Publishers And Digital Libraries

The effects of the new consortial model for building digital libraries are not confined to the domain of technology. During the period when the new digital distribution system was being constructed, Ohio LINK, an agency of the Ohio

Board of Regents, commenced an overlapping relationship with Academic Press to offer its collection of approximately 175 electronic journals, many of which were in our chemical sciences collections. Significantly, the Ohio LINK contract with Academic Press facilitated the development of our digital library because it included a provision covering the scanning and storage of retrospective collections (i.e., backfiles) of their journals that we had originally acquired by subscription. In 1997, Ohio LINK extended the model of the Academic Press contract to an offering from Elsevier Science. According to this later agreement, subscriptions to current volumes of Elsevier Science's 1,153 electronic journals would be available for access and use on all of the 57 campuses of Ohio LINK member institutions, including CWRU and the University of Akron. The cost of the entire collection of electronic journals for each university for 1998 was set by the Ohio LINK-Elsevier contract to be approximately 5.5% greater than the institution's Elsevier Science expenditure level for 1997 subscriptions regardless of the particular subset these subscriptions represented; there is a further 5.5% price increase set to take effect in 1999. Further, the agreement between Ohio LINK and Elsevier constrains the member institutions to pay for this comprehensive access even if they cancel a journal subscription. Notably, there is an optional payment discount of 10% when an existing journal subscription (in a paper format) is limited to electronic delivery only (eliminating the delivery of a paper version). Thus, electronic versions of the Elsevier journals that are part of our chemical sciences digital library will be available at both institutions regardless of the existence of our consortium; pooling collections according to our consortial model would be a useless exercise from a financial point of view.

Other publishers are also working with our consortium of institutions to offer digital products. During spring 1997, CWRU and the University of Akron entered into an agreement with Springer-Verlag to evaluate their offering of 50 or so electronic journals, some of which overlapped with our chemical sciences collection. A similar agreement covering backfiles of Elsevier journals was considered and rejected for budgetary reasons. During the development of this project, we had numerous contacts with the American Chemical Society with the objective of including their publications in our digital library. Indeed, the outline of an agreement with them was discussed. As the time came to render the agreement in writing, they withdrew and later disavowed any interest in a contract with the consortium. At the present time, discussions are being held with other significant chemical science publishers about being included in our consortial library. This is clearly a dynamic period in journal publishing, and each of the societal and commercial publishers sees much at stake. While we in universities try to make sense of both technology and information service to our scholarly communities, the publishers are each trying to chart their own course both competitively and strategically while improvements in information technology continually raise the ante for continuing to stay in the game.

The underlying goal of this project has been to see if information technology

could control the costs of chemical sciences serial publications. In the most extreme case, it could lower costs by half in our two libraries and even more if departmental copies were eliminated. As an aside, we estimated that departmentally paid chemical sciences journal subscriptions represented an institutional expenditure of about 40% of the libraries' own costs, so each institution paid in total 1.4 times each library's costs. For both institutions, the total was about 2.8 times the cost of one copy of each holding. Thus, if duplication were eliminated completely, the resulting expenditures for the consortium for subscriptions alone would be reduced by almost two-thirds from that which we have been spending. Clearly, the journal publishers understood the implications of our project. But the implications of the status quo were also clear: libraries and individuals were cutting subscriptions each year because budgets could not keep up with price increases. We believed that to let nature take its course was irresponsible when a well-designed experiment using state-of-the-art information technology could show a way to make progress. Thus, the spirit of our initial conversations with chemical sciences publishers was oriented to a positive scenario: libraries and the scholars they represented would be able to maintain or gain access to the full range of chemical sciences literature, and journals would be distributed in digital formats. We made a crucial assumption that information technology would permit the publishers to lower their internal production costs. This assumption is not unreasonable in that information technology has accomplished cost reductions in many other businesses.

