Sir Brian K. Follett
4.1 Introduction
Faculty undertaking research at the cutting edge of their subject must have access to the world’s knowledge base: it is a key infrastructural requirement of a research-intensive university. The challenge is how to organize and deliver this requirement, either within a single university or jointly across, say, a nation state.
Over the last few years the most obvious trend in science journals has been their arrival on the Internet and libraries have chosen, or been forced, to outsource much of their provision onto publishers’ websites. This has yet to occur on a major scale in the humanities and social sciences, or in the provision of under- graduate materials, and so the paper form still predominates but for how long is an interesting question. If I speak as a scientist, and not as a librarian (or Uni- versity Rector), the electronic trends of the past few years have many virtues.
The speed of access to scientific articles, as well as the efficiency of hunting for materials, has been transformed by the web. In many areas especially biomedicine the provision of powerful databases and search engines created by the NIH mean I can cover my own areas of endeavour (biological clocks; repro- ductive biology) thoroughly, easily and quickly with a small investment of time each week. There are downsides, of course. Few scientists browse in their librar- ies any more. What is more the sheer growth in overall publication means that review journals have become more important (e.g.Trends in...;Annual Review of...) whilst weekly publications like Nature,Scienceor Naturwissenschaften, must be read to retain a sense of what is happening more widely in science. All
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these trends may be causing certain distortions. Only a few percent of articles submitted toNatureare being published so that if one submits an article the chances are that it will never be read by a research scientist but judged rapidly, and rather crudely, by the publishing team. That is negative and in some ways it lowers the esteem of such weekly publications. More broadly it reflects a trend in many countries that scientists must publish in those journals with highest impact factors.
Within the research library itself the changes have been more profound. The web has proved itself a truly disruptive technology: it brings great benefits but at the same time it threatens the traditional place of the university library at the heart of the institution. Librarians have responded flexibly to the challenges but one aspect has defeated all of them: the continuing rise in acquisition costs that outstrip underlying inflation. The traditional approach to excessive cost pres- sures is to adjust expenditure between activities but this has proved difficult because the traditional roles of libraries have not disappeared whatsoever, indeed they may have intensified. Perhaps we are really watching a world-wide trend whereby information resources are becoming more important within society. Put another way this information aspect of a university is growing relative to some other aspects.
At a university or supra-university level the pressures become most obvious in financial terms. So what, if anything, can be done about it?
4.2 The Increasing Importance of Universities
The last fifteen years has witnessed another trend which is quite distinct from
“information resources”. Across the world governments of all political persua- sions are changing their views of universities and, as manufacturing wanes, nations are attempting to move up-market into higher value products and services. This is placing universities in a far more central position within society than they have experienced previously. They are being viewed not only as the key generator of highly trained persons but through their research as a major stimulus for new “knowledge-based” industries. For example, in the UK there is now a significant focus upon patents and spin-out companies emerging from the universities, primarily in science and technology but increasingly also in the creative and service industries. In summary the opportunities for our universities have become much greater but because most remain heavily dependent upon the taxpayer for resources they are watched by government and also attract the critical gaze of the media and of the public. We are adjusting but it is not proving an entirely comfortable experience!
One consequence in some countries (but not yet all by any means) is that gov- ernments have driven through changes aimed at improving the competitive- ness of their universities both between themselves (the market economy for research and teaching resources) and internationally. Experience shows that these changes are not universally welcomed by the universities, or their faculty, but the available evidence but points strongly to the fact that the advantages of
some competition greatly outweigh the disadvantages. This has occurred most obviously in the quantity and quality of research outputs (e.g. the UK’s so- called research assessment exercises every few years, the less frequent analyses of research-doctorate programs in the USA, and the research analyses being undertaken by the DFG in Germany ), in the greater financial independence of institutions (at Warwick University in 1980 the proportion of funding coming as state grant was 90%, now it is 22% and the turnover is twice as large in real terms), and in a university’s ability to attract higher quality undergraduates and graduate students (including those from abroad). I do believe that it has been this kind of evidence which has persuaded governments to invest more heavily in their universities. They see them as agile and responsive organizations with a focus upon the “customer” (student, research contractor) rather than upon themselves. In the past year alone the UK government has introduced three more changes in the university system: firstly a ten-year financial strategy to strengthen the science and technology base (defined broadly asGesellschaft), secondly providing proper overheads for research grants and contracts (“full economic cost provisions”), and thirdly a significant increases in undergradu- ate tuition fees (from ca. 1800 to 4500 Euro per annum). These are intended (a) to put university research and teaching on a sustainable economic basis and (b) to drive up the quality of both teaching and research. This is the backdrop to considering libraries which, in my view, constitute one of the key infrastructure requirements in any leading university. The UK government’s strategy arises in part from arguments about the future basis of the economy but without doubt it is backed up by growing statistical evidence (King, 2004) that some nations are performing significantly more strongly than others in a range of scientific and technological disciplines, and that the UK does rather well out of such analyses.
In Switzerland, King’s data should be even more valuable in any debates with its governments: Switzerland’s S&T productivity (citations per paper normalized across academic disciplines) is ranked first (1st Switzerland; 2nd USA; 3rd Denmark; 4th UK; 5th Netherlands; 6th Germany, etc.).
