APPENDIX 92
Memorandum from The British Library
INTRODUCTION
1. The British Library (BL) welcomes the
opportunity to provide written evidence to the Science and Technology
Committee to assist in its inquiry into Scientific Publications.
THE BRITISH
LIBRARY
2. The British Library was established by
statute in 1972 as the national library of the United Kingdom,
consisting of a comprehensive collection of books, manuscripts,
periodicals, films and other recorded material, whether printed
or otherwise. The Library's duty is to act as the national centre
for reference, study, bibliographical and other information services
in relation both to scientific and technological matters and to
the humanities. The Library is funded from the vote of the Department
for Culture Media and Sport; in 2002-03 the BL's baseline Grant-in-aid
was £85m and in addition the Library earned £27m in
trading income. A recent independent economic impact study commissioned
by the British Library suggests that the total value added to
the UK economy by the Library each year is £363m, or £4.40
for every £1 of public funding. [314]
3. The British Library is one of the world's
greatest research libraries, and the nation's most extensive source
of published scientific information. The Library is the beneficiary
of legal deposit, and it also purchases widely with a £15m
annual budget for material of research value, of which broadly
two-thirds is allocated to publications in the Science Technology
and Medicine (STM) disciplines. Overall, the Library's STM collections
include: 3.3 million books, 33,700 current serial titles (of its
total holdings of 260,000 STM research titles), 0.5 million theses,
4 million official publications and reports, and 49 million patent
specifications. The Library's STM collections reflect the international
nature of scientific endeavour: 30% of the collections are UK
publications, 30% are US publications, and 40 per cent are other
overseas material.
4. The British Library is an integral component
of the national research infrastructure and it plays a correspondingly
significant role in ensuring the research excellence of the UK.
When Professor Sir Brian Follett's Research Support Libraries
Group (co-sponsored by the British Library, the four Higher Education
Funding Councils, and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales)
ranked the budgets for acquisitions in UK research libraries against
those in the United States, the level of the British Library's
acquisitions expenditure was on a par with the best US research
collections at Harvard and Yale and significantly above the highest
ranking UK universities. The Group concluded, "The resources
of the British Library are, we believe, one of the main reasons
why UK universities are able to match, and in many cases exceed,
the quality and scale of research undertaken within similar sized
universities in other parts of the world"[315].
The Library is to provide the home for the Research Libraries
Network proposed by the Group to ensure a strategic and sustainable
approach to the development of the national research library and
information infrastructure.
5. Investing in innovation, the Government's
July 2002 strategy for science, engineering and technology[316]
recognised the value placed on the BL as a resource to scientific
researchers in the UK, both public and private, as follows: "The
British Library has an important role to play in supporting scientific
research in the UK, by providing access to its scientific reading
rooms, and through its document supply service . . . it has potential
to provide particular benefit to smaller firms which are less
able than large companies to hold substantial collections of scientific
and other publications."
6. The British Library's current service
portfolio for science, technology and innovation comprises: reading
room services, document supply services, searchable databases,
information services and research services. In 2002-03 over 4
million scientific journals, monographs and patents were consulted
in the Library's reading rooms at St Pancras, and 2.8 million
documents were supplied to remote users through the document supply
service operated from the Library's site at Boston Spa, West Yorkshire.
Some 50-55% of the Library's users—either of its reading
rooms or its document supply services—come from the Higher
Education sector while broadly 20% of the Library's service transactions
relate to the delivery of information to industry and commerce.
The Library is a key supplier of information to >80% of the
UK's top 100 R&D Scoreboard companies.
7. Within the context of the terms of the
Committee's current inquiry, the Library considers that it is
uniquely positioned in the following respects:
— its statutory, public good, remit
to collect, preserve and provide long-term access to research
information in all published formats extends to the whole of the
UK;
— it is guardian of the scientific
intellectual property generated by others—it does not itself
generate scientific intellectual property; and
— of the legal deposit libraries, the
British Library is unique in terms of both the size of its STM
collections and the scale of its acquisitions expenditure, and
also its commitment to service provision in support of research
(public and private) and innovation.