In our preliminary discussions with the publishers, we expressed the long-term objective that we were seeking-controlling and even lowering our costs through the elimination of duplication as our approach to solving the "cancellation conundrum"-as well as our short-term objective-to receive the rights to scan, store, and display electronic versions of both current and back files of their publications, which we would create from materials we had already paid for (several times over, in fact). Current and future subscriptions would be purchased in only one copy, however, to create the desired financial savings. In exchange, we offered the publishers a complete copy of our PDF-formatted current issue and backfiles for their use, from which they could derive new revenue through licensing to others. Since these once-sold backfiles were being considered on the publishers' corporate balance sheets as a depleted resource, we thought that the prospect of deriving additional revenue from selling them again as a digital resource would seem to be an attractive idea. In the end, however, not one publisher was willing to take us up on this exchange. To them, the backfiles that we would create were not worth what we were asking. One chemical sciences journal publisher was willing to grant the rights to backfiles for additional revenue from our consortium. But this offer made no sense unless the exchange could be justified on the basis of savings in costs of library storage space and the additional convenience of electronic access (the digital library is never closed, network access from remote locations would likely increase marginal usage, etc.). When we saw the proposed charge, we

rejected this offer as being too expensive. Another publisher did grant us the rights we sought as part of the overall statewide Ohio LINK electronic and print subscription contract, but this arrangement locked in the current costs (and annual increments) for several years, so the libraries could not benefit directly in terms of cost savings. With that particular limited agreement, however, there still is the definite possibility for savings on departmentally paid, personal subscriptions.

When we began to plan this project, it was not obvious what stance the publishing community would take to it. Our contacts in some of the leading publishing houses and in the Association of American Publishers (AAP) led us to believe that we were on the right track. Clearly, our goal was to reduce our libraries' costs, and that goal meant that publishers would receive less revenue. However, we also believed that the publishers would value receipt of the scanned backfiles that we would accumulate. Thus, the question was whether the backfiles have significant economic value. Clearly, libraries paid for the original publications in paper formats and have been extremely reluctant to pay a second time for the convenience of having access to digital versions of the backfiles. In our discussions, the publishers and AAP also seemed interested in doing experiments in learning whether a screen-based digital format could be made useful to our chemical sciences scholars. Thus, there was a variety of positive incentives favoring experimentation, and a benign attitude toward the project was evinced by these initial contacts with publishers. Their substantial interest in the CWRU Rights Management system seemed genuine and sincere, and their willingness to help us with an experiment of this type was repeatedly averred. After many months of discussion with one publisher, it became clear that they were unwilling to participate at all. In the end, they revealed that they were developing their own commercial digital journal service and that they did not want to have another venue that might compete with this. A second publisher expressed repeated interest in the project and, in the end, proposed that our consortium purchase a license to use the backfiles at a cost of 15% more than the price of the paper-based subscription; this meant that we would have to pay more for the rights to store backfiles of these journals in our system. A third publisher provided the rights to scan, store, display, and use the backfiles as part of the overall statewide Ohio LINK contract; thus this publisher provided all the rights we needed without extra cost to the consortium. We are continuing to have discussions with other chemical sciences journal publishers regarding our consortium and Ohio LINK, and these conversations are not uncomplicated by the overlap in our dual memberships.

It is interesting to see that the idea that digital distribution could control publisher costs is being challenged with statements such as "the costs of preparing journals for World Wide Web access through the Internet are substantially greater than the costs of distributing print." Questions regarding such statements abound:For example, are the one-time developmental costs front-loaded in these calculations, or are they amortized over the product's life cycle? If these claims are true,

then they reflect on the way chemical sciences publishers are using information technology, because other societies and several commercial publishers are able to reflect cost savings in changing from print to nonprint distribution. Although we do not have the detailed data at this time (this study is presently under way in our libraries), we expect to show that there are significant cost savings in terms of library staff productivity improvement when we distribute journals in nonprint versions instead of print.

As a result of these experiences, some of these publishers are giving us the impression that their narrowly circumscribed economic interests are dominating the evolution of digital libraries, that they are not fundamentally interested in controlling their internal costs through digital distribution, and that they are still pursuing tactical advantages over our libraries at the expense of a different set of strategic relationships with our scholarly communities. As is true about many generalizations, these are not universally held within the publishing community, but the overwhelming message seems clear nonetheless.