University Presses: “Under Fire” or Just Under the Gun (Like the Rest of Us)? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"... And while it’s true that the relentlessly increasing cost of science journals results in money being redirected from monographs budgets to serials budgets, that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that in most research libraries there is solid, constant, and demonstrable demand for scientific journal content, and the same simply can’t be said for scholarly monographs. In other words, even if annual journal price hikes were minimal, many research libraries would likely be directing acquisitions money away from monographs anyway. And herein lies the very, very difficult reality around which this article (and, in my experience, much of the recurring conversation about 'The Crisis at the University Press') dances: the simple fact that university presses all too often publish books that no one needs to use or wants to read. The difference between 'read' and 'use' is important here. The scholarly books that fill library shelves have never been heavily read; even during the halcyon days of generous library budgets, four-figure print runs, and healthy book circulation statistics, there was never much reason to believe that scholarly monographs were regularly being read from cover to cover. Study after study after study has shown that huge chunks of academic libraries’ book collections never circulate. The most famous such finding came from the University of Pittsburgh study of 1979, which reported that roughly 40% of the books acquired by that university’s library ten years previously had never circulated, and concluded that each of those books had only a 2% chance of ever being checked out in the future. More recent research suggests that things have only gotten worse in this regard: in 2011, an OCLC study of 90 Ohio academic libraries found that 80% of the circulation in those collections was driven by only 6% of the books. When the Cornell University Libraries studied their circulation patterns in 2010, they found that only 45% of their holdings published since 1990 had circulated even once; more than half had never circulated at all. A study I published a few years ago showed a deep and almost universal downward trend in circulations among large North American research libraries over the past 13 years. While circulation is an imperfect indicator of use (since some usage of books takes place in the library), it is a much better indicator of reading. And the indicators of in-house usage are not very rosy, either: at my own large research library, reshelving statistics are down dramatically (see figure below right; click to enlarge), and anecdotal evidence suggests that what we’re seeing here is typical ..."