0.23 Perpetual stewardship: comments on penelope kaiserlian’s paper  (Page 3/5)

One could arrange things differently, and make the publisher liable for the annual maintenance (in which case the one-time purchase cost would necessarily be much higher) but the simple fact that the electronic resource requires ongoing annual (actually, daily and hourly) cash outlay in order to be usable means the library/publisher nexus faces a set of problems that did not exist in the print age. These problems derive much more from changes in the ways libraries and publishers do business than from increases in the cost of doing business.

Note that in the journal world we have made the adjustment to ongoing annual cost by folding those costs into annual subscriptions. This was facilitated, I suspect, by the fact that serials have always been paid for on a subscription basis. The radical change that has taken place in the digital environment is that electronic versions of serials—including the backfiles in most cases—are now hosted on the publishers’ servers. Somehow librarians allowed the associated loss of control over the scholarly record to happen without all that much fuss, perhaps because there was no immediate effect on cash flow (the annual subscription model was already in place) and perhaps because the reliability of JSTOR and the development of Portico, LOCKSS and CLOCKSS give some confidence that the journal-based scholarly record will continue to be available. Academic libraries rail against the cost of electronic journals, and rightly so. But it is principally cost, and not either the frequency of payment (annual subscriptions are fine, they are just too pricey) or the loss of physical control that causes most of the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Libraries are much less comfortable about annual fees to maintain electronic books—that is, to maintain scholarly works with content that is at least reasonably stable. Reasonably stable is as good as it gets. As Kaiserlian points out, p. 14, footnote 13 and the associated discussion, digital projects tend to be subject to continuing revision, which also implies continuing cost. From an economic point of view, this aversion makes little sense, because ongoing maintenance is every bit as important and as costly for print books as for electronic books. When a research library acquires a print book, it acquires the responsibility to care for it and make the content available indefinitely. Preservation and access are bundled into one technology and there is no practical way to separate them. But the cost of future access to the print resource is large—for conventional patterns of use and storage it is of the same order of magnitude as the cost of the book itself. Courant, Paul N. and Matthew Nielsen, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” expected to be published by CLIR, 2010, Draft 19 January 2010, available from the authors. For a print book that is kept indefinitely, first in an open stack facility and moved after twenty years to compact storage, the present value of storage under reasonable assumptions is $66.43. The cost of keeping the book in open stacks in perpetuity is $141.89. The high range of our estimates for an equivalent ebook is $13.10 and our best estimate is $5.00. All of these numbers may be interpreted as the endowment necessary to store the book permanently. Space has to be maintained and eventually replaced, buildings have to be heated and cooled, books are shelved, re-shelved, bound, etc.