RE: E-Reserves question

[Kevin Smith <kevin.l.smith@xxxxxxxx>]

You are free to question the priorities of universities, but it is a luxury
that does not change the realities we have to deal with in libraries.

The reason university presses would be hardest hit by a reallocation of monies
for a blanket license is because so much of our money is tied up in big deals,
where we have limited negotiation room.  It is very hard to simply cancel an
entire "big deal" because, although much of what would be lost are low-use
journals, they are inevitably bundled with very high-use, top-tier items.
Lots of people would have their work impaired if those items are lost.  With
small academic presses, unfortunately, we have more flexibility, and the
losses are not felt as broadly.  That does not mean we want to cut university
press monographs, or that we believe it is good for scholarship.  It is only
that in a world with few options, this is one that is still open to us, if we
are forced to move that way.

Instead of spending your time lobbying librarians about how to spend the
collections budget, everyone, including small academic presses, would be
better served if you worked with fellow publishers to introduce more
flexibility into bundled packages.  We didn't create the situation in which
small academic presses are so at risk, and attempts to force a blanket
permissions license on us only makes it worse.

Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
Director of Scholarly Communications
Duke University, Perkins Library
P.O. Box 90193
Durham, NC 27708
919-668-4451
kevin.l.smith@xxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: Sandy Thatcher [mailto:sandy.thatcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2011 9:08 AM
To: Kevin Smith; Peter B. Hirtle; digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: E-Reserves question

Let me reply in this way. I'm not questioning whether librarians are faced
with hard decisions, but I am questioning the overall priorities of
universities that allocate more to assistant football coaches than to
academics. (Yes, i do think coaches' salaries are out of control. If you knew
how much I've written about intercollegiate athletic reform, you would not
have raised that question.) That is not anything librarians can change, of
course. But I do question why libraries should be burdened with the
responsibility for paying for a license that covers the entire
university--administrative copying, copying for coursepacks, etc.--when only
e-reserves are the direct responsibility of libraries. I'll bet that at some
universities this expense is taken from a more general administrative budget
and not imposed on the library solely, or ;perhaps covered by a student fee.
Am I wrong about that? I needled Peter about university presses because he
specifically mentioned university presses as the target for cutting, whereas
we all know that monographs are published by a lot of commercial publishers
also. So, I wondered, why target university presses for cutting?

Sandy Thatcher


At 12:06 PM +0000 9/6/11, Kevin Smith wrote:
>What seems most remarkable about this diatribe is that you, Sandy, do
>not seem to feel that the salary of an assistant football coach is
>exorbitant.
>
>Seriously, what is really immature is the facile assumption that
>librarians are in a position to decide between buying monographs and
>hiring another football coach.  Just to be clear, we are not in a
>position to supplement our collections allocations from the athletic
>budget.  Even the people who usually give us those allocations, the
>chief academic officers, are not able to make that call.  They too have
>to live within the budget priorities set by Boards of Trustees.
>You can complain all you like about those priorities, but please do not
>accuse us of immaturity for trying to make responsible decisions with
>the money entrusted to us.
>
>Peter is absolutely right.  If we are forced to purchase an annual
>blanket license, there is no place for that money to come from except
>our collection budgets.  I have several times been part of specific
>discussions on this point, and have always been convinced that as it
>now stands the annual license is too much money for too little
>coverage, and its cost would seriously impair our ability to buy other
>materials.  It is not that we want to "punish" university presses, but
>they are one of the few sets of vendors with whom we can adjust
>incremental expenses.  You have to get over yourself and look at the
>wider world we inhabit, where choices like this are not optional.
>
>So-called "big deals" have many problems, but they provide a large
>amount of access to our users, and that is our bottom line.  In fact,
>the annual license would function a lot like another big deal
>-- it would be a substantial drain on our resources and a price we
>could not control over time -- yet it would not provide us any access
>to new materials.  Instead, it would inevitably elbow out some
>purchases of new scholarship.
>
>You posed a rhetorical question about priorities -- football over
>scholarship.  I want to ask you a question that is not at all
>rhetorical, but one librarians face all the time.  Would you, as the
>former director of a university press, prefer that we buy an annual
>campus license even if it means not buying new monographs that you
>publish?  Do you really believe that is the best outcome for
>scholarship?
>
>Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D.
>Director of Scholarly Communications
>Duke University, Perkins Library
>P.O. Box 90193
>Durham, NC 27708
>919-668-4451
>kevin.l.smith@xxxxxxxx
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Sandy Thatcher [mailto:sandy.thatcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 8:34 PM
>To: Peter B. Hirtle; digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Cc: digital-copyright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: RE: E-Reserves question
>
>I am curious to know what you consider "exorbitant." The blanket
>license that the CCC offers would cost most universities in Div. 1 less
>than the annual salary of an assistant football coach.  Do universities
>consider football more important than providing course materials?
>(Don't answer that question!)
>
>One can't reduce expenditures on the big deals?  What is sacred about
>big deals? Already they have been discontinued at a number of
>universities.
>
>So, an adverse decision in the GSU case will lead librarians to take
>revenge on university presses by cancelling monograph purchases?
>That's certainly a mature attitude.
>
>
>At 11:50 AM -0400 9/5/11, Peter B. Hirtle wrote:
>>As Sandy well knows, there have been no court decisions regarding
>>reserves either before or after the 1976 Act, so it would be difficult
>>to conclude what constitutes "fair use" or even what the consensus
>>regarding fair use may have been. The Georgia State case will provide
>>some guidance on the matter.  Until then, it would be dangerous to
>>assume that court decisions based on commercial use of material or
>>taking place in a commercial setting apply to educational
>>institutions.  The ALA statement on ereserves that I cited in my
>>message is the best current guidance libraries have on fair use in a
reserves setting.
>>
>>On the GSU case, I am optimistic that the court will follow the plain
>>letter of the law.  A decision that encouraged libraries to pay
>>exorbitant permission fees to the CCC would be disastrous for most
>>academic publishing.  In many universities, permission fees would come
>>from the acquisition budget.  Since one can't reduce expenditures on
>>the "big deals," that money would come from the money spent for
>>monographics.  At Cornell, we narrowly avoided dropping a third of the
>>university presses from our approval plan last year; a decision in
>>favor of the AAP and CCC would most certainly mean that we would no
>>longer acquire titles from those publishers.
>>
>>Peter Hirtle
>>


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