1. Impact of Licensing Cuts on
Research and Education:
Results of a Focus Group Study
Pat Higginbottom
Tracy Powell
T. Scott Plutchak
University of Alabama at Birmingham
November 5, 2010
The Charleston Conference
[No Competing Interests]

2. 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

3. 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)

4. Revenue Sources
State Funds 68%
Tuition & Fees 3%
Support from President 12%
Support from Provost 1%
Support from Schools 5%
Other (primarily hospital) 11%

5. 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%

6. Potential Cancellations 2009
Break up bundles (ScienceDirect, et. al.)
Low-use titles (<300 downloads/year)
Selective moderate use
Subspecialty titles

7. 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 faculty
Newsletter
Personal contacts

8. By the numbers
Total titles available at UAB
*2008: Approximately 38,000
*2009: Approximately 34,000

9. Faculty Reaction
From October ‘08 to June ‘09
65 faculty contacts
153 individual titles (21 after 1/1/09)
Reinstated 147

10. WTF?
We need to do some focus groups

11. 2010
Cancellation list of 300 titles
Accreditation standards
Clinical care
Reduction in ILL charges
Mediated PPV

12. Four Sessions
Public Health, Health Professions, & Nursing
Faculty
Medicine, Dentistry, Optometry Faculty
Center For Clinical & Translational Science
Postdocs & Grad Students in the Joint
Health Sciences
36 participants total

13. Process
Brief introduction, fiscal background
Focused questions
Open discussion

14. 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?

15. 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?

16. 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?

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. Conclusions
Great variability in how the journal literature
is used
ILL/PPV not sufficient for all types of uses
“Black market” is ubiquitous
We are not as effective as we need to be in
getting our message out
High degree of concern, although it is not
being communicated to us

23. 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
license
Our community has a much better
understanding of the challenges that we face

24. Budget increases for 2011
Federal stimulus funds
Indirect expense recovery funds
Protection from proration

25. Going forward
Will increase content spending by 8%
Continue to query faculty who make
requests for new titles
Purpose of use
Type of use
Frequency of use
Alternatives used to get content

26. Acknowledgments
Great thanks to the other LHL faculty & staff
who assisted with this project:
Liz Lorbeer
Valerie Gordon
Sylvia McAphee