Slowly but surely all these changes are leading to a greater differentiation between universities. This trend is encapsulated in national “league tables” of universities (e.g. US News and World Report each autumn, the (London)Times in May of each year) which are widely read, much criticized within universities and followed avidly! This “league table mentality” has been taken one step fur- ther recently with attempts to compare universities between countries (e.g.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University; The Times Higher Education)and to the grow- ing conviction that a country must have a number of“world-class universities”if it is to be at the cutting edge in the new“knowledge economy.” The most recent example of a nation responding to these pressures is Germany where in 2006 a serious competition has taken place for major extra funding in certain universi- ties. As someone privileged to play a minor role in this “excellence initiative” I can vouch for its intensity and its importance to the competing universities.
On this basis the USA can relax. It dominates the lists with 28 of the “top 50”
(55%). That comes as no surprise (even given the rather English-language dom- inance of the tables). But in some ways what is most interesting are the other nation states with more than one university in the “top 50”. These are the UK
(7), Australia (3), Canada, China, Japan, and Switzerland (2 each). One of those two Swiss institutions is ETH, ranked well into the top half of the “top 50” and at position ten in the Times Higher table.
Thoughtful academics should question the precision of such league tables but we should never underrate the capacity of such analyses to be used by govern- ments to shape policy (after all, in other spheres of life school, health, defence and industrial policies we expect evidence-based decisions).
4.3 Funding the Library
So, one can probably define those universities which are “world-class” and which must provide extremely comprehensive information resources for their future health and welfare. But can they afford such resources? The answer, I think is “yes” and “no”. I only have limited data on library expenditures in major universities but the picture for Europe is not encouraging. Oxford and Cambridge spend far more than virtually any other universities (and are also favoured by the UK copyright deposit system) but the sums expended are only one-half of those at Stanford, Berkeley, Yale and Michigan. The situation is much worse for the next tier of research-intensive British universities with serious claims to be defined as “world-class” and universities such as University College London, Imperial College London, Bristol, and Manchester spend only a fraction on their libraries compared with their peers in the States. Let me enter a caveat at this point, however. There is no obvious correlation between a universities expenditure on its library and research productivity of their faculty (e.g. citations per faculty). Perhaps some enterprising librarians will demon- strate such a correlation by more sophisticated methods and thereby improve their arguments for more resources. Insofar as the UK is concerned we were puzzled by the apparent underinvestment in journals scholarly monographs not leading to a greater difference with peer universities in the States. We cannot prove our hypothesis but think that part of the explanation lies in the British Library’s national collection of periodicals held at Boston Spa which allows academics rapid access to the full range of world journals, and so has allowed individual universities to spend much less than their counterparts across the Atlantic. If true here is a fine example of national endeavours “adding value” and I shall return to the issue below.
Nevertheless “the under-funding of libraries” is a perennial issue for all librari- ans and for the university’s administration. Most of the costs in libraries are inflating at rates similar to those in the university at large (staff salaries, provi- sions of buildings) but without doubt there have been much faster rates in (a) the costs of S&T journals, (b) in the offering e-library provision whilst continu- ing to take the print version, and (c) in the requirement to mount new on line services (e.g. institutional repositories, catalogue retroconversions, online access to search engines). Yes, university libraries are genuinely underfunded.
So, what should be done? The most obvious solution would be for each univer- sity to rebalance its internal expenditure and shift more resources to the library
system. My best estimate is that at Oxford and Cambridge the extra costs of han- dling the “hyper-inflating” items listed above (S&T journal subscriptions, new services) would require an annual increase in the materials budget for each library of about 1.5m Euros. With a university turnover of 500m Euros this is feasible and even across a decade the expenditure on libraries would rise from 6.2 to 8.5% of total costs. It could be done if the will were present and the faculty perceived the provision of superb information resources as a primary infrastructural requirement for the R&D base.
To be honest I suspect these arguments have not been argued through in virtu- ally any university. Indeed, I am not optimistic that a university would willingly rebalance expenditure in favour of libraries, not least because there is a long- standing maxim that the most effective way to improve a university is to invest in more faculty and not in improving the infrastructure. As an academic, I also believed this but as Rector I would argue that universities are under capitalized and over trade, and that their best way forward is to restrict investment in peo- ple but ensure the resources exist for the individual faculty to optimize their outputs.
