Idaho Librarian

The Editor's                   Second          Thoughts

THE JOURNAL IN THE WHITE SUIT

When, decades ago, the price of scholarly journal subscriptions began to rise at double-digit rates year after year, academic librarians set up a hue and cry.  We’ve all grown hoarse by now, but our protests seem to have had only minimal effect.  As the years have passed, journal expenditures have eaten up a larger and larger piece of the library materials budget pie, reducing the funds available for books, media and other information formats.  The damage done to collections has been deep and wide.  One of the few bright spots in this gloomy picture has been the willingness of journal publishers, over the past five years or so, to supply free access to online versions of their publications for those who subscribe to the paper versions.  At least they told us it was free; who knows what was built into the annual inflation increases. In any case, that online bait has been in the water for several years now, and lots of us, and our patrons, have swallowed it whole and relished the taste.  But it was inevitable that the publishers would someday begin to reel us in.

 The reeling in has now begun in earnest.  Publishers are “unbundling” online from paper subscriptions and devising new pricing schedules and license agreements to manage the market.  Their aim, as always, is to maximize their profits, and their tactic is to sell online subscriptions as though they were paper subscriptions.  This tactic responds to a dilemma that they face: the great advantage of the online format is the ease with which users can gain access to journal content, even if they are not physically close to the subscribing library.  To the publishers, of course, this is threatening, because a single subscription can serve a great number of people.  Therefore, to nullify the dire economic consequences of easy distribution of content, the publishers, in their licenses, are seeking to geographically circumscribe the service scope of a single subscription.  In other words, just as a library would have had to purchase several paper subscriptions in order to place one at each of its branch campuses, now it must buy several online subscriptions to enable its far-flung student and faculty users to have ready access to a journal’s contents. 

 And there’s yet another twist to the story.  It might be possible for libraries to get along with a single site license for a journal in the same way that they have managed with a single print subscription, viz. through interlibrary loan.  This would be especially effective if they could take advantage of the ease with which digital content can be sent from the home library to its branch libraries.  Content could, in principle, remain in digital form for the entire transaction; it could simply be emailed to the requesting library, or patron.  But the publishers are alert to this, for them dangerous, potentiality.  In most of their licenses for online subscriptions, they specify that ILL can only be performed if a paper copy of the desired article is printed off first.  Then, some will allow Ariel and fax to be used, but others insist that the copy be mailed to its destination.   In other words, technology is once again curtailed, and we remain in the old, familiar world of the paper journal.

 To top it all off, many publishers are seeking to deny online subscribers one of the standard concomitants of subscription to paper: ownership and perpetual access to journal issues that have been paid for.  In many e-journal licenses, the publisher explicitly disclaims any obligation to continue to provide access to paid-for issues if the library cancels its subscription.

 Perhaps all of this could be swallowed if the price of online subscription were dramatically cheaper than paper subscription.  But it’s not.  E-journal subscriptions often cost the same as paper, and, if they cost less, it’s rare to find more than a 10% discount.  Are we to believe that online publication, which entails none of the printing and distribution costs of paper copies, saves the publisher no more than 10% of the cost of paper?

 Perhaps some of you remember the English film “The Man in the White Suit” (Ealing Studios, 1951) in which Alec Guinness portrays a chemist named Stratton who discovers a textile fiber that is indestructible and repels dirt.  He naively supposes that he has found a product that will be a boon to all mankind.  The textile industry's tycoons, labor unions and bankers soon confront him with what, to them, is the most important consequence of his invention: it will eventually destroy their livelihood.  They therefore conspire to eliminate the threat, ultimately by eliminating Stratton himself.  As it turns out, the fiber disintegrates after a few days, thus saving Stratton’s life and the fortunes of the textile manufacturers.  I don’t suggest a perfect parallel with e-journals and their publishers.  The internet, after all, is not going to conveniently disintegrate like the miraculous fiber.  Publishers cannot, therefore, suppress the electronic revolution in journal publishing; they are going to have to learn to live with it.  One can hope, however, that they will not be permitted to do so entirely on their own terms.

Leonard Hitchcock