KEY TRANDS
IN THE
STM PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
AND THEIR
IMPACT ON
THE BRITISH
LIBRARY
8. It is well documented that the subscription
prices of scientific journals have increased over the last ten
years or more at a much faster rate than general price inflation[317].
Of the Library's budgeted acquisitions spend (£14.9m in 2003-04)
on research-level material for the collections, broadly two-thirds
of the budget is allocated to publications in the Science, Technology
and Medicine (STM) disciplines: £7.9m on STM serials and
over £1.8m on other STM materials. Over the last five years
to 2003-04, average STM journal prices have increased by 43 per
cent; compared with UK general price inflation, as measured by
the GDP deflator, over the same period of only 13 per cent. By
taking strong steps to achieve efficiency gains over this period
the British Library has within an overall cash-flat operational
budget managed broadly to maintain the real terms buying power
of its STM serials budget which has risen from £6.2m in 1998-99
to £7.9m in 2003-04. Prior to this, in 1998-99 and in 1996-97,
the Library's financial position (exacerbated by higher-than-inflation
book and serial price increases) required that major serials subscription
cancellation exercises be undertaken. Some 7,000 STM titles were
cancelled in 1998-99 and 1,300 humanities and social science titles
were cancelled in 1996-97. In both instances the cancellations
were focused on low-use titles and titles held in multiple copies
to mitigate the impact on users.
9. The Library seeks specific recognition
from Government of the pressure of journal price increases on
the Library's resources. The Board considers this to be a crucial
issue due to the central role played by the British Library's
collections in underpinning UK research library provision and
because it is unlikely that the Library will be able to sustain
the buying power of its serials budget beyond the current planning
period.
10. In the face of journal subscription
price increases and falling library budgets, UK university and
other libraries have struggled to maintain strong collections
and they increasingly turned to interlibrary loans and individual
document delivery as a means of filling the gaps created in particular
from cancelled serial titles. At its peak level of demand in 1998-99,
the British Library's document supply service was fulfilling 3.8
million requests for individual documents annually. However, the
introduction of publishers' `Big Deal Schemes' (which were made
possible by the advent of the electronic journal and which provide
access to all the journals of a particular publisher) and their
widespread take-up by UK higher education institutions, has led
to a significant decline in demand for the British Library's document
supply service. Nonetheless, this service remains invaluable and
essential in terms of both sustaining the breadth of access to
journal articles particularly from the smaller publishers that
are not available online and also supporting customers outside
the HE sector where the take-up of the Big Deal Schemes has been
far less pronounced.
11. There remains widespread support for
the British Library's centralised document supply service from
stakeholders. The joint evidence to the Committee from CURL (the
Consortium of University Research Libraries) and SCONUL (the Society
of College National and University Libraries) states in Para 47:
"We also stress the importance of the British Library and
the other national libraries maintaining and improving their acquisition
of all scholarly publications, to enable the continuation of a
comprehensive document supply service, serving the requirements
of scholars and researchers". However the take-up of the
Big Deal Schemes, and the consequential decline in demand for
document supply from HEIs, represents a significant challenge
to the existing financial model of the Library's document supply
service. The Library is responding to this challenge in the short-term
by adopting a twin-track approach of aggressive cost reduction
and innovative product development. This saw the introduction
in December 2003 of a new Secure Electronic Delivery service which
gives access to 100 million documents which can be delivered electronically
to researchers' desktops. This investment by the Library in improved
online services has been warmly welcomed by the Library's university
research library partners. Meantime there is recognition of the
need for discussions on alternative business models for this crucial
element of the UK research infrastructure to ensure that its support
for the science base and innovation is sustained into the medium-
to long-term.
