Editorial

Citation

McGrath, M. (2007), "Editorial", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 35 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2007.12235baa.001

Editorial

Three key issues affect the future of document supply. First is the truth of the old saying “most articles are read only by the author and their mother”. If it is true then the underlying justification for document supply remains. If however increased access to material electronically means that even the most obscure material is being read frequently then the outlook for document supply is indeed bleak. However even though we now have much more sophisticated ways of measuring usage the jury is still out. Often usage studies are based on a small number of journals – even only one journal in a recent study. A conclusion that most journals are accessed could be true but many articles might still not be accessed – let alone read. The ongoing OhioLINK study by CIBER shows a massive increase in usage but also a substantial number of journal titles that are little used. We still await a study that deploys usage data to measure the cost effectiveness of document supply compared to subscription; which leads to the second issue – big deals, which are the main cause of the significant decline in document supply, at least insofar as current journal issues are concerned. How much is a subscription when a large proportion of titles are part of a “big deal” in which the price of an individual title is no longer known? That a number of journals are made freely available to customers conceals the fact that the overall price paid by the customer continues to rise above inflation. However the future of the big deal is intimately tied up with the future of the open access movement – the third issue – and the elephant in the library.

The Brussels declaration has been organised by publishers concerned with the threat posed by the open access movement. It bristles with worthy sentiments expressed in eight principles which they “believe to be self-evident”.

The first principle states:

The mission of publishers is to maximise the dissemination of knowledge through economically self-sustaining business models.

That will come as a surprise to the shareholders of those companies who assume, rightly, that the mission of the firms in which they invest is to maximise the rate of return on capital invested – i.e. profit. “Self sustaining” carries the implication of cost recovery only – an altogether different “mission”.

The open access movement certainly has the potential to disrupt fundamentally the scholarly publishing industry, from which a few people make a lot of money. However it’s a long road and the pressure on libraries will, if anything, become greater in the next few years; resources will need to be found to give access to an increasing amount of freely available material whilst still maintaining current journal subscriptions. In that context it is difficult to keep one’s temper when the fourth “principle” includes the statement that “less than 1 per cent of total R&D is spent on journals”. I am amazed that it is so high – subscriptions are paid for mainly out of library budgets, not R&D budgets. How could publishers not have not known that?

This is another bumper issue of ILDS. Nine articles including a double length literature review and the first of a two parter on Donald Urquhart’s contribution to document supply. Other articles come from the US, Belgium, the UK, Korea and Italy and range from the general to the specific. We hope that you find it useful.

Mike McGrath