RE: puzzled by self-archiving thread

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

> I plead ignorance here, and welcome instruction from you 
> librarians, but as a publisher of 11 journals in the 
> humanities, it bothers me to think that cancellations could 
> occur just because of usage statistics alone.

It's not that we care only about usage and cost -- it's that 
fiscal reality forces us to make difficult decisions based on 
imperfect and incomplete data.  Spiraling journal prices and (for 
many of us) effectively static budgets mean that we can't afford 
to keep buying everything this year that we bought last year. 
So something has to go -- but what will it be?  We can't just 
keep a subscription because the journal is good and worthwhile; 
the world is full of good and worthwhile things that we can't 
afford.  In the short term, we can protect current subscriptions 
by buying fewer books, but that's no long-term strategy.

Eventually, we have to pick subscriptions to cancel.  If we don't 
make our cancellation decisions based on usage and cost, what 
criteria should we use?  I don't ask that question facetiously -- 
I'd be honestly interested to know, from a publisher's 
perspective, what other criteria _would_ make sense.

Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
Univ. of Nevada, Reno Libraries
rickand@unr.edu