The UK Research Reserve (UKRR) sounds a bit like a Dad’s Army of retired researchers ready to be pressed into service in time of dire emergency – Your laboratory needs you!. But in reality UKRR is much duller: an attempt to resolve the tension between the future and the past of journals.
The future of journals, and the present for that matter, is clearly as electronic entities. Ask any scientist the last time they went to the library shelves to find a print version of an article that was published after about 1998 (when ejournals became dominant). Chances are they only did it because there was a power cut or network outage that caused them to look for the print copy, or else they fancied the Library Assistant on duty and wanted to get a closer look. Yes, publishers (with help from librarians) have created a great success story in electronic journals. Every scientist loves them and uses them to the almost total exclusion of print journals.
The past of journals is still partly as print entities, though these backfiles are relatively little-used. Librarians have therefore been evaluating the amount of space that print journals take up in the library and and are making plans to reallocate that space for other users (study space, collaboration space, training and seminar rooms). Perhaps surprisingly, library users are not always happy at this abandonment of the ideal of a “proper” library with bound volumes on shelves. In the past when I have suggested cancelling print subscriptions I have had some responses saying “I no longer ever use the print journals in the Library, but I think we should still have them on the shelves“. This attitude is changing, I think, and it is looking less and less defensible for libraries to grant space to volumes that no-one wants to use. We have to be brave sometimes in taking the plunge. I know of one medical library that has recently moved most of its printed journals to a locked store. They anticipated problems, but have had very few requests from users for the key.
The problem comes when you ask what will happen to the volumes that you remove. Putting them in an onsite store is one option, but not if your store is already full! Throwing them away altogether is the easy option, but there is a danger that something unique or very rare will be lost. UKRR is one answer to this quandary. Led by Imperial College, UKRR sees
low-use research journals stored and maintained by the British Library, freeing up university library space to be used more creatively
One copy of each title is kept, thereby reducing the overall amount of space required. In the pilot there were eight university libraries and the scheme is now being opened to other UK university libraries. The library gains extra space by relinquishing little-used journals, but can relax safe in the knowledge that nothing is being lost from the scholarly record.
One day, when everything under the sun has been digitised and checked ten times to make sure that no supplement or ancillary material has been missed, perhaps we can finally discard the last print volumes altogether. Until then, UKRR is the last chance saloon for printed journals.
Frank, this is a really interesting development. Any idea what will eventually happen to the cast offs? Recycling, sending them to Universities in developing nations? Or landfill?
sending them to Universities in developing nations
I’ll definitively favor this option. It’s true that on developed countries these days you hardly ever need to go to the library, since access to any paper that you may need to read is just a few clicks away, but this doesn’t hold for the rest of the world. The fees for online access that publishers charge are sometimes too high for under-budgeted scientific libraries in developing nations (and the exchange rate sometimes makes it particularly complicated). I can tell you from experience how frustrating it is to spot some abstract on pubmed that looks relevant for your work, only to find out that your institution does not have access to that particular journal and therefore you probably won’t be able to read it.
I don’t know what their plans are for disposals. It will depend on the nature of the material – if it is very old and obscure stuff then it’s unlikely anyone is going to want it. Shipping print volumes to developing nations is problematic – you don’t want to waste money shipping material that no-one needs and can’t assume that institutions there will be happy to take just what you want to send. I’ve not looked into this recently but will have to do soon as we have some stuff to clear out.
We’ve recently cleared our office shelves of personal subscriptions for back issues of Am Nat, Oikos, Ecology, Journal of Animal Ecology. It was easy to find a home for all of them, in a University in Russian Karelia (right on the Finnish border).
It really wouldn’t be difficult to co-ordinate and find homes for many of the journals, and thinking only of the UK (disregarding the rest of Europe, Japan and North America), there are likely to be enough uni libraries with copies of the same journals to distribute to any number of willing recipients all around the world!
Yes, copies of recent issues of your core journals (which is presumably what you take out personal subs to) will find a home easily. But the Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine 1920-1990 or the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 1928-1984 are less in demand.