12. A further factor that is exacerbating
the position of the Library's document supply service is the inconsistent
approach taken by Member States to implementation of the European
Copyright Directive (in terms of how the levels of recompense
for rightsholders are determined in each State) which has undermined
the UK's competitive position in information supply. The Library
would welcome the Committee's support for obtaining Government
recognition of the need to address the differences in implementation
of the European Copyright Directive by Member States if a level
playing field in European information supply is to be attained.
13. The shift towards electronic publication
has created an additional financial pressure for university library
budgets. While print publications are zero-rated for VAT, electronic
information attracts VAT at the standard rate of 17.5 per cent.
The VAT differential is a disincentive, and an additional cost,
to libraries making the transition towards electronic access to
meet researcher needs. As a member of both CURL and SCONUL the
British Library would welcome the Committee's support for obtaining
Government recognition of this pressure on university library
budgets and the need to exempt education institutions from payment
of VAT on electronic information resources, including electronic
journals.
14. In September 2002, the Office of Fair
Trading (OFT) report, The market for scientific, technical and
medical journals[318],
concluded that it would not be appropriate, given possible changes
including the use of new technology, for the competition authorities
to intervene in the market at that point, but that the position
would be kept under review. As further concentration of the commercial
scientific publishing sector is undesirable, the Library believes
there is a case for OFT to revisit its earlier study to ensure
that a genuinely competitive market operates. Given the international
nature of the journals market, action will require close liaison
with other competition authorities in Europe and the United States.
HOW THE
BRITISH LIBRARY
IS MAKING
NON-PRINT
SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS
AVAILABLE
15. In recent years the Library has collected
significant amounts of digital material, in addition to the vast
paper-based collection resources which can now be supplied digitally
on demand (Paragraphs 11,17). The Library currently subscribes
to over 4,000 of the most highly-used electronic journals, and
this number is growing continuously. The Library took a leading
role in seeking to secure reform of UK legal deposit legislation
to take account of electronic publications, and the Legal Deposit
Libraries Act 2003 represents a significant step forward in safeguarding
the nation's digital heritage for future generations. The Act
extends the concept of legal deposit to electronic and other non-print
publications and will be implemented incrementally through a series
of Regulations requiring the affirmative resolution of both Houses
of Parliament. The United Kingdom is the first major publishing
country in the world to have introduced this change. In the meantime
some 2,000 electronic monographs, 400 hand-held electronic serial
titles, and 900 online serial titles have been deposited with
the Library to date under a voluntary scheme with publishers.
16. The British Library is joint chair (together
with the Digital Content Forum, for the publishers) of the newly
formed Joint Committee on Legal Deposit, which has recently commenced
work to prepare for the progressive implementation of the Act.
Careful implementation of the Act is vital to ensuring the collection,
storage, preservation and access of the non-print national published
archive for the benefit of present and future generations. By
virtue of its scale and the depth and breadth of its collections,
the major responsibility will fall upon the British Library. Together
with CURL and SCONUL, we believe it is essential that the Library
is funded at an appropriate level to enable it to discharge this
responsibility. It is also imperative that, as Regulations are
made, reasonable access arrangements are introduced for material
which will be deposited or harvested under the Act. A judicious
balance must be struck between the national interest (which requires
access) on the one hand and the protection of the legitimate economic
interests of the publishing industry on the other.
17. The Library provides access to the 4,000
electronic journals to which it subscribes in both its reading
rooms and through its document supply service as a result of licensing
agreements secured with the relevant publishers. New technology
introduced into the Library's document supply service (developed
in collaboration with Adobe and Relais) enables almost any item
in the collection—be it print, digital, or microfilm—to
be delivered to researchers electronically. The Library is working
with partners in higher education to implement digital signatures
so that documents can be delivered to individual end-users under
the "library privilege" provisions of copyright law.
18. The new electronic publishing models
have significant implications for collecting, storing and making
material available for the long-term. The Library is co-founder
(with JISC—the Joint Information Systems Committee) of the
Digital Preservation Coalition and it is collaborating with higher
education institutions on pilot projects under the JISC FAIR Programme
to test the long-term sustainability of emerging models. The Library
is developing a digital object management system to ensure the
long-term preservation and access for digital material. There
is widespread support from the British Library's university research
library partners for its continuing role in ensuring long term
preservation of the national digital archive. The principal concern
lies in the cost of preserving material for future generations.
