Over at Infectious Greed Paul Kedrosky refers to an article in the Wall Street Journal on the problem of escaling prices for scholarly journals. I’ve not read the WSJ article yet but am, of course, very familiar with this issue. Publishers, including many academic societies, know that libraries are captive markets and that research libraries have multimillion dollar budgets for acquiring content. The publishers are simply trying to get as much of that pie as possible, that’s business. While the library community has ventured into open access electronic publishing, libraries could still be doing much more in this area.

The budget for a library is usually divided into two segments: operational funds (including personnel, technology, facilities, etc) and material funds. In every library, the much larger of these two segments is the material fund that is used to acquire books, databases, journals, and e-publications. If a library wants to develop its own open access publications, then the money for that development must come either from the operation budget (where it competes with a lot of other demands), external grants, or as special funds from the university’s academic vice-chancellor. The latter generally requires that the library director go begging to the administratin and get in line with all the other deans.

However, that multimillion dollar material budget is hardly ever utilized to support open access publishing at the library’s own institution. The material budget is a resource that libraries ultimately will need to tap into for open access publishing for its own faculty. A few years ago I was at a meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information when someone asked how could all the needed digital projects be funded, given the limited availability of external funding. At that moment, the director of a large research library in the U.S. stood up and said, in effect, “There are a lot of people in this room who control multi-million dollar budgets for purchasing journals. An increasing amount of that money needs to be shifted to cover the cost of open access publishing.”

Publishers know that universities are not as cash-strapped as they like to pretend. Of course, there´s never enough funds to pay for every initiative. It’s a matter of a university deciding case-by-case for different projects. It’s not unusual for a research library to have end-of-year money left over from its material budget, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. A single research library purchases tens of thousands of books each year, few of which are actually ever used. Libraries need to seriously re-examine how their materials budgets are allocated, particulary with an eye towards the research needs of the next generation of scholars.

Additionally, electronic journals offer potentially greater capabilities for conveying research than that supported by print publications. However, most e-journals are simply PDF or full-text versions of their print counterparts. Libraries must be at the forefront of working with faculty to explore new publication options in the digital environment that incorporates audio/video/animation alongside text and images. All of this requires funding. Rather than continuing this dance of serial prices with publishers into its third decade, librarians have to find new dancing partners.