Financial setbacks threaten availability of journals

By: Melhor Leonor/Contributing Writer 

Academic journals, the basis for many student papers and reports, are being threatened by an increasing price tag.

The University library system is struggling with a 3-5% increase per year, which been occuring over the last ten years.

In 2011, the University spent $2.2 million in e-journal packages, a price that is bound to increase in the coming fiscal year.

“This is a problem that affects the publishing industry at large, especially publishers of academic content, and the library/education community,” said Laura Probst, dean of libraries at the University. “The reasons for the problem are complex. But there are two primary drivers, consolidation of the publishing industry into a small number of very large publishers and the transition to a digital publishing environment.”

Another push for the increases is the dependence of universities on large commercial publishers.

“It’s not just the library system at FIU. These price hikes affect libraries and education everywhere,” said Philip Bolton, an electronic thesis and dissertations coordinator at the University’s Graduate School. “Librarians are being forced to cancel subscriptions to important databases and library funding has shrunk in recent years in conjunction with the economic downturn.”

In order to address the increases, the University has begun to adopt strategies to lessen the effects on students and staff, among them are seeking additional funding.

“The University provides new strategic initiative funding to the libraries each year,” Probst said. “Without this funding, the libraries would need to cancel subscriptions to journals and our students and faculty would lose access to these critical resources.”

University students and faculty have access to over 10,000 journals, some of which are used several thousand times a month.

“Academic journals are crucial to my majors,” said Marianne Liens, a junior majoring in political science and international relations. “Most of my classes require a lot of written work and regular Internet sources like Wikipedia are unreliable. If academic journals would not be available through the University it would be an extra cost to me, as a student, or a drop in the quality of my work.”

“Internally, we have reduced our costs by eliminating duplication and cancelling subscriptions for journals that are not heavily used or are no longer needed to support research and teaching,” Probst said.

Additionally, the University is also reducing the number of printed versions per journal as electronic options become more popular.

Externally, the University is working with publishers, re-working contracts for lower pricing and to develop alternative models that reduce costs while also maximizing access to journal content and retaining access to the most critical journals.

While rising costs are a problem, Probst said the real issue to be addressed is the need for fundamental and structural changes in academic publishing.

“The academic community is exploring alternatives to commercial publishers for distributing faculty research publications,” Probst said. “More recently, the ‘open access’ movement is gaining prominence, advocating for open Internet access to faculty research and publications as an alternative to the high-cost and subscription-only access currently available from traditional, commercial publishers.”

Moving towards this alternative benefits both the University and the faculty that publish their research, according to Probst.

It would decrease costs and would allow the faculty to keep copyright of their work, a privilege they often times lose when signing contracts with corporate publishers.

“Information is more important than sports,” said Bolton, who studied library and information science at Syracuse University, “more important than brand new facilities, more important than nearly any initiative that requires significant budgetary commitments.

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