The recent exchanges, primarily between Albert Henderson and Greg Kuperberg, with some additional remarks by David Goodman and others, commingle two issues:
1. Ease of access: Electronical resources are much easier to use, so are increasingly preferred and becoming much more widely used than print ones. However, commercial publishers have been moving rather rapidly towards making their journals available online through various subscription, consortium, and other pricing plans that make them available to scholars in convenient form on their desktop. Thus the continuation of the publishers' role in processing scholarly articles and collecting revenues for this does not preclude access that is better than what we have had in the past, at least for scholars at institutions able to afford their wares. This access would not be as easy, nor available as widely, as free distribution, but it would still be an improvement. An interesting question is whether publishers (both commercial and professional society ones) would have moved to online publication as fast as they did if it were not for the "journal crisis," with libraries cancelling their subscriptions in response to escalating prices and budgets that did not keep up. I expect that in the end the publishers would have moved in this direction anyway, as the logic of more convenient access and, even more importantly, the attraction of partially disintermediating the libraries by reducing those libraries' huge internal costs would have become obvious. However, it might very well have taken them longer than it did. 2. Library budgets: Albert Henderson is correct in pointing out that library budgets have been shrinking as fractions of university budgets. However, there are several ways of thinking about it. If every part of the university got to keep its "rightful share" of the overall budget in the past, then a third or so of the faculty would still be teaching theology. Here is what I wrote on this subject in the 1994 paper "Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals": University libraries have already lost some of their importance. Spending on libraries has been increasing rapidly, much faster than inflation. Still, Albert Henderson has pointed out that over the last 25 years, the fraction of budgets of research universities in the US that are devoted to libraries has declined from 6% to 3%. One could therefore argue that everything would be fine with scholarly publishing if only libraries regained their "rightful share" of university budgets. My opinion is that this is unrealistic, and that the decline in the relative share of resources devoted to libraries resulted from their decreasing importance. The increasing availability of phone, fax, email, interlibrary loan, and other methods of obtaining information, and the inability of any single library to satisfy scholars' needs, may mean that scholars do not need the library as much, and as a result do not fight for it. In the best of all possible worlds, there would be resources to acquire everything, but in practice, choices have to be made, and at some level in the university power structure, libraries compete for money with faculty salaries, student scholarships, and so on. That libraries have been losing this competition probably means that they have already lost some of their constituency, and will have to change. Andrew ************************************************************************ Andrew Odlyzko [email protected] AT&T Labs - Research voice: 973-360-8410 http://www.research.att.com/~amo fax: 973-360-8178 ************************************************************************
