puzzled by self-archiving thread

["Margaret Landesman" <margaret.landesman@utah.edu>]

Re: posts about self-archiving causing cancellations

Busy as I am each year cancelling serials and cutting the book 
budget, I have not read these complete postings, nor have I done 
studies or read most of these studies.

But I am puzzled.

As we cancel journals, we rely on reports which show the number 
of uses, the costs, and the costs per use.  We have no reports 
which show the journal's stance on IRs or whether it is OA after 
an embargo.  Do other libraries have such a thing?  We do not 
have this information in our ILS and it would be a very big job 
to put it there.

If we know that the journal has a liberal stance, we exempt it 
from cancellation if possible - and we have done that with MUSE, 
BioOne, university press, etc journals in order to support those 
publishers.

We are cancelling journals - both print and electronic - as fast 
as we can, generally on the grounds that they are:

1)	high cost-peruse, or
2)	not used

We expect to go on doing this, probably forever.

What has made me especially sad this year is that, very 
reluctantly, we have cancelled packages from university presses 
and smaller publishers because, after we have had them up for a 
number of years, they are showing no use.

I would wish this list might talk about ways libraries can 
partner with such publishers to find ways to change this 
situation...

Margaret Landesman
University of Utah