The Library is seeking specific recognition from Government of
this particular funding requirement in the forthcoming Spending
Review and would welcome the Committee's endorsement of that requirement.
EMERGING MODELS
OF SCHOLARLY
COMMUNICATION
19. Currently it is estimated there are
15-18,000 core scholarly scientific journal titles worldwide,
containing over one million articles per annum, reliant on an
extensive network of researchers to provide peer review and quality
control. However there is widespread recognition of the need to
re-engineer the scholarly communication process and new business
models are emerging, including:
— open access journals—where
the author pays for the articles to be published and as a result
the articles and the journals can be widely distributed without
an access charge;
— institutional repositories—where
the institutional generators of intellectual property (eg the
universities and other research centres) make the products of
publicly-funded research undertaken on their campuses freely available
on a central server; and
— disciplinary-based e-print services—where
researchers post their online manuscripts on such services and
allow free access and download.
20. The new publishing models that are emerging
are still in the early stages of their development and have yet
to prove sustainable in the long-term. They raise questions about
how quality control is to be maintained in the re-engineered environment
and how the scientific record is to be maintained and preserved
for future generations. And while the number of open access journals
is growing, at the time of writing the Directory of Open Access
Journals compiled by Lund University in Sweden[319]
lists only 739 fully peer-reviewed journals that place no barriers
between the papers published online and readers. Thus at this
stage the Library is maintaining a close watching brief on technological
and business developments, including involvement in pilot projects
and other development initiatives.
CONCLUSION
21. The British Library does not itself
generate scientific intellectual property—its mission is
to underpin science—and thus it takes a balanced and long-term
view of the particular business models or formats that might emerge
from this evolving market (although it naturally welcomes moves
to increase the dissemination of publicly-funded scientific research).
The Library's responsibility is to preserve and provide access
to the definitive record of science for the long-term, and the
legal deposit arrangements for printed publications and, increasingly
in the future, for electronic publications make a critical contribution
to this. In the light of the developments under way in scientific
scholarly communication, the Library would welcome the Committee's
general support for its continuing leadership position in ensuring
long term preservation of the national digital archive and its
recognition of the resource implications of the necessary investment
in the digital infrastructure.
22. The Library also seeks the Committee's
specific support for:
(a) the importance of maintaining the real
terms value of the British Library's acquisitions budget for scientific
publications (Paragraph 9)
(b) the need to address anomalies in the
implementation of the European Copyright Directive (Paragraph
12)
(c) the need to exempt education institutions
from payment of VAT on electronic information resources, including
electronic journals (Paragraph 13)
(d) a further review of the market for scientific,
technical and medicine journals by the Office of Fair Trading
(Paragraph 14)
(e) timely and effective Regulations under
the Legal Deposit Libraries Act (Paragraph 16)
(f) investment in the digital infrastructure
required to preserve and to provide long-term access to the UK's
national published archive of scientific publications in electronic
form (paragraph 18)
February 2004
314 Measuring our Value: Results of an independent
economic impact study commissioned by the British Library to measure
the Library's direct and indirect value to the UK economy (December
2003). Back
315
Research Support Libraries Group. Report. 2003. http://www.rslg.ac.uk Back
316
HM Treasury. Investing in innovation: a strategy for science,
engineering and technology. 2002. Back
317
Annual periodical prices for . . . Library Association
Record, May 1994-May 2000; and, Serials price increases. Swets
Blackwell, 2001-2003. Back
318
Office of Fair Trading. The market for scientific, technical
and medical journals. London: OFT, September 2002, p.1 [http://www.oft.gov.uk/News/Press+releases/2002/PN+55-02+Can+the+scientific+journals+market+work+better.htm] Back
319
http://www.doaj.org Back
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