The American Chemical Society publishes some of the best scholarly journals in the field. Jenica P. Rogers just can’t afford them anymore.
Ms. Rogers, director of libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam, won’t be renewing her institutional subscription to the society’s current online journals package. As of January 1, 2013, the Potsdam campus’s chemistry faculty and students will make do with content from the Royal Society of Chemistry, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, and a handful of single-title ACS subscriptions.
Academic librarians have to make tough decisions all the time about what content to buy and how much they can spend for it, but they rarely discuss those decisions in public. Ms. Rogers has brushed away the veil of secrecy, posting a detailed account of the ACS situation on her blog.
“Librarians, this is a call to action,” she wrote. If enough librarians find alternatives to high-priced subscription deals, she added, “maybe together we can make enough choices to make our voices heard.”
The breaking point came with the chemical society’s decision to switch all its institutional customers to a tiered pricing system based on Carnegie classifications and journal usage. Ms. Rogers has no philosophical quarrel with that strategy.
“Too many libraryland vendors obscure their pricing models, negotiate great deals with one institution while charging double to someone else, or have to ‘ask the manager’ to approve any offer,” she wrote on her blog.
But the base price that underlies the new tiered system is set too high for a small institution like hers, she said. Paying for the ACS journal package would have eaten up more than 10 percent of her acquisitions budget.
With only seven faculty members, 40 or so undergraduate majors, and no graduate students, chemistry is a small department at Potsdam, Ms. Rogers told The Chronicle. “The ACS package would have cost more than all our music databases combined, and we have a music conservatory to support,” she said.
From where Ms. Rogers sits, the tiered-pricing system favors larger institutions. According to her, bigger members of the SUNYConnect library consortium, which covers the entire 64-campus system, stand to gain while smaller ones lose. A large university center in the SUNY system pays twice what Potsdam does for an ACS package but also has far more users who need that content, she said. And there’s not much opportunity to tailor an ACS package to campus needs.
“The built-in inequity in the pricing model that ACS has come up with makes it very difficult to act in collegial, supportive ways while we look out for our own interest,” she said.
According to Ms. Rogers, she’s not alone in her gloomy assessment of the situation. “I may be saying this publicly, but there’s a lot of people saying it quietly,” she told The Chronicle.
(Observers, including some commenters on Ms. Rogers’s call-to-action blog post, have noted a potential conflict of interest for the chemical society, which serves as an accreditor of chemistry programs as well as a publisher of chemistry journals. A certain number of high-quality journals is required for accreditation. They don’t necessarily have to be ACS journals, though, and losing accreditation as a result of canceling ACS subscriptions does not appear to be a worry for SUNY-Potsdam’s chemistry program.)
A spokesman for the American Chemical Society said that the group would not offer a response to Ms. Rogers’s blog post or the conversation that’s sprung up around it. “We find little constructive dialogue can be had on blogs and other listservs where logic, balance, and common courtesy are not practiced and observed,” Glenn S. Ruskin, the group’s director of public affairs, said in an e-mail message. “As a matter of practice, ACS finds that direct engagement via telephone or face-to-face with individuals expressing concern over pricing or other related matters is the most productive means to finding common ground and resolution.”
Difficult Decision
No librarian likes to deprive patrons of access to quality journals. “It feels wrong to take information away from our users,” Ms. Rogers said, adding that ACS has “got the good stuff.” That includes the Journal of the American Chemical Society, The Journal of Organic Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and a number of other highly cited journals—41 in all.
Ms. Rogers didn’t reach the decision to discontinue SUNY-Potsdam’s ACS subscription suddenly or lightly. The society’s prices have been increasing for several years, she said. Five to seven years ago, the journals package cost half of the current asking price. This year, “it’s just too much,” she said. “It’s a couple thousand dollars more than it was last year.”
For the last several years, as prices rose and budgets constricted, Ms. Rogers has kept the SUNY-Potsdam chemistry faculty apprised of the situation. That made it easier to enlist their support for her decision not to renew this year.
“I think our faculty were primed to hear it,” she said. “They don’t like it. They don’t want it to be true. But they understand the situation we’re in.”
That was confirmed by Martin A. Walker, an associate professor of chemistry at SUNY-Potsdam. He describes the ACS journals as excellent and finds them useful in his work. The Potsdam chemistry faculty is “very disappointed” it won’t have institutional access to them online, he said. “But we’re all in the situation of trying to balance our budget, so we understand Jenica’s position.”
Mr. Walker supports open access, but he is also an active member of the chemical society, helping to organize a regional meeting a couple of years ago. (Individual members get a free number of article downloads from ACS journals, an option Mr. Walker is likely to make more use of now.) At the society’s national meeting, in San Diego this year, he set up lunch with a high-ranking ACS sales executive and tried to pave the way for a productive conversation with SUNY-Potsdam.
“He seemed very willing to listen, and I was encouraged,” Mr. Walker said. “I really hoped that ACS could come up with a package that would work for us.”
That didn’t happen this time. Ultimately, he said, publishers will have to figure out a better way to do business.
“There’s a view that would say, ‘We can’t imagine a world without the Journal of the American Chemical Society,’” Mr. Walker said. “Well, there was a time when we couldn’t imagine a world without Kodak cameras either.”
Correction (9/26/2012, 11:59 a.m.): This article originally provided an incorrect estimate of the number of journals published by the American Chemical Society. It is 41, not 50 or so. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
