User behavior and its impact on libraries and publishers: A report on the most recent fiesole collection development retreat, Amsterdam, July 2002
Carol A. Hughes
It is all about "reliability, speed, and content … the rest is b******s." Thus Derk Haank, CEO of Elsevier Science, opened the fourth invitational conference in the Fiesole Collection Development Retreat series,sponsored by The Charleston Company and Against the Grain, and hosted by Elsevier Science, Erasmus, Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Swets.
Nearly 70 people gathered to hear about user studies, publisher pricing model development, and the role of librarians and library consortia in the provision of electronic information at the desktop. The mood of the conference was one of frank exchange. But the frankness was not so much confrontational about library budgets and publisher serials prices as a fact-finding exchange about what librarians know about user behavior and how that compares with the trends that publishers see in use of their growing electronic offerings.
Haank, who gave the welcoming keynote remarks, predicted that differential pricing might make its way into the publisher's pricing models soon. Although he noted that the jury is "still out" on the best model, he stated that the customers who benefit from enhanced functionality should be paying more. For example, the pricing model at Elsevier could soon reflect an accommodation for the number of searches that the service handles, the management of which is a new cost to Elsevier. (Several in the audience observed that this seems to be a new flavor of the "pay per use" model that libraries have resisted so steadfastly.) However, Haank predicted that soon the system of serving articles and linking among journal titles will all work like "clockwork" and"the world will be a better place with libraries as our most reliable business partner."
As the conference progressed it was encouraging to notice the attentiveness paid by publishers to well-constructed user studies. Leigh Watson-Healy reported on the Outsell/Digital Library Federation study, soon to be published by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Peter Boyce and Carol Tenopir reported on studies funded by NASA that focus on information behavior of astronomers. Some of the memorable highlights from these presentations include:
A call from Joost Kircz, former Elsevier employee and now a consultant with KRA Publishing Research, for better attention to the quality and usefulness of metadata for online articles, as that will ultimately be the primary enabler of users finding electronic information.
Users spend about 43 percent of their time gathering information and 57 percent of their time using it; print is preferred for use, but online is preferred for retrieval of information; the functional role that the user is performing drives the information use behavior. (Watson-Healy).
Respondents in the study of astronomers spend more time browsing online than they do in print; they prefer to print out documents; they often do not submit an article to e-print services until it has been accepted for print publication;a significant number of astronomers do not use e-print services as a source of information (Boyce and Tenopir).
About 35 percent of abstracts viewed lead to viewing of the full-text for an article (Bill Russell, a director of Emerald Publishing).
There was some concern about the "marginalization" of the library and of publishers. Chuck Hamaker noted the decline in reference and circulation transactions in the library and that the use of indexes is also dropping unless the index has full-text links, in which case its use has reached a plateau. A recent study by the Ingenta Institute that seemed to indicate that individuals are increasingly willing to purchase their own access was critiqued, but the implication was clear that certain sectors of the scholarly communication system would welcome such a trend.
Publisher fears of marginalization were also apparent. A discussion of the recent move by one publisher to withdraw its full-text from some content aggregators highlighted the fact that publishers cannot survive solely on the royalty stream provided by aggregators. This may foreshadow other publishers making a similar protective strategic decision and, in light of Hamaker's comments, start to put serious financial pressure on some aggregators. Bas Saventje, University Librarian, Utrecht University, stated that he had no confidence that the current system can safely evolve into a new, healthy system. He challenged libraries to step up to a vision of themselves as publishers on an international scale, just as the corporate sector has operated. David Worlock,Chairman, Electronic Publishing Services Ltd, predicted that the more vital future of publishing will be in the manipulation of reuse of information rather than in publishing new content.
The conference concluded with additional reflections on costs. Hazel Woodward, University Librarian, Cranfield University, announced that the UK is anticipating a new study from the Higher Education Funding Council for England to be published in September 2002 with a spending review and a new strategic five-year plan. She also noted that the top 25 publishers account for 68 percent of the total spending for journals in the UK … so what is left for the acquisition of information from smaller publishers? In her opinion, the current spending trend, coupled with an increased emphasis on life-long learning in the higher education agenda of many European governments, indicates that the current pricing patterns cannot be sustained.
John Cox, Principal, Cox Associates, reviewed the cost structure for publishers. Fixed costs comprise 60-70 percent of the cost of journal publication, which means that new journals do not usually break even until volume six or seven. New costs include technology support and 24-hour customer service. And what have we got? Expensive distributed printing systems if the user studies are to be believed.
Moreover, universities in many southern European countries do not emphasize research-based curricula so FTE are not an accurate basis on which to estimate usage of research databases. Current publisher models just do not make sense for these situations. What to do? The "middlemen" in the publishing chain are also looking for new options for revenue growth. Andrea Keyhani, Chief Operating Officer, Ingenta, looked toward new revenue models for agents either as compilers of broad market data for their publisher partners or as new players in the market currently served by interlibrary loan.
Deanna Marcum, President, CLIR, was in the unenviable position of providing a wrap-up for the conference. Her reflections included a conviction that, if libraries might become marginalized as information sources, librarians would not become marginalized. She called for more flexibility in our rigid personnel systems that may inhibit librarians from creating new service models and for an increased effort at re-training and re-tooling in the profession.
For those who have been studying user behavior over several decades, it is not news that it is "all about reliability, content, and speed."However, this conference indicates that the publishers are listening to that"news" with new respect for librarians' knowledge of the user and our emphasis on quality metadata and other infrastructure for the support of information discovery. There was a collective realization that both librarians and the commercial sector need to become more creative in developing sustainable pricing and delivery models. Neither side can go it alone, so we must become partners in developing substantively new approaches to, in the words of Derk Haank, make the world a better place.
Carol Ann Hughes(hughes@lib.uci.edu) is the Associate University Librarian for Public Services at the University of California, Irvine Libraries.
