Scientific Journals

Improving Library Collections Through Analysis of Publishing Trends

Tony Stankus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367432683
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000760095
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book, first published in 1990, examines the relationships between scientists, publishers and journals. It focuses on managing acquisitions budgets, and helps substantiate journals selection/deselection decisions to library users and administrators.

THEME TWO

What Do Shifts in World Science and World Publishing Mean for U.S. Librarians?

Is the U.S. losing its technological and economic grip? We dress for work in the morning in clothes with German synthetics. The cars we drive to work are Korean. The computer terminal at work is Japanese. The scotch after work is even from Scotland! This fear of gradually losing all-American control over our lives is extended to our journal collections. We tremble at every exchange rate fluctuation in Europe. We worry about how many more journals it will take to cover Asian developments.

The response of the library profession is of two parts: first we monitor prices, then we denigrate foreign publishers and their products. We act much like the renowned Herb White would like us to act: tough purchasing directors. There are several problems with this. Purchasing directors arguably know the price of everything, but not the real cost of doing without it. Do they know what cutting off legal access to the flow of information to your own institution’s scientists does for your institution’s domestic competitors? It enhances your competitor’s ability to get information and then get the best people, the right equipment, and the contract or grant instead of you. White’s notion that we should all go illegal on a national basis, pirate international information, and then let the foreigner sue us is foolish for two reasons. First, it presupposes gutsy collusion among hundreds of libraries, a very hard act in coordination and sustained resolve. Second, the dozen or so of the largest European publishers —a much more manageable coalition — would certainly react in a way that protected the most severely damaged among their fraternity from collapse. They would close ranks to choke off the flow of information. They have legal recourse. They have cash reserves.

If the purchasing manager’s boycott or piracy schemes actually took hold in the country, our scientists would experience the onset of a bigger effect than the purchasing manager ever envisioned: you hurt the competitiveness of the country as a whole. What is being trifled with is not works of poetry or social commentary, scientific information is the chief fuel of a modern economy. Purchasing managers are short on insight: they bought us those Japanese computers and German chemicals because those products were smartly made but somehow figure the Europeans and Asians who made them aren’t smart enough to seize whatever competitive advantage could come out of such chaos. A preferential or exclusive information access agreement is one option that would especially hurt. Of course it could be circumvented by roundabout means, but the delays would themselves be harmful. Scientific information is a perishable product.

Purchasing managers might hope that they can get American faculty authors and American scientific product consumers to fall in step out of patriotism. But the faculty and scientific product consumers have been driving Volvos and Audis for some time, both literally and journal-wise. If you throw the foreign papers out of American journals, you invite the unseating of tens of thousands of American papers from European outlets. Soon the costs of the savings made by the purchasing manager approach would be more intolerable than the costs of the appeasement approach we are currently enduring.

Are either appeasement or boycott/piracy the only alternatives? They are for those of the purchasing agent mentality. They have not the imagination to see that meat cleaver approaches will work neither on faculty nor on publishers. The purchasing manager approach makes the librarian the minion of the treasurer, the conserver of existing cash, not the ally of the grants winning faculty, the source of future cash. Even nationally it has become apparent that the money manager’s approach to wealth production, junk-bonds and asset stripping, goes only so far before a collapse. There must be a continuous flow of internationally competitive products to generate revenues both in the world of economics and scientific literature. Even the most fearsome treasurers will be dismissed if future funds have been choked off foolishly, and those who too readily agreed with their policies would soon follow.

The key people are the faculty, and the faculty will not respond to “Just Say No.” The goal is not to tell the faculty that they can’t have something they want, it’s to make them not want it any more. Telling faculty that a journal is too expensive is just not enough to cause a shift in taste. Faculty that bring in hundreds of millions in the aggregate don’t think a few thousand a year for this or that title is too outrageous. Here is the strategy for librarians who really want to gain control of their collections: be analysts of the literature beyond mere processing and pricing studies. Librarians serving American scientific authors are extremely fortunate in that influencing American manuscript placement does influence, albeit no longer absolutely controls, foreign publishers. (Purchasing managers think World War II ended yesterday.)

Because of the size of the American journals market, and because of a residual respect for American scientific prowess, the desirability of foreign journals to Americans is something that foreign publishers will pursue. The goal of the librarian interested in the long-term survival of his institution is to steer the faculty only to titles, domestic and foreign, that serve them very well and to cut those that don’t. The role of the truly professional librarian is much more suitably and much more satisfyingly journal intelligence officer than allowance monitor. By earning the faculty’s trust through extraordinary daily attention to their needs we gain the ability to subtly shift American papers around at a time when a foreign journal’s having American papers is still valued by subscribers around the world as an endorsement of journal quality. It is important for librarians to be seen as having accumulated leverage with faculty because publishers are then likely to pay more attention to us than they would if we were mere purchasing agents. We will become people who have to be dealt with not because we are merely arrogant but because we are smart and because the key people, the faculty, listen to us.

