To My Academic Friends: Heres What ASALH Is Up Against in Keeping Journals Alive via the Academy: Watch How One Library Decides to Cut Journals and See the Fate of Research Journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences On a given campus, it stands to reason that a journal used mostly by the faculty and graduate students for research will not have the same usage as one used in undergraduate teaching. Thus, if librarians make decisions based primarily on usage, the most likely cut journals would be the ones used by the faculty in their specialties. How to deal with this problem of cutting journals if you are a library? Well you wait three years until they appear in JSTORs archive. See, youre only three years behind. Now when others do this and the journal dies, then you are no longer behind. Got it? (Note that being in JSTOR is best practices and yet potentially harmful to your well being.) Lessons: If You Think a Journal Is Important You Better Incorporate It in Your Teaching Lesson for Scholarly Publishers: Get off of University Budgets, If You Can. Universities rarely resubscribe to journals cut from their collections. Heres an excerpt of the U of California Santa Cruz decision making chart. I have spoken to enough librarians to know this reasoning is fairly common. Cancellation Guiding Principles To the extent possible, we will maintain high-use local subscriptions. We will cancel low-use, print-only subscriptions. We will cancel low-use, local, current subscriptions for materials for which we also have online subscriptions for back issues (for example, for titles that are in JSTOR, PAO, etc.). We will review for cancelation all titles that have substantial (20% and up) annual subscription cost increases. library.ucsc.edu/collections/journal-costs-cancellations
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 09:53:49 +0000
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