Konsequenzen aus der Preispolitik von Elsevier ---> gezogen von der Cornell University Library

[Marcel Brannemann <mbrannemann _at__ awi-bremerhaven.de>]

aus: Cornell Universitiy Library - Issues in Scholarly Communication

"For many years, increases in the prices of library materials in all
formats (including more recently electronic) have generally
exceeded—sometimes significantly—increases in library acquisitions
budgets. Libraries have worked hard to minimize the effects of this
imbalance, but we are now reaching a point at which many institutions,
including Cornell, are for this reason no longer able to provide access
to some standard materials needed for instruction and research.

[...]

The Elsevier Subscription

As noted elsewhere on this Web site, the prices of commercial science
journals increase at a much higher rate than those of the
not-for-profits. There are a number of such publishers—Wiley, Springer,
Kluwer—but the paradigmatic commercial science publisher is Elsevier,
and there are indeed special challenges associated with subscribing to
Elsevier.

[...]

In 2003, we were able to maintain our subscriptions to Elsevier
journals, only because we received one-time assistance from the
University Librarian. The primary purpose of this 2003 one-time funding
was to buy us some time, so that we would be able to explain these
issues to Library users, and prepare for the possibility that we would
need to cancel a significant number of Elsevier journals for 2004.

It is now nearly 2004, and the need to undertake such a cancellation
effort has arrived. We can no longer subscribe to so many Elsevier
journals (including duplicates) that we no longer need. We must now free
up some of the money spent on Elsevier journals to pay for journals
published by other publishers that are more needed by our users. We have
explained this to Elsevier in lengthy discussions, both through our
research library consortium and then independently. We have tried in
these discussions to broker an arrangement that would allow us to cancel
some Elsevier titles without such a large price increase to the titles
remaining—but Elsevier has been unwilling to accept any of our proposals.

We are therefore planning to cancel several hundred Elsevier journals
for 2004. The decisions on cancellations will be made on the basis of
faculty input, as well as several years of statistical information on
individual journal use. As will be clear from the remarks above, we have
been preparing for this cancellation, while hoping to avoid it, for more
than a year—so we do feel we know at this point which journals to cancel
that will have the least impact on research and instruction at Cornell.
Once the cancellations are complete, we will list the titles on this site. "

Vollständiger Text unter

http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/index.html
--
___________________________AWI_________________________
Marcel Brannemann - mbrannemann _at__ awi-bremerhaven.de
- Bibliotheksleitung -
Stiftung Alfred-Wegener-Institut
fuer Polar- und Meeresforschung
P.B. 120161, D-27515 Bremerhaven, Germany

Tel.: ++49 471/4831-1587 - Fax.: ++49 471/4831-1149