FAQs about the Serials Review Project

1. As a faculty member how can I contribute to the review process?
2. What materials are being reviewed?
3. How do I know what serials support my department?
4. Who is the librarian working with my department?
5. What is the time frame for all of this?
6. How have faculty been involved in developing the review project?
7. Why is so much emphasis being placed on continuing commitments? Doesn't the library buy a lot of books?
8. Can all this use data be trusted?
9. What are these publishing alternatives? Open access? Institutional repositories?
10. Why are the Libraries prioritizing 25% of expenditures?
11. Why are there three different tiers within the 25% titles?
12. Does this mean that no new subscriptions are possible?
13. What happens when a title is removed from one of the tiers?
14. What about resources that serve more than one discipline or department. How will they be reviewed?
15. Why are the Libraries reviewing their subscriptions?
16. Are the Libraries having budget problems?
17. Is this a cancellation project?

1. As a faculty member how can I contribute to the review process?

The Libraries are seeking input from all faculty. Each department on campus has a librarianand a departmental library liaison. Librarians will be working with their partners in the departments to engage each department in reviewing the titles it uses. Please look over lists of titles provided by librarians and contribute your perceptions of the relative priority of various titles to support campus programs. In March there will be a campus-wide posting of the lists developed by the departments to allow faculty in other departments to comment on multi-disciplinary titles.

2. What materials are being reviewed?

The review covers all of the Libraries continuing commitments. This includes subscriptions to print journals, newspapers, electronic journals, databases, microfilm and standing orders to book series. The Libraries will be reviewing all of these materials, although somewhat different procedures may be applied to different categories of materials.

3. How do I know what serials support my department?

Librarians have been working for several years to organize serial expenditures by department where that is possible given the subject content of the resource. Faculty can contact their liaison to obtain copies of the lists.

4. Who is the librarian working with my department?

A list is available at http://www.lib.umd.edu/CLMD/CMT/managerdirectory.html

5. What is the time frame for all of this?

Subscription renewals typically occur in the summer. Electronic resources are largely renewed in late spring before our next fiscal year begins (on July 1). If the serial review results in any changes in subscriptions it must thus be completed well before the end of the spring semester. The review process has been organized so that lower priority titles (the bottom 25% of library expenditures) will need to be prioritized by the end of March 2006. Librarians will be engaging in substantial amounts of data-gathering and organizational planning during the Fall of 2005. Once that groundwork has been completed faculty will have opportunities to participate in the prioritization process.

6. How have faculty been involved in the design of the review project?

Faculty play a significant role in any review of serials. The University Library Council is comprised largely of faculty members. This group recommended regular journal review and endorses the current serial review.

7. Why is so much emphasis being placed on continuing commitments? Doesn't the library buy a lot of books?

Journal subscriptions alone account for almost half of the Libraries' materials budget. Electronic resource subscriptions account for just under 20% of the rest. With standing orders, these continuing commitments account for approximately 70% of the materials budget. While inflation rates vary from title to title, this portion of the budget has historically inflated at an annual rate of 8-10% a year. It is thus critical that continuing commitments be monitored closely and evaluated regularly as to the value they are providing to the campus community. Furthermore, rapid changes in the scholarly publishing marketplace demand that libraries be prepared to act. Improvements in library services and advances in data gathering also encourage regular assessment of our subscriptions

8. Can all this use data be trusted?

Use statistics offer helpful guidance to the review process, providing information beyond anecdotal evidence or a more subjective "sense" of the usefulness of a given journal or database. Journal use statistics reflect the number of times a researcher accessed the full text of an article from that publication. Database use statistics indicate the number of searches conducted. More and more publishers and database vendors are adopting standards developed by COUNTER so that statistics are reported consistently regardless of source, leading to greater reliability and comparability. Use data available through Research Port and Find It provide a cross-check.

After a pilot period, the Libraries began collecting print journal usage statistics in earnest in October of 2004. Any time a staff person reshelved a journal, current or historical, a use was recorded in a hand-held scanning device and subsequently reported. The Libraries are confident that by November 2004 any lingering technical issues were resolved. This project is ongoing and will help inform subscription, preservation, and shelving decisions.

9. What are these publishing alternatives? Open access? Institutional repositories?

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international coalition of libraries, research institutions and organizations dedicated to the creation of alternative peer-reviewed journals based on a different business model for scholarly publishing. SPARC provides advocacy and education for both faculty and scholars. The University of Maryland Libraries is a founding member of SPARC.

