Month: February 2018

a values conundrum

Scales
photo by Charles Thompson (CC BY 2.0)

‘Tis the season when I spend a lot of time gathering and consolidating usage reports for the previous calendar year (though next year not as many if my SUSHI experiment goes well). Today, as I was checking and organizing some of the reports I had retrieved last week, I noticed a journal that had very little use in the 2017 YOP (or 2016, for that matter), so I decided to look into it a bit more.

The title has a one year embargo and then the articles are open access. Our usage is very low (average 3.6 downloads per year) and most of it, according to the JR5 and JR1 GOA for confirmation, is coming from the open access portion, not the closed access we pay for.

The values conundrum I have is multifaceted. This is a small society publisher, and we have only the one title from them. They are making the content open access after one year, and I don’t think they are making authors pay for this, though I could be wrong. These are market choices I want to support. And yet….

How do I demonstrate fiscal responsibility when we are paying ~$300/download? Has the research and teaching shifted such that this title is no longer needed and that’s why usage is so low? Is this such a seminal title we would keep it regardless of whether it’s being used?

Collection development decisions are not easy when there are conflicting values.

what’s the big deal?

house of cards
photo by Erin Wilson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I’ve been thinking about Big Deals again lately, particularly as there are more reports of institutions breaking them (and then later having to pick them up again) because the costs are unsustainable. It’s usually just the money that is the issue. No one has a problem with buying huge journal (and now book) bundles in general because they tend to be used heavily and reduce friction in the research process. No, it’s usually about the cost increases, which happen annually, generally at higher rates than library collections budgets increase. That’s not new.

The reality of breaking a Big Deal is not pleasant, and often does not result in cost savings without a severe loss of access to scholarly research. I’m  not at a research institution, and yet, every time I have run the numbers, our Big Deals still cost less than individual subscriptions to the titles that get used more than the ILL threshold, and even if I bump it up to, say, 20 downloads a year, we’re still better off paying for the bundle than list price for individual titles. I can only imagine this is even more true at R1 schools, though their costs are likely exponentially higher than ours and may be bearing a larger burden per FTE.

That gets at one factor of the Big Deal that is not good — the lack of transparency or equity in pricing. One publisher’s Big Deal pricing is based on your title list prior to the Big Deal, which can result in vastly different costs for different institutions for essentially the same content. Another publisher many years ago changed their pricing structure, and in more polite terms told my consortia at the time we were not paying enough (i.e. we had negotiated too good of a contract), and we would see hefty annual increases until we reached whatever amount they felt we should be paying. This is what happens in a monopoly, and scholarly publishing is a monopoly in practice if not in legal terms.

We need a different model (and Open Access as it is practiced now is not going to save us). I don’t know what it is, but we need to figure that out soon, because I am seeing the impending crash of some Big Deals, and the fallout is not going to be pretty.

giving SUSHI another try

(It's just) Kate's sushi! photo by Cindi Blyberg
photo by Cindi Blyberg

I’m going to give SUSHI another try this year. I had set it up for some of our stuff a few years back with mix results, so I removed it and have been continuing to manually retrieve and load reports into our consolidation tool. I’m still doing that for the 2017 reports, because the SUSHI harvesting tool I have won’t let me go back and pull from before, only monthly moving forward now.

I’ve spent a lot of time making sure titles in reports matched up with our ERMS so that consolidation would work (it’s matching on title, ugh), and despite my efforts, any reports generated still need cleanup. What is the value of my effort there? Not much anymore. Especially since ingesting cost data for journals/books is not a simple process to maintain, either. So, if all that matters less to none, might as well take whatever junk is passed along in the SUSHI feed as well and save myself some time for other work in 2019.

resisting my inevitable death

black and white photo of a kettle bell weight and two medicine balls, along with part of a human leg and sneaker-shod footI’m getting older. It’s hard to avoid. My body isn’t as resilient as it was fifteen years ago when I started this blog. As my income increased, so did my pant size, and being in a sedentary job didn’t help.

January began as January often begins, with a renewed commitment to stay as physically active as I can and work on getting stronger. For the first two weeks, I managed to get out and hike/walk/gym every day but three. Then my choir rehearsals began and things picked up again with new music being sent to the radio station, and I was reminded why I don’t spend two hours at the gym every day.

One of my favorite blogs is Fit is a Feminist Issue, and several of the bloggers over there are talking about a 218 workouts in 2018 challenge. I missed jumping on from the start, but I’ve been keeping track for other reasons and I’m up to 23 so far. Not bad. Could be much better — there was one week in there with zero. If I’m going to hit that goal, I’ll need to be doing 4-5 workouts a week, not the average 3-4 I’ve been doing so far.

I’ve also been keeping track of the food I eat. I’ve done this in the past with mixed success, but I’m finding the tool less frustrating this time. (Or maybe I just care less about being absolutely precise?) I haven’t approached this with the intent to prescribe some sort of diet regimen, but the data has been useful for making tweaks. Since I’m also weight training, I’ve been paying closer attention to macros and increasing protein without blowing up the fat percentage, too.

I’ve also discovered how easy it is for me to consume a massive amount of calories and not even realize it — it simply doesn’t seem like that much food, and by weight, it isn’t, but the nutritional composition is very densely packed with caloric energy. So, I need to out-think my survival brain that compels me towards high energy foods my body can store for later use in the lean times that will never come.

My goals are simple: get stronger, avoid physical injuries, lose some weight to relieve stress on my joints, and get ready for prime softball/baseball/hiking season. Oh, and delaying my inevitable death.

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