to find other, less optimal, resources in those situations; it is something we do well, but wish we didn’t need to do.

Go forth. Read. Learn. Identify who our friends and allies are. Identify equally well who does not have our best interests at heart as we struggle to build better libraries and better institutions of higher education. And then take that knowledge about the state of our industry and make smarter choices as a result. Please.

 

specious arguments

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Merriam-Webster defines “specious” as “having a false look of truth or genuineness : sophistic <specious reasoning>”

The latest communication from the ACS, to many library and chemistry lists, says, in part,

Beginning in 2009, for a small increase to the subscription fees it had
paid for 8 ACS journals, SUNY Potsdam immediately received expanded access
to the entire portfolio of 34 ACS peer-reviewed journals, with all
published content from 1996-present. This access was provided under terms
agreed between ACS Publications and New York State under the New York
State Higher Education Initiative (NYSHEI). As part of a multiyear
commitment by NYSHEI, the ACS agreed to cap base price increases at 5.75%
per annum.

As a consequence of this program, as of 2012, SUNY Potsdam now benefits
from access to all 40 ACS peer reviewed journals online, the ACS Legacy
Archive, and the Journal of Chemical Education, which ACS Publications
publishes on behalf of the Society¹s Division of Chemical Education.
Annual price increases to SUNY Potsdam under this arrangement have
averaged 7%, including the cost of new journals launched after 2008. Thus,
while the price SUNY Potsdam pays in 2012 for this access to nearly 1
million articles is roughly double what the school paid more than a decade
ago, they now receive nearly 4 times the number of journals.

As far as that goes, it’s absolutely correct. I believe that those are true facts.

However, the argument that SUNY Potsdam is better off now than in 2009, or that the price SUNY Potsdam is charged for ACS content is appropriate is where I call out the definition of specious.

In 2006, we subscribed to 8 online ACS journals. After discussion and collaboration with our Chemistry faculty, in 2006 we swapped subscriptions to a bunch of print titles for that online access to the most important ACS titles for our program, and we were satisfied with what we had done. In 2009, we were offered a lot more content for a small amount more money because of the deal NYSHEI agreed to on our behalf with ACS. We were satisfied then, too, though concerned by the increase in price, given our flat budgets, and wary of more Big Deals for journal access. And in the three budget years since, we’ve been dismayed by the continuing increase in both unsolicited content being sold to us and associated annual increases in pricing.

Because here’s the thing: We don’t need, or want, access to 40 ACS journals. We need and want access to about 14 of those. We subscribed to the most important 8, initially, as that was what worked for our budget — we stopped at 8 because it was what we could afford. We moved to a package of 32 because there was a Big Deal offer on the table that seemed smart at the time, as it gave access to all 14 for a reasonable price increase. That package is now 40 titles and climbing, and markedly more expensive than when we thought it was smart. It’s not smart anymore, and when ACS representatives argue about how much value they’ve added by publishing additional science and more titles, they ignore that we never wanted that additional science, and we don’t need more than 14 of those titles. It’s empty “value” that they’re adding.

And here are the options that I have, as a responsible steward of my institution’s funds and my library’s resources:

  1. Subscribe to the 2013 All Pubs package, the aforementioned more than 10% of my acquisitions budget.
  2. Subscribe to the 2013 Academic Core+ package for 75% of the cost of the all-pubs package. This package is 15 pre-selected titles (or 37% of the titles in the All Pubs package), and ACS does not want to negotiate on which 15 titles it is. They are not the 15 ACS titles most important or useful to our scholars. Several of the titles are ones which showed zero or virtually zero (10-20) uses for our campus in 2012, and 5 of our most-used titles (150-500 article downloads annually) are not part of the package. Given that this is 37% of the titles, and not the titles we actually use, for 75% of the cost of the full package, it’s plainly not a smart answer for us.
  3. Subscribe to the titles we want individually. At 2012 list price, the 14 ACS titles that saw the most use at SUNY Potsdam in 2012 would cost us more than $51,000. More than 16% of my acquisitions budget. No.
  4. Stop subscribing to most ACS content. This was the only financially reasonable solution available to us.

So when ACS reps say “but there’s more content for your money” with the implication that this therefore justifies the price, I reply “specious argument”. True on the surface: there is more content. But the “more content makes it a good value” argument is false: It’s an unacceptable cost for that content, no matter how you approach it or how you slice it.

Walking away from the American Chemical Society

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There’s no gentle introduction to this, so I’ll get right to my point:

Librarians, this is a call to action.

tl;dr: SUNY Potsdam will not be subscribing to an American Chemical Society online journal package for 2013. We will instead be using a combination of the Royal Society of Chemistry content, ACS single title subscriptions, the ACS backfile, and ScienceDirect from Elsevier** to meet our chemical information needs. We’re doing this because the ACS pricing model is unsustainable for our institution and we were unable to find common ground with the sales team from the ACS. Instead, we explored other options and exercised them. You could do the same if you find yourself in a position similar to ours as ACS standardizes their pricing, and maybe together we can make enough choices to make our voices heard in meaningful ways.

