re: Study Identifies Factors that Could Lead to Journal Cancellations

["chris beckett" <cblists@scholinfo.co.uk>]

Apologies to those list subscribers who have been awaiting a 
response from Simon and I with reference to a number of comments 
with reference to our recent study commissioned by the Publishing 
Research Consortium (www.publishingresearch.org.uk.) 
"Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or 
Competition?:An International Survey of Librarians' Preferences"

A combination of travel, hardware failures and lurgie have 
delayed our response.

We will be responding to them all over the next couple of days.

With reference to Heather Morrison's post 
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0611/msg00045.html 
she makes a number of points, the substantive assertions being:

"Elements of the model examined:

Version of Article

Percentage of a Journal's Articles that are Available Reliability 
of Access How up-to-date is the content Quality of the content 
Cost

The problem with this, is that the primary factors determining 
collections decisions are not taken into account: research and 
educational priorities of the university, and faculty assessment 
of the importance of journals. When we take these factors into 
account, we can see why it makes sense that librarians continue 
to subscribe to physics journals, even when prices are considered 
high and virtually all of the articles are available for free in 
arXiv."

As the methodology section of the report Pg 39 indicates

"Initially a number of factors were identified by SIS that they 
thought library decision-makers were most likely to consider 
important when purchasing content for libraries. These were 
tested and validated by extended (typically 60-90 minute) face to 
face discussions with six senior decision makers at the Midwinter 
ALA conference in San Antonio and additional follow-up, 
open-ended, in-depth interviews by telephone. Following 
modification, the web based questionnaire was piloted among a 
further six respondents (three of whom had participated in the 
initial definitional phase and three who had not) and the 
questionnaire finalised. Feedback from this process resulted in a 
reduction of the attributes to be tested in the conjoint analysis 
from an original eight (12) to six and to some minor rewording of 
the attitudinal survey."

The footnote (12) indicates "The two attributes that were include 
in the original draft conjoint survey but subsequently excluded 
were "Archive and Permanence" and "Importance to your Collection"

"Importance to your Collection", which I think equates to 
Heather's point of "research and educational priorities of the 
university and faculty assessment of the importance of journals", 
was therefore considered and proposed for inclusion in the 
formulation of the conjoint survey. However as indicated in the 
paragraph above and footnote this was excluded from the final 
survey in order to simplify the completion of the survey. 
Feedback from the pilot indicated that having eight variables 
made completing the survey too complicated. The decision to 
exclude this variable was made in discussion with the library 
members who made up the pilot team. The logic for its exclusion 
was simply that, in the context of making a choice between 
different incarnations OF THE SAME CONTENT (i.e. the same article 
appearing in a journal, in a licensed database or on an OA 
Institutional or subject repository), the importance of that 
particular article is constant across the different incarnations. 
An article does not become more or less important to the 
collection needs of the institution because it appears in an OA 
archive rather than a licensed database or a journal. It was this 
argument that persuaded us, in discussion with our library panel, 
to exclude this factor, given that concerns of excessive 
complexity required the reduction of the number of factors from 8 
to 6.

We addressed this, and some other factors, directly in the 
introductory text to the web survey (page 49 of the report) where 
we said:

"You can assume for the purposes of this questionnaire that: all 
content is equally easy to find using library tools and general 
search engines; all content is relevant to your library; and all 
content has satisfactory archiving arrangements. We do know these 
are important factors but they have been deliberately excluded 
from this exercise."

Respondents were required to tick a box indicating that they had 
read and understood the instructions before they were able to 
continue.

I hope that reassures Heather and others that we did not overlook 
the importance of material to a collection as a factor.

She makes a further point that:

"For decades, libraries have been forced to cancel subscriptions 
due to prices rising far above inflation. No study of librarians' 
preferences and journal cancellations which not does consider 
this major factor can be considered even remotely objective."

Since COST was one of the attributes identified by librarians in 
our panel as one of the important factors and was included as one 
of the attributes in the conjoint analysis I am at a loss as to 
what Heather's argument is here. It was considered and included.

Lastly

"In other words, the answers this study have found really do not 
matter, because it did not ask the right questions. Research into 
librarians' collections decisions might be best led by 
librarians."

Au contraire; the results do matter. And as a qualified librarian 
and one with 27 years experience working on both sides of the 
industry I welcome her recognition of the importance of 
librarians' involvement in the leadership of investigations into 
issues of importance to the industry. This study was led by a 
qualified librarian and had extensive input from an insightful 
and experienced librarian panel.


Chris Beckett (MA Information Studies University of Sheffield 
1979)
Director
Scholarly Information Strategies Limited
Oxford Centre for Innovation
Mill St
Oxford
skype cjbhome

http://del.icio.us/cbeckett <http://del.icio.us/cbeckett>
E: chris@scholinfo.com
W: www.scholinfo.com <http://www.scholinfo.com/>

Consultants in Scholarly Publishing to Publishers, Intermediaries and
Libraries.
kk