University Library Committee 2003-2004

Minutes for March 1, 2004

PRESENT: Val Burris, Deb Carver, Peter Mills, Judith Musick, Dan Pope, Rennard Strickland, Marc Vanscheeuwijck, Mark Watson (Associate University Librarian for Collections and Access).

Val called the meeting to order at 9:05 a.m.

Budget
Deb reported that the library is on target to balance out this year. We have eliminated 6.75 positions during the last couple of years, which has created a significant gap in staffing. She anticipates having to come up with at least a 3% cut during 04/05 - approximately $350,000. This amount is in addition to the serials cancellation targets. The areas the library is looking at to generate savings include:

Reduce funding for professional travel.
Reduce binding costs.
Reduce student payroll by closing the library during weekends of fall, winter, spring, and summer intersessions. ULC members feel strongly that the library should be open on the weekends before classes resume. It was also suggested to query students on closing those weekends. International students would be affected the most. If students are given several choices of where savings need to come from, they may have a better understanding of why it is important to reduce hours. Deb will discuss this further with Tom Mills and how international students might be accommodated during the closures.
Reduce monograph expenditures 7%-10% (approx. $60-$90K). The monograph line has been preserved over the years. The library feels that with access to over 22 million items available through Orbis Cascade, reducing monograph purchases may not cause the hardship it would have prior to Orbis. Orbis Cascade coordinates collection purchases on an informal basis. Certain libraries will retain titles that are more relevant to their institution. There are also heavily used books that need to remain in each of the consortia\'s institutions. Deb will keep the ULC informed of how much money will be eliminated from the monograph budget.

Shared Collection
Mark distributed and reviewed a handout on the UO/OSU Shared Journal Collection. Both libraries have been working over two years to implement a plan to reduce duplication of expensive journals, identifying titles where one print copy between the two institutions will be enough to satisfy demand. To date, 79 titles have been identified (OSU 42; UO 37). It is expected to have 160 titles identified by July 2004. The circulation policy for these journals will be:

3-day loans to UO/OSU faculty, staff and students
In-library use only.
Default cost for lost bound journals will be $150 plus $15 service charge per item.
Three-business day delivery, which often is less.

The procedure for obtaining these titles will begin this month. When searching the UO catalog for a journal, you may see that the item is available from OSU. At that point, you will be directed to further instructions on how to obtain the journal. There is also a link to the list of titles held by both libraries. Mark added that most requests will be for articles, rather than the journal itself. If that is the case, the requestor would order it through the standard ILL procedure and have the article scanned to his/her desktop. It was suggested to have the articles procedure more visible on the submission form.

A list of all duplicate titles between the two libraries will be put together and reviewed by departmental library representatives before any decision are made to eliminate certain titles.

In order for this shared collection procedure to work, both institutions will need to have equal access to bound journals. There was general support from the ULC members to permit OSU to borrow our journals. Marc V. will discuss with the Music faculty if they wish to have music journals excluded as they are currently for UO\'s own policy on circulating bound journals. Mark W. added that we have experienced few problems with allowing journals to be checked out. There have been 4,000-5,000 journals checked out with only two issues lost and very few fine notices have been sent.

Open Access
Deb reported that the library is now linked to the 700+ titles held in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). The listing of those titles can be found at http://www.doaj.org/ One of the concerns people have with Open Access is whether it is sustainable. At this point, we don\'t really know, but we do know that the traditional model of scholarly publishing is not sustainable. Deb presented several questions for the ULC to discuss:

1. How does the library have conversations about OA with the campus community?

2. Should there be a library subsidy for author fees associated with publishing in an OA?

3. Should the UO, at the institution level, suggest that individual departments give credit to their faculty for using OA to publish, or should each discipline make its own decision?

4. Should the library pay the $2,000 membership fee to join PloS? (Public Library of Science - http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ )

5. Should the ULC take a more aggressive stand in scholarly publishing than what the committee presented to the Senate two years ago?

A question was asked how authors pay fees to publish with Open Access journals. Deb responded that many grants factor those costs into their award so that the author is not responsible for covering the fees him/herself. Judith suggested having senior faculty experiment with Open Access publishing. A concern with publishing through this model is whether articles will be available two years from now, as no one knows the future of Open Access. Another concern is whether Open Access would eventually become another version of the current model. Some feel, as a non-profit organization, Open Access would be less monopolistic than publishers. Val added that it is important to have ISI support (or some citation ranking) in order for Open Access to be successful. The committee agreed to the following:

1. Library join PLoS membership for $2,000.

2. The library/ULC should take an active role informing the campus. The question is whether to accomplish this by meeting with each discipline, or holding one large symposium for all disciplines. Other suggestions given were to consider general information session for promotion & tenure chairs, create information databases, ask departments to help fund workshops

Deb will discuss this further with Lorraine Davis.

Faxon/Rowecom Update
Mark provided a brief summary of how the library is affected by the bankruptcy filed by subscription vendor Faxon/Rowecom. The library placed over $415,000 in prepaid orders for about 1,350 serial titles. Faxon/Rowecom filed bankruptcy before making payments to publishers. In exchange for permission to assume library claims against the company, many publishers continue to supply journals for which they had not been paid. The library is receiving issues for about 600 titles. The library has about 700 titles whose publishers are not providing issues. At the last ULC meeting, it was suggested to ask faculty to donate their personal copies to help fill in the gaps of missing issues. Mark distributed a draft memo addressed to UO faculty, from the ULC, asking for donations. The committee suggested the memo be addressed to departmental representatives rather than all faculty.

It was also suggested to follow-up with a notice to department chairs the key journals missing from their discipline.

The meeting was adjourned at 10:25 a.m. Sheila will be asking the committee for their spring term schedules soon.

Submitted by Sheila Gray

Maintained by: Sheila Gray, skgray@uoregon.edu

Last Modified: 01/10/2008