So here’s how we got here.

The problem:
In May 2012, after much internal discussion and debate, three SUNY library directors from the comprehensive colleges (myself included) and the university centers, along with two SUNY Office of LIbrary and Information Services staff met with three representatives from the ACS at SUNY Plaza in Albany, NY, and discussed their pricing model. The ACS folks were very clear: they are dedicated to moving all customers to a consistent pricing model, the pricing steps in that model are based on a tiered system, and there is a base price underneath all of that. In principle, I absolutely support this kind of move: too many libraryland vendors obscure their pricing models, negotiate great deals with one institution while charging double to someone else, or “have to ask the manager” to approve any offer. In our discussions, the librarian stakeholders noted our support for this approach, but argued that while their tiers are reasonable and based on arguably sound criteria, the base price underlying those steps is unsustainable and inappropriate. (In the case of SUNY Potsdam, the ACS package would have consumed more than 10% of my total acquisitions budget, just for journals for this one department.) We also learned that their base price and pricing model, when applied to much larger institutions, did not produce the same unsustainable pricing – I cannot provide numbers, as they are marked SUNY Confidential, but I can easily say that what our ARL peers pay for ACS in support of their doctoral programs is, in my estimation, in no way fair or reflective of the usage, FTE, or budgets of those institutions as compared to the pricing offered my institution for my usage, FTE, and budgets. It seems to me that the tiered increases may be fair and be reflective, but the problem lies with the base price underlying their pricing model. That base price is unsustainable for small institutions. And, unfortunately, the ACS sales team is not currently interested in negotiating on that fact. In response to any suggestions of ways that SUNY or campuses might collaborate or negotiate to reach a place where we could sustain our subscriptions – one which might well be applied to other campuses, other consortia by ACS – we were repeatedly told “but that’s not our pricing model.” The ACS is clearly committed to creating consistent pricing across their tiers, which I respect. However, I firmly believe that their approach to the base price for their resources is unacceptable and unsustainable for institutions like mine.

What we did:
Given that there was no apparent ACS-based solution to our budget crunch in the face of what we feel is unsustainable pricing, we went to our Chemistry faculty and discussed all of this with them. This was not our first meeting; we’ve been discussing this since fall 2011 when we clearly understood that ACS pricing would continue to increase, and was pushing at the ceiling of what we could sustain.  Along with two librarians – the Collection Development Coordinator, and our subject liaison to Chemistry – I laid all the facts out. We described our subscription history in support of their scholarship, teaching, and learning needs, pulled out the costs for ACS content when we first subscribed in the early 2000s and referred back to the discussions we had then (when I was CD Coordinator, not Director), laid out the current cost of ACS publications and the price increases over the past five years, and estimated what our 3-year prices would be. Based on our discussion, I think that some of our faculty were surprised, some seemed resigned, some were horrified, and they were all frustrated by what seemed to be a plate full of bad options. However, after two meetings and much discussion of how to reconfigure our ACS subscriptions to meet our budgetary constraints, I believe that we all agreed that this goes beyond having a tight campus or library budget: this is simply not appropriate pricing for an institution like ours. The result of our first meeting was that the chemistry faculty agreed to take their concerns to the ACS based on their individual professional involvements with the organization, talking with sales and the Chemical Information Division about their concerns, and we agreed that we’d look into other library solutions to their chemical information needs.

The options we found:
So Marianne Hebert, our Collection Development Coordinator, did some research, and came up with three options for Chemistry content.
A) The ACS Core+ Package at the new standardized price, ACS Legacy Archive, 2-3 selected titles outside the Core+, and ILL fill-in as needed beyond the 250 tokens offered. Based on our use stats, this would maintain a comfortable level of access to ACS content, but was going to save us virtually no money over our ACS full package, as we would have to pay the ACS full list prices for the selected titles, plus the $41 per article copyright clearance fee for ILLs beyond the initial free articles.
B) A Wiley 2012 STM package, which offered many chemistry titles. This was about 40% of what we would have spent on ACS content, based on our Wiley print subscriptions and other existing Wiley contracts.
C) A Royal Society of Chemistry Gold Package, and the RSC archive. This was about 54% of what we were projected to spend on ACS content.

So we gathered up the price quotes, the title lists, and our usage data, and presented the three options to the Chemistry faculty who were available on campus in July. These faculty are strong participants in their professional organization: Many if not all of them are ACS members, doing active research and publication both alone and with undergraduate research partners, some of them heavily involved in ACS committees and conferences. And they agreed on behalf of their department that despite the undisputed excellence of content and relevance to their work found in American Chemical Society content, we cannot afford the ACS content at the current pricing model.

