Re: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

But will OA be of any help to monographs? If funds are diverted 
to pay the costs of OA journals, what will be left to pay for 
publishing monographs? If library serials budgets do not have to 
be as large to pay for subscriptions, will the money saved there 
be used to purchase more monographs, or will the savings just be 
used by the universities for other purposes, with library budgets 
reduced in proportion to what they save in journal subscriptions, 
leaving the purchase of monographs at the same dismal level where 
it is now. Who knows the answers to these questions, or will they 
be decided differently on each campus? Anybody care to speculate?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

>In reply to Rajia and to Shirley in her earlier post, it is 
>clear that users in small to medium-sized libraries have been 
>gaining access to a broad range of titles through Big Deals, and 
>this has been a plus-point for that business model. However, the 
>benefit has been obtained at great cost to the academic 
>community, not only financial cost but also academic cost in not 
>having access to the research monographs and smaller journals 
>which have had to be sacrificed in order to pay for the Big 
>Deals. Moreover the new open access models hold out the promise 
>of unrestricted access to all journals, not only those contained 
>in Big Deals, with a better benefit to cost ratio than the Big 
>Deals. I do not under-estimate the magnitude of the change in 
>business models, but bigger changes in business models are 
>already happening in the music industry without the industry 
>collapsing.
>
>Fred Friend
>JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
>Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL