Vol. 7, No. 1: September 15, 2000
Electronic Resources,
Academic Libraries, and Scholarly Publishing:
Who's Affected and How?
by Jennifer Smith, TTT Editor
[Quick link to resources for further reading]
In many ways, libraries are the cornerstones of academic institutions. If one of the hallmarks of an undergraduate education is learning to do in-depth, independent research, libraries need to fulfill their roles as repositories of information and centers of learning for students. And, of course, highly-skilled librarians need to be available to help connect users with the resources they need. But what of the status of the academic library in the digital age? Rapidly expanding electronic resources, distance education, and other relatively new developments pose unique challenges for academic librarians and administrators. Similarly, electronic resources are changing the face of academic publishing, presenting scholars with new venues to distribute their work, and giving students an often daunting array of new sources to turn to for information.
This theme issue of Teaching with Technology Today focuses on some of the issues librarians and scholars face as electronic resources grow in popularity and begin mounting a challenge to the dominance of print resources. Contributors from several UW institutions address what electronic resources mean for distance education students, students with disabilities, and librarians making acquisition choices on limited budgets.
Issues for Librarians
From a librarian's perspective, electronic resources raise questions of cost, controlling access, and storage, among other things. Can electronic resources truly become an alternative to some of the print journals whose costs have skyrocketed in the last several years? Who will be able to access these publications–the public at large, university users logging in from anywhere, or only those physically at campus libraries? Will e-journals store their back issues on their own servers, and will university libraries always have access to those issues? If a journal goes under, what happens to electronic back issues that a library had already paid for access to? Do librarians have the time to keep their users up to date on what new resources are available?
However, with these challenges, electronic resources stand to offer significant benefits to librarians. For example, many delicate or rare items kept in special collections or rare books areas of libraries–and often available to users only by appointment–can be placed on the web as electronic texts or digital images, making them known to a wider public. Also, electronic resources may be a good way to deal with limited physical space in libraries. These resources are also a convenient way to provide materials to distance education students.
Electronic journals are also being heralded as a way to avert the "crisis is scholarly publishing," as some have dubbed it. Particularly in science, technical, and medical fields, journal prices have risen to new heights. For the year 2000, the journal Brain Research (Elsevier) climbed to a subcription price of over $16,000. Several other science and medical journals published by Elsevier and Wiley are also well over $10,000 per year. While large libraries like those of the UW-Madison may remain obligated to order all of the leading journals in specific fields, smaller campuses often get left behind–they simply don't have the budgets needed to keep up, and cuts must be made. As a result, professors and students on those campuses have access to less and less scholarly research.
New organizations like SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and Create Change are looking to shake up this state of affairs. They argue that some in the commercial publishing industry have gotten out of touch with a core academic value–making scholarly research as widely available as possible–in the pursuit of profit. These new ventures, backed primarly by academic librarians and scholars, are looking at reputable, refereed e-journals as an alternative to the costly traditional journals. And they're gaining quite a bit of support–the UW is a founding member of SPARC. (For links to SPARC, Create Change, and related resources, see below.)
Publishers, Students, and Authors
For publishers, choosing the digital path can allow quicker dissemination of information, a boon in the sciences, medicine, and other disciplines where research results can become old fast. Even publishers who do not want to embrace electronic publishing can use the Web as a marketing tool for their traditional publications. Still, many academic disciplines remain wary of e-publications, choosing to rely on the standard, most reputable journals in their fields.
Scholars may worry that publishing their work in an electronic venue is a gamble. Many tenure committees are not willing to consider e-publications as "real" publications on one's curriculum vitae. Plus, it may not always be clear which e-journals are here to stay. If an e-journal fails, a scholar may wonder, will the article I published with them be lost to obscurity forever?
Electronic resources seem to pose fewer thorny questions for students. Distance education students, who may have difficulty getting to campus for library trips, can now access a substantial amount of information online, from full-text journal databases to websites. These can supplement traditional materials that may need to be mailed by the student's university library.
Advanced students can also complete much of the legwork for research excursions ahead of time. As archives, museums, research institutes and the like put catalogs of their holdings online, it becomes easier and quicker for students to identify those institutions that have the resources they need. This helps not only students doing research in the U.S., but also graduate students who may need to do archival research abroad.
Master's and doctoral students can also benefit from online venues for publishing their theses and dissertations, bringing these papers out of their traditional obscurity. Dissertation.com allows grads to pay a filing fee and then have their theses listed on its site, which also has a deal with Amazon.com. Thus, searches on Amazon can turn up academic papers on Dissertation.com. When a graduate's paper is sold, the author receives royalties. While fledgling scholars are unlikely to make much money this way, these dissertation services allow their research to find a wider audience, possibly helping them make contacts in their fields.
I. The "Crisis in Scholarly Publishing" and New Electronic Publishing Initiatives
BioOne
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core
Create Change
http://www.createchange.org/home.html
D-Lib Forum
http://www.dlib.org/
PEAK: Pricing Electronic Access
to Knowledge (A project at the University of Michigan)
Homepage: http://www.lib.umich.edu/libhome/peak/
Conference papers: http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/program.htm
SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and
Academic Resources Coalition
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
II. Background
Reading in the Chronicle of Higher Education
(Subscribers can read the Chronicle online at http://chronicle.com.
Back issues are easily searchable.)
A. Librarians / Academic Libraries
B. The Publishing Industry
C. Scholars / Authors
D. Students
A. Librarians / Academic Libraries
"California State U. Tries
to Create a New Way to Buy On-Line Journals:
Vast system seeks to take advantage of its clout with publishers and data-base
providers"
by Lisa Guernsey
January 22, 1999
"Stanford Project Will Test
an Approach for Preserving Digital Journals"
by Scott Carlson
March 10, 2000
"Academic Librarians Offer
the Crucial Human Element in Online Scholarship"
by Martin Raish
April 21, 2000
"2 California Digital Libraries
Agree to Collaborate on Online Projects"
by Florence Olson
June 14, 2000
"Scholarly Publishing in
an Electronic Age: 8 Views of the Future"
June 25, 1999
"E-Books and Retro Glue Protect
the Vested Interests of Publishing"
by Michael Jensen
June 23, 2000
"Why Do Some Electronic-Only
Journals Struggle, While Others Flourish?:
Visibility looms large for authors seeking a publisher for their papers"
by Vincent Kiernan
May 21, 1999
"The Riches of Hypertext
for Scholarly Journals"
by Roy Rosenzweig
March 17, 2000
"Devising an Online Future
for Journals of History"
by Michael Grossberg
April 21, 2000
"West Virginia U., Following
Virginia Tech, Now Requires Digital Dissertations"
by Lisa Guernsey
October 2, 1998
"Dissertation.Com Helps Thesis
Authors Find a Paying Audience"
by Lisa Guernsey
November 27, 1998