Issue 8: Spring 2007
Interview with Dr. Ralf Schimmer, Max Planck Digital Library in Munich
Arend Kuester Director - PCG EuropeDr. Ralf Schimmer explains how researchers at the Max Planck Institute have adjusted to the increase of available material online and how the library’s acquisitions policies are evolving. Dr. Schimmer also shares his views on Open Access and key issues he would like to see addressed by publishers.
Background
Arend Kuester: How large is your group? – How many locations and users?
Ralf Schimmer: The Max Planck Society operates 80 institutions in Germany, the Netherlands and in Italy, which are focused on basic research. 4500 scientists research in all subject fields of the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.
The members are entirely research orientated; there are no undergraduates or graduates at the Institute, with the exception of selected PhD candidates. We don’t focus on students, but high-end research with a high level of Excellency, which has been at the core of the reputation of the Max Planck Society.
Users:
AK: How have your library users adjusted to the changes in electronic availability?
RS: They have adjusted extremely well! We cannot imagine turning the clock back again, and we actively pursue an e-only policy with deep discount prices. Some institutes still prefer having some of the journals in print, and this is generally left to the individual institute. However, it does help that the Max Planck Institute are VAT exempt.
AK: Have you observed a real shift to Google use when students / faculty start researching a subject?
RS: Naturally, Google is being used as a point of entry in our research institutes. We don’t really see this as a problem, as long as researchers know they quality restrictions this might have and come back to the quality assured information, which the library provides.
AK: How do your users access the articles they are looking for? How has your role in helping them changed over the last 5 years?
RS: Library users are unpredictable, and we are trying to catch the user where he/she is actually looking for the information. We provide a strong infrastructure for our users, with a portal, Open URLs and reference linking; metasearch engines are sometimes used to supplement the information in special circumstances.
The Society does invest into systems to anticipate the users behavior, and we are constantly working to make sure that we have our links where the users are looking for information. Our researchers are continuing to be creative, both in their research as well as in the way they access in the information, and we have to allow them as much space as possible for their own creativity and are supporting the importance of self-regulation within the scientific community.
Certainly, our top researchers know where to get the main information – but we can’t tell a Nobel Laureate where he has to go to get his information!
AK: How do your users feel about eBooks? Have you noticed an increase in demand for more books or Major Reference Works online?
RS: We don’t know enough about eBooks yet – early signs are that they are a little shallow in coverage. To address this issue, we have created a project group, which is working to define a strategy here, and they will draft a concept whether the MPI will purchase this publication centrally or not. At this moment, we don’t know whether it will be best to order eBooks through aggregators or direct, title by title or in packages. We then will have to find out the best way to offer the eBooks to our users – we just can’t send an email out to everyone, and tell them that we purchased a specific package and hope that the users will start working with it. We did buy the Safari Textbooks, though, but overall; we need to find out more about usage within our community before we can start spending larger sums of money on eBooks.
Purchasing Decisions
AK: Does your institution have specific guidelines for cancelling unique serials? What are the factors that influence journal cancellation decisions?
RS: We are still working on optimizing our holdings and consolidate the holdings. We are constantly in dialogue with our users and trying to find out whether journals match their research interests.
AK: Does an embargoed online access via a journal aggregator constitute a substitute for either print or online subscriptions through the publisher?
RS: Not at all! Time is the most significant factor in reach, and we need to get even to the preprints! Still, for less important titles this is an option, especially for smaller more university orientated libraries. They probably are more a factor in the social science and humanities where there is less pressure on immediate dissemination. We would only consider this for journals of lesser importance, but never for the most important titles. Especially since we really need the archiving rights to work with the information in perpetuity…
AK: How important are usage statistics and how do you integrate them in your selection process?
RS: Gladly, we have expanded our team, and now we are working more with user statistics. However, they should not be the single deciding factor on acquisitions. We are actually working with a Matrix and evidence based analyses, where we mix the user statistics with other factors.
AK: PCG has consistently found that faculty recommendations or endorsement have a very significant impact on the collections of university libraries. What approach is employed when considering new journals for acquisition? What do you think about online trials for individual journals and for larger packages?
RS: We have a central acquisition group, which links into the individual libraries within the institutes, who are in constant dialogue with the faculty. They voice their acquisition requests, and then a lot depends on how responsive the provider of the information is going to be. Many publishers don’t have sales representatives we can contact for Europe within Europe. And this can sometimes cause delays in the communication.
However, trials are very important, but we usually don’t do four weeks trial. The fewer barriers there are, the better. Ideally we prefer six months trials, so we can add them to our system and see how the users are picking them up. We really don’t mind paying a fee for those, which should be considerably lower than half of the journal subscription.
Open Access
AK: What is your view about the Open Access movement? How often do you use Open Access journals and how important are they for your institution? In a recent study conducted by PCG, librarians reported that the availability of Open Access journals do not influence their collection decisions at 57% of the institutions. Do Open Access journals have any bearing on journal collection or cancellation decisions at your institution?
RS: The Max Planck Institutes are strong supporters of Open Access, after all the Berlin declaration has originated here. We do actually believe that OA journals should be paid from within the same budget, but in many calculations about the real cost of Open Access, many people forget that most articles have multiple authors. I don’t think that the monetary argument works with Open Access anyway. We should look at this issue without ideology.
Let’s face the reality: the budget will shift, and we would probably pay the same amount for the information than we did before – perhaps even slightly more. We are more concerned about the fact that the current subscription model limits the creativity of our authors. Let’s have an example. A researcher is building an accelerator or better a microscope. They can’t just call Carl Zeiss Jena and ask for something they have in stock! So, they will order some parts and reassemble the microscope and add their own scientific input to build their specific scientific instrument. With articles in traditional journals, use is limited, and the law does not allow doing more with it. Both librarians or publishers should not attempt to channel scientific creativity, and both parties need to find ways to continue working with their users on this.
We don’t think that we can cancel the key journals, because other research is Open Access – we have to motivate publishers to adopt the “golden way” to open access and prefer articles made available in Open Access in traditional and reputable journals. I think that probably in 20 to 30 years time, the Open Access journal will be the norm, and we will look back at the current discussion in a similar way as we are looking back on the discussions from Galileo whether the sun evolves around the earth or not.
Publishers
AK: What are the key issues that you would like to see addressed by publishers and content vendors working with your organization?
RS: We would like to work with publishers on machine-readable user license that would save us all time. Our most pressing issue is that we need the publishers to come out of their self contained information silos, which does not match the way scientists work. Open URL is one of our biggest issues, and to us it’s difficult to understand why two of the large publishers are still not offering reference linking? No publisher should think that any information can only be found at the publisher’s site only, so we encourage searching over several publisher’s sites, and hope that publishers will start to offer the relevant tools.