Is there an alternative? The most obvious is to shift a significant proportion of S&T journal costs from the library (central university) onto the researchers themselves. There are many potential models but the simplest is to make pub- lishing another cost of research similar to the purchasing of materials (chemi- cals, time on a large machine, animals), of staff (postdoctoral fellows, graduate and technical assistants) and of laboratory space. If this had happened thirty years ago then I suspect many of the inflationary issues would have not run away from us so fast or for so many years. Ironically, contributing to the costs of publishing one’s research results has been a peripheral factor all along. For example, page charges of many journals lower subscription costs significantly less whilst purchasing reprints has always been a highly expensive business for the researcher. I make the obvious point that if publication costs in the sciences were moved to the researcher from the librarian (and robust means adopted to circumvent the obvious difficulties) then this would have two effects. Firstly, it would lower central library expenditure significantly and secondly it would bring the customer (the researcher) much more directly in contact with the cost problems faced by librarians. One suspects that whilst the scientists are isolated from such issues (“the library is a free good paid for by others”) then their involvement in the publishing debate will remain peripheral and they will not act decisively against excessive publisher (profit or not-for-profit) demands and pricing strategies, let alone wholeheartedly embrace approaches such as institutional repositories. Somehow we must involve the general mass of researchers in issues related to publication: frankly, this is not happening even when there is an active international discussion about “open access”. It has caught the eyes of research grants funders (NIH, Wellcome Trust, UK Research Councils) but the debate it still peripheral from the heartland of the researchers themselves, and the Rectors themselves studiously avoid becoming involved!
The approach above would, I believe, go some way to tackling the costs of S&T journals but it may only cap that particular element of the cost structure where
publishers feel they are currently able to drive a market. If I speculated about the future then I can see parallel developments in the social sciences and humanities, let alone in the widespread cry from undergraduates that “there are not enough textbooks in the library”. This last is indeed true and the internet offers a clear solution but who is to pay for the textbook to be available on each student’s computer?
4.4 A National Approach
Some world-class universities could doubtless solve their problems – or at least ameliorate them – but there are weaknesses:
1. Costs will probably continue to rise faster than basic inflation for at least the next couple of decades. Partly this is because the internet is leading to a society where more and more access to information resources is seen as a societal good (quantity is the thing, forget quality!). Partly it lies within our own culture of linking academic success to publication so that the real power lies not with the customer (the researcher) but with the publisher (commer- cial and not-for-profit) and the intermediaries (providers of search engines). No wonder, the NIH and the Wellcome Trust are moving to an open access situation.
2. For sound reasons (usually associated with undergraduate teaching) most countries have adopted a model of having many universities (ca. one per half million of population) and truly massive urban universities have not proved ideal either for teaching or for research. The result is many university libraries at the very moment in history when the technology (the Internet developed, ironically, by the public sector and universities) means that one server can supply the entire world with information from a given journal.
This inversion lies at the very heart of the librarian’s dilemma and is why cooperation and deep collaboration between universities is essential, not a luxury to be argued about! The researcher simply wants information and is not terribly interested in where it comes from. They like the provision of materials at their desk-top from electronic sources: it is efficient, customer friendly and delivers information rapidly, particularly because they are not paying for the service directly.
3. The vast proportion of a nation’s universities are not in the world-class league and capable one way or another of supplying their information needs.
Since I believe that the health of a nation’s research depends as much upon them as on the leading universities then what can be done to help them provide information resources.
4. Finally, let me mention the great national libraries. In most countries these are funded separately from university libraries and have grown up with a somewhat different culture. Yet we know that over one-half of the activity in the British Library is the provision of resources for research. This may have as its public focus the great reading rooms but the library also subscribes to a vast range of journals: far more than any other library in the UK. A number
of us in the British Library and the UK university system do not think that the current arrangements are ideal for either party in this electronic age.
4.5 The Research Information Network
It was these concerns which dominated discussion within the so-called “UK Research Libraries Support Group”. In particular we were all struck by the lack of a national strategic view over what were the really major issues on “information resources”. Individual projects abound in the UK but do they add up to a coherent approach and represent the best value for investing what are scarce resources? We have funded dozens of individual electronic projects in Britain and new develop- ments spring up regularly (e.g. Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edin- burgh funded by JISC). We have many library associations discussing and planning their own cooperation. We have funded national developments to tackle access to research libraries. Whilst without doubt this demonstrates willingness in the UK to cooperate and be at the forefront of library developments it lacks coherence and an overarching national strategy which determines priorities.
As a result our single major recommendation was to create a Research Informa- tion Network (RIN) with the objective of stimulating much stronger collabora- tion between libraries and in a number of areas, providing a national resource.
This is not by any means a novel idea because librarians have a rich history of collaborating for the common good. Let me give three instances where major improvements have taken place because of collaboration. The Document Sup- ply Centre of the British Library was established in the bleak years after World War II and grew into an important service for all universities. OCLC in Dublin, Ohio is a not-for-profit cooperative providing cataloguing and search facilities to thousands of research libraries. SuperJanet is the UK’s academic network and is paid for centrally by top-slicing the public funds given by the government to support the universities. It keeps the UK network at the leading edge and is remarkably sound value for money.
The RIN was established in 2004. The initial key players are the universities and their government funding bodies, the British Library, the Office of Science and Technology which supports the government’s Research Councils, and the national libraries in Wales and Scotland. Personally I would like to see the Wellcome Trust, as a great medical charity, on the governing body too. The office is located within the British Library.
The central theme in the RIN is “collaboration and cooperation” and the actions are focused upon “doing those things together that are best done together andnotdoing those things together that are best done separately”. Put more formally the RIN will have three aims:
G To determine a national strategy and priorities. This strategy should be led by the priorities of the professional researchers (as is happening, for example, in the e-science programme run by the UK Research Councils). This strategy will cover much more than the electronic world.