Librarians as trusted manuscript investment advisors can eventually use their influence to point out realistic alternative to expensive journals in print – not, by the way, some paperless solution that may one day be adopted – but less expensive journals in print now, or soon manageable. But the recommendations must be carefully considered. The trust of the faculty is more important than an ill-considered quick fix. There need not always be solutions that sacrifice either faculty careers interests or budget balances. Careful analyses may show that supposed conflicts may not even be as bad as those of the purchasing agent approach would have you believe. There are just as certainly foreign publications that are worth more than what they cost as the opposite case. There are many borderline judgements to be made requiring a tolerance for ambiguity and subtlety lacking in the purchasing manager mentality. It is only when librarians get used to evaluating in shades of gray, rather than in screaming red ink, that they have a real hope of understanding and managing the foreign publication situation, and proposing any reasonable alternatives. That is the goal of the six papers that follow.

The Rise of Eurojournals:
Their Success Can Be Ours

Tony Stankus
Kevin Rosseel

SUMMARY. The number of science journals that focus explicitly on European research is increasing. These Eurojournals are compared with individual national and international titles. Their success is gauged, and their remaining shortcomings discussed. As they earn the loyalty of the best European contributors, they provide Americans with an attractive alternative to a large assortment of foreign subscriptions.

A torrent of criticism concerning high and discriminatory pricing has recently cascaded upon European publishers,^1–8 threatening to drown out a very positive development in science publishing: the emergence of Eurojournals. If these journals succeed in their goal of consolidating the best European research, Americans may succeed in ameliorating one of their problems: the proliferation of journals for each country at a time when some U.S. libraries can afford only a few.

EUROJOURNAL CHARACTERISTICS

Eurojournals, which have been steadily increasing in number (see Figure 1), have been evolving certain common traits (see Figure 2).

Reprinted with the permission of the Office of Copyright and Permissions, American Library Association: Stankus, Tony and Rosseel, Kevin. “The Rise of Eurojournals, Their Success Can Be Ours,” Library Resources and Technical Services 31(3):215–224; (July/September, 1987). Copyright, the American Library Association, 1987.

FIGURE 1. The Number of Scientific Eurojournals by Decade

– First and foremost, Eurojournals are intended to create a sense of identity and fraternity among European scientists. The strategy involves assembling quality papers by Europeans in a European outlet, along with conference proceedings, commentary, etc.

– Eurojournals often have predecessors in single-nation journals, some with histories going back eighty years. These Eurojournals have an advantage over entirely new journals, which must often wait for sufficient manuscripts to fill an issue, construct a reviewer network, build a certain academic respectability, and engender a faith in continuity necessary to maintain subscribers. For Eurojournals developed from single-nation journals, success is often a matter of progressively enlarging a good operation across frontiers.

– Some Eurojournals are endorsed by Pan-European scientific research societies. In some cases individual national societies have dropped their own titles and united with like-minded societies behind a Eurotitle.

– Some Eurojournals are based at designated European multinational research centers. These institutions, largely founded after World War II, have generally been outstanding both in research output and in promoting a sense of camaraderie.

– A source of strength for many Eurojournals is their affiliation with very strong publishing empires: Pergamon in England, Springer-Verlag in West Germany, Karger in Switzerland, Munksgaard in Denmark, Elsevier in the Netherlands, etc. This link provides quite an advantage in both advertising and distribution.

– Virtually all Eurojournals are based in Western Europe. This need not be the case in the future, particularly given the warm and open academic relations of countries such as Hungary and the immense research history of some East German institutions. A start-up by capitalists was probably for the best, however, given certain initially unpopular policy decisions and the levels of investment necessary for successful Eurojournals.

– The almost exclusive use of American English as the language of publication was the toughest of these policy decisions and had overtones of political and cultural imperialism. Editors also tended to lose their lofty independence in a number of matters, particularly in the ponderous pace at which issues were put together. Many journal editors were forced by their publishers to discard their time-honored, but stodgy, academic layouts and ancient typographies and even to accept advertising. The production of many of these journals became thoroughly Western: very slick, increasingly high-tech, and quite expensive, but generally more likely than their predecessors to be delivered on time. Readers today typically find heavily illustrated, U.S.-format pages with double columns. Multi-font computer typesetting is interspersed with computer graphics. More Western European journal publishers are putting into their scientific, engineering, and medical titles the same concern for quality that has long made their handling of visual arts materials so admired. As Eastern Europeans accept these conditions and acquire advanced graphics capabilities, they will become more credible candidates for Europublishing.

– Most Eurojournals deal with the life sciences, perhaps reflecting recent explosions in bioscientific research. This may also reflect some negative experiences in b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Theme One
• Theme Two
• Theme Three
• Index