Open access initiatives ensure the dissemination of scholarly output to the broadest possible audience of interested readers instead of limiting access only to those who can pay high subscription fees to commercial journal publishers. Institutional repositories are one means of open access. The basic concept of institutional repositories is to use the power of the Internet to make research widely available and maintain permanent access to it. Repositories are designed to make it easy for authors to deposit their works and for any researcher to locate works of interest quickly and easily. The costs are kept very low and are covered by the institution rather than the author or the reader. The University of Maryland Libraries operate DRUM, the University of Maryland's institutional respository.

10. Why are the Libraries prioritizing 25% of expenditures?

The UM Libraries need to manage serial commitments carefully even in good budget times. Even when our materials budget has been growing we have carried out serial reviews to ensure that we are using collection dollars as effectively as possible. Given rapid changes in the publishing industry and recent enhancements to library services, the Libraries need to better understand our priorities for serials commitments, not just for a small proportion of our collection but for the collection as a whole. By seeking explicit prioritization for 25% of our serial expenditures, the Libraries will be in a strong position to understand how to use the materials budget effectively under a range of scenarios. Inflation on our serial collections has been running at 8-10% per annum for more than a decade with inflation historically increasing more rapidly at times. With this in mind funding that fails to provide for inflation would have a significant impact on the effective purchasing power of the materials budget. It is hoped that the 25% prioritization could provide adequate information for the Libraries to manage its budget through FY08 without needing to mobilize another campus-wide review effort.

11. Why are there three different tiers within the 25% titles?

The UM Libraries need to gather enough information to cope with possible budget restrictions over a multi-year period. It is therefore important to understand the relative priorities of various serial commitments. While an absolute prioritization of 25% of subscription expenditures is not practical, a three-tier categorization is very helpful if it becomes necessary to make a number of cancellation decisions over time.

12. Does this mean that no new subscriptions are possible?

The UM Libraries have no funding for new subscriptions in FY06. The Libraries, however, continue to work with faculty to determine where existing subscriptions can be cancelled to free funding when new subscriptions are needed. The review project can support this process as well. Faculty are encouraged to continue to discuss needs for core materials not held by the UM Libraries with their librarian.

13. What happens when a title is removed from one of the tiers?

A title or titles of equivalent cost must be identified as lower priority.

14. What about resources that serve more than one discipline or department? How will they be reviewed?

During the review process, every attempt will be made to identify and consider the needs of any affected users of a particular title. Many titles will be presented to faculty from multiple departments for consideration. Very general titles serving a wide campus constituency will be reviewed by the Libraries' Collection Management Team rather than by specific librarians. Finally, a composite list of all titles identified through the review process will be made available to the campus for comment during March of 2006. Any concerned faculty member will have an opportunity to offer a justification for reprioritization.

15. Why are the Libraries reviewing their subscriptions now?

As responsible collection managers, librarians regularly review their continuing commitments. Continuing commitments include journal subscriptions, electronic resource subscriptions, and standing orders for series. Triennial collection-wide serial review was recommended by the University Library Council and is supported by the Provost. Serial review was last conducted in FY03.

16. Are the Libraries having budget problems?

As with other campus units, the Libraries experienced a 2% reduction of the materials budget in FY03. A further cut to the base budget of 5% for FY03 was mandated, leading in FY04 to a cancellation of 5% of serial expenditures. In FY05 5% was added to the Libraries' budget, but then 1% was subsequently removed. The Libraries have been notified of a 3% increase for FY06, however, serial prices have been inflating at rates of 8-10% a year. If FY06 brings cuts or even simply no additional budget growth, serial cuts may need to be implemented to balance the materials budget. If cancellations are required to balance the materials budget in FY07, priorities need to be identified by the spring of 2006 if they are to be used for making decisions with regard to the FY07 budget. The Libraries hope to have a robust materials budget to support all of the existing commitments to print and electronic resources.

17. Is this a cancellation project?

At the moment the Libraries do not know for sure that any cancellations will be necessary. The review process is currently an evaluation and prioritization project. However, the substantial investment of faculty time inside and outside the Libraries is justified by the need to be prepared for a range of possible budget situations. If budget cuts are made for FY06 or FY07, or even if our budget simply remains flat, cancellation may be necessary and this review and prioritization process will inform cancellation decisions.

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