What we chose:
When faculty compared the titles available from Wiley and the RSC, they preferred the RSC for reasons of quality, reputation, and relevance to our curriculum. On the library side, we agreed to subscribe to the RSC Gold Package, and to provide our standard ILL service for any needed additional titles (though we were careful to note the $41 clearance fee for ACS publications, and described how that works, so that everyone was clear on the many ways that the ACS has price-protected access to their content). We also added on the ACS Legacy Archive, as it is reasonably priced for an STM indexing and abstracting product. There was then a discussion of the appropriateness and feasibility of faculty encouraging students doing undergraduate research to purchase ACS student memberships (students’ dues are $25 and include 25 free downloads from any ACS publication), which could be nicely dovetailed with our Legacy Archive access and would be professionally relevant to our students as they graduate and move into jobs as chemists. Our Information Literacy librarians have also begun working with Chemistry faculty to integrate “how to do chemical research without university resources to support you” into some of our information literacy sessions for the department.  Teaching this kind of broader information skillset strikes me as just the kind of IL skills we want our students to have as they move into jobs outside of higher education, and I’m grateful this is one side effect of the discussion.

Librarians and faculty raised the valid concern that we might not be able to meet ACS approval of undergraduate programs without our ACS package. The ACS is in the unique position of both approving programs and selling the content necessary for approval, which I will leave to someone else to debate the ethics of. Throughout our discussions we agreed that any library solution we proposed would have the ability to meet the approval requirements in concert with our subscription to ScienceDirect. It can be done.

The dramatic conclusion:
And so that’s where we are. On January 1, 2013 our ACS content will dramatically decline, and our RSC package is already active to pick up the slack. The libraries have agreed to do a robust analysis of how well or poorly this works out in this year, but the chemistry faculty were willing to join the librarians in taking a stand against unsustainable pricing structures. I argued to them that while I will always try to do what’s best for our students and faculty, we also have an ethical responsibility as active members of the scholarly information ecosystem to make smart choices. I asserted that someone has to be first – someone has to stand up and say that this is unacceptable, that we must find or create better options, and that we have the power to make choices based on those options. I know that other libraries — some within SUNY, some outside — have already chosen to unsubscribe from ACS content, all for their own reasons, be they practical, ethical, financial… But no one is talking about it. Or at least, not loudly enough to suit me. So I’ll be the first one to stand up and say it loud.

Librarians are often disinclined to be first to try something – we’d often rather be second, after someone else has found the hidden pitfalls. So here I am, saying that we were willing to be the first to be loud, and to provide you with a public example of what is possible. Our chemistry faculty were willing to follow that lead, and I’m grateful to them for it. I’ll report back on what we learn.

~~~~~~~~

** I am also displeased with Elsevier, as are many others. However, all 64 SUNY campuses buy ScienceDirect as a part of our Core Services through SUNYConnect, and given the broader interests of all of SUNY, I was not allowed to opt out of the Elsevier contract as a part of those Core Services.

in which i apologize and ask for clarity

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Warning: bad language ahead.

This morning, I wrote this:


@ this has to be the stupidest, most pointless kerfuffle I’ve EVER HEARD OF. Fucking bunhead librarians make me sick.
June 28, 2012 12:01 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@jenica26
Jenica Rogers

I also wrote this:


Heartbreaking & appalling that w/all the issues facing libs, people are passionately complaining that they didn’t get free books at #ala12.
June 28, 2012 12:07 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@jenica26
Jenica Rogers

And this:


@ I respectfully disagree. Posts i’m seeing = complaining that BLOGGERS TOOK OUR BOOKS, not that publishers weren’t available.
June 28, 2012 12:11 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite
@jenica26
Jenica Rogers

 

It’s that first one that pissed people off, though.

Sorry about that.

No, really. I am. I apologize to those I offended. I use the phrase “bunhead librarian” to mean people in my profession who I believe are focused on small or outdated issues instead of important and big ones. It’s personal code. I also say fuck a lot. But I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings or call anyone names. I am generally opposed to those things, and broke my own rule. I was angry, and frustrated, and wrote something that was probably better sent as a DM to my friend Andy. I wrote it in public, though, and offended people.

I do that sometimes.

And while I am sorry for the upset, and my not-so-awesome judgement, I’m still waiting for someone to write something that’s clearer about why the bloggers and ARCs at ALA are a problem worthy of a) this level of passion, and b) an institutional response. From where I stand and in my experience, vendors give away free stuff to lure you to their booths so they can sell you things. If they run out of lures, we can still go get them to sell us things. I’m not clear where the crisis is, and the responses on Twitter are abysmally bad at doing anything other than making advocates look more shrill and shitty than I was.

What should I be reading to make sense of this?