Forum to look at cost of journals

The cost of producing and purchasing scholarly journals is increasing at the same time that library budgets are shrinking. Those facts, together with the emerging possibilities of electronic publishing, has led university librarians everywhere to push for change. And that’s part of the reason for a Friday, March 2 forum on campus. Titled “Scholarly Communication: New Models for a New Millennium,” it will run from 8:15 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the HUB Auditorium.

The forum - part of the University’s Conversation About the Future initiative - is open to anyone but should be of special interest to faculty, administrators and graduate students.

The keynote speaker for the event is Michael L. Rosenzweig from the University of Arizona, who will speak on Crisis in Academic Publishing: We Are the Solution. Rosenzweig is a former editor of a commercially produced print journal who watched with dismay as the price of his journal shot up. Finally, he and his editorial board decided to quit and start their own journal in direct competition with their former one. He is now editor of Evolutionary Ecology Research, an electronic journal.

“He’ll be talking about his own experience,” said forum planning committee member Tim Jewell, who is head of collection management services at University Libraries. “But he’ll also generalize from that and talk about what other people in similar situations might do.”

Rosenzweig’s journal is, in fact, one of the journals nurtured by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries. The initiative is designed to infuse more competition into the journal-publishing marketplace by providing seed money for the growth of (usually Web-based) publishing alternatives to high-priced commercially published journals. Rosenzweig’s talk is scheduled for 9:30 a.m.

The rest of the morning session will be devoted to a panel discussion, “Aspects of Scholarly Communication.” University Libraries Director Betty Bengtson will set the stage for the discussion by talking about trends in pricing and in research library budgets. According to figures from the Association of Research Libraries, journal costs have risen 175 percent since 1986, leading to a 7 percent decrease in serials purchased and a 25 percent decrease in monographs purchased by libraries.

David Hodge, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, will talk about the relationship between scholarly publishing and promotion and tenure. Jewell says that there is still some question in academic circles as to whether electronic publishing “counts” as much as print publishing in the promotion process. However, at some universities, policies have been adopted encouraging the evaluation of professors’ top few publications rather than judging based on the number of publications.

Catherine Innes, UW copyright officer, will talk about intellectual property issues in publishing. According to Jewell, commercially published print publications often require that authors give up rights to their work.

The afternoon session, which begins at 1 p.m., will present “New Models for the New Millenium.” Julia Blixrud, director of information services and SPARC assistant director, will describe a number of SPARC initiatives with professional societies. Donald Waters, scholarly communications program officer of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will concentrate on initiatives having to do with monograph publishing, especially in the humanities. Jewell says much of the spotlight on this issue has been on journals in the sciences, but that the humanities - where monographs are more common - can also benefit from change.

The final speaker is Richard Lucier, interim associate vice provost for academic initiatives and university librarian of the California Digital Library. Lucier is also executive director of the UC system-wide planning for libraries and scholarly information, and he will describe the e-Scholarship Initiative. Another aspect of SPARC, the initiative is designed to provide researchers with the tools they need to do their work in an electronic environment.

The day will conclude with a brief discussion of how the information presented might apply at the UW.

Demonstrations of various electronic initiatives will be set up in 200C HUB throughout the day, and Jewell said a new Web site is being created that will provide links to all the SPARC journals, plus two electronic journals that originated at the UW. The forum is sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Faculty Senate, the Faculty Council on University Libraries and the University Libraries. For more information, see the Web page: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholcomm/ ¶

Nancy Wick