Impact of Licensing Cuts on Research and Education:

Results of a Focus Group Study

Pat HigginbottomTracy Powell

T. Scott PlutchakUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham

November 5, 2010The Charleston Conference

[No Competing Interests]

UAB State Appropriation History

Year Amount ($) Change from FY08

FY11 254,204,273 (7.5%) (37.6%)

FY10 274,654,620 (254,055,521)* (11.6%) (27.4%)

FY09 310,812,676 (282,839,536)** (11.1%) (19.1%)

FY08 349,829,308 14.1%

FY07 306,529,308 19.7%

FY06 256,142,651 13.4%

FY05 221,933,880 2.9%

FY04 215,741,009 0.7%

FY03 214,198,718 2.3%

FY02 209,387,365 3.5%

FY01 202,271,904 (0.5%)

* proration FY10 (7.5%), ** proration FY09

Budget Impacts

FY 07 $5,391,027

FY 08 $5,399,556

FY 09 $4,824,641 (12% reduction)

$4,509,481 (9% proration)

$4,439,481 (2% proration)

FY 10 $4,372,418

$4,201,986 (7.5% proration)

Revenue Sources

State Funds 68%

Tuition & Fees 3%

Support from President 12%

Support from Provost 1%

Support from Schools 5%

Other (primarily hospital) 11%

Impact on Content Spending

FY 07 $2,244,500

FY 08 $2,000,000 -10.8%

FY09 $1,550,000 -22.5%

FY 10 $1,200,000 -22.0%

Potential Cancellations 2009

Break up bundles (ScienceDirect, et. al.)

Low-use titles (<300 downloads/year)Selective moderate use

Subspecialty titles

Getting the word out

Collections blog with potential cancellations lists

Marked “potentially to be cancelled” in A-Z list and the catalog

Liaisons communication to facultyNewsletter

Personal contacts

By the numbers

Total titles available at UAB*2008: Approximately 38,000*2009: Approximately 34,000

Faculty Reaction

From October ‘08 to June ‘0965 faculty contacts

153 individual titles (21 after 1/1/09)

Reinstated 147

WTF?We need to do some focus groups

2010

Cancellation list of 300 titlesAccreditation standards

Clinical care

Reduction in ILL chargesMediated PPV

Four Sessions

Public Health, Health Professions, & Nursing Faculty

Medicine, Dentistry, Optometry FacultyCenter For Clinical & Translational

SciencePostdocs & Grad Students in the Joint

Health Sciences36 participants total

Process

Brief introduction, fiscal backgroundFocused questionsOpen discussion

The Questions

1. How does the journal literature support your work? Does your work

typically require that you use every issue of a specific journal? The most current

issue? Older issues?

2. What problems have you experienced in getting the articles you

need? 

3. When you don’t find the articles you need at UAB, what do you do?

 4. Have you had an experience

where you have had to use something you could find easily rather than what you preferred?

What was the impact?

 

5.Have you had an experience where lack of access to journal literature had a direct effect on your work? Such as a grant application, a teaching

experience or treatment of a patient. 

6.What have been your experiences with the new services we put in place to mitigate the effects of

journal cancellations? 

7.Do you have any additional thoughts and reactions to the budget cuts at UAB and how LHL’s

responses have impacted journal holdings?

Themes

• Quality• Competitive Position• Recruitment• Reputation among colleagues• Overall quality of the institution• Training the next generation of researchers• Productivity• Cost• Getting the articles you need in a usable format• The nature of the literature

Quality

It’s partly, how can you know what the negative impact is cause you don’t know what’s in those.

You know, there’s a whole chunk of the world out there that you’re essentially blind to. And,

so, asking the question of has that had a negative impact, well, it’s just going to build

over time as you become more and more disconnected from the world of what else is

going on. I’m sure someday I’ll publish a paper that is exactly what someone else did in a

journal I haven’t read. That’s going to take some time.

Competitive position

But it’s ultimately not a good thing for an institution that’s trying to join the top 20 of NIH funding to be begging other institutions to send us bootleg

copies of PDFs.

Recruitment

When I moved here eight years ago from [redacted], it was actually a

recruitment positive, the Lister Hill Library. Now, if someone were to ask me about the library, I could not give them the same endorsement that I

was given.

Training the Next Generation

Or how about your students, how about the next generation, we try to pass down

a history, and what we had before us was rich and fluid and we learned how to use that. Now there’s a new frustration where what new students are coming in to is far different than what we had in the past, and I don’t think they like it. We’ve lost this continuity on how we obtain the wealth of the literature.

Conclusions

Great variability in how the journal literature is used

ILL/PPV not sufficient for all types of uses

“Black market” is ubiquitousWe are not as effective as we need to

be in getting our message outHigh degree of concern, although it is

not being communicated to us

The Bright Side

Engagement with faculty is better than ever

We know that every dollar we spend is for content that is being well used

We have systems in place to do a much better job of deciding what it is

appropriate to licenseOur community has a much better

understanding of the challenges that we face

Budget increases for 2011

Federal stimulus fundsIndirect expense recovery funds

Protection from proration

Going forward

Will increase content spending by 8%Continue to query faculty who make

requests for new titlesPurpose of use

Type of useFrequency of use

Alternatives used to get content

Acknowledgments

Great thanks to the other LHL faculty & staff who assisted with this project:

Liz LorbeerValerie GordonSylvia McAphee