February 1999
Newsletter #32
 

Library Studied by Review Teams

Multimedia CD-ROMs Enrich Teaching 

SPARC: A New Answer to Journal Price Increases

INSPEC and EI Compendex Available in Reiss Science Building

Web Forms Simplify Requests

A Glimpse of Georgetown in 1837

New Video Services Offered

Stay Current with Free Tables of Contents Via E-Mail

Faculty and Graduate Students Able to Borrow Bound Periodicals

Increases in journal prices over the past decade have put a significant strain on library budgets. Since 1986, members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) have spent 124% more on serials to purchase 7% fewer titles. A significant portion of this dramatic increase is driven by commercial firms' discovery that scholarly journal publishing--notably science, technology, and medical titles--can be very lucrative. 
 

In an effort to counteract these trends toward higher prices, ARL, in association with other leading academic organizations, has established SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition). The Georgetown University Library is one the founding members of this new venture. 
 SPARC has begun creating "partnerships" with publishers who are developing high-quality but economical alternatives to existing high-price publications. Organizations expected to be interested in participating in SPARC include professional societies, university presses, start-up electronic publishers, and discipline- and institution-based enterprises seeking to create entirely new economic models for scholarly communication. With these partners, SPARC seeks to: 
 . create a more competitive marketplace;

. reduce journal prices;

. ensure fair use for educational and library uses of electronic resources; and

. apply new technologies to improve the process of scholarly communication and to reduce the costs of production and distribution. The American Chemical Society (ACS), which currently publishes 26 peer-reviewed research journals, is the first scientific publisher to collaborate with SPARC. ACS will publish at least one new scientific journal each year for the next three years with SPARC. The first new journal will publish letters in organic chemistry. This new ACS title will compete against titles such as Tetrahedron Letters, which cost $8,602 this past year. SPARC has recently announced another new journal, Evolutionary Ecology Research, launched by the founder/editor and the entire editorial board of Kluwer Academic Publishers' Evolutionary Ecology following their resignation from the Kluwer title. They abandoned their thriving journal because a subscription has become so expensive that many libraries and individuals no longer can afford it. At a cost of $290, Evolutionary Ecology Research is 37% of the price of the Kluwer title. SPARC is one of a number of strategies that must be undertaken simultaneously to ensure long-term access to scholarly research. Other strategies include maintaining fair use of copyrighted works in the digital environment; investigating options for faculty and universities to retain and better manage intellectual property rights; and developing models other than formal publication to certify faculty research for the academic tenure process.  More information about SPARC can be found at <http://www.arl.org/sparc/>.