It’s April, and even here in New England traces of spring abound.  The brown and grey landscape of winter is rapidly giving way to more vernal hues. Forsythias are in bloom, the branches of the roadside maples and oaks are festooned with buds, and the woodlands are alive with the sounds of birdcalls. Why does the world seem such a gloomy place? Could it be the economy? Well yes, it could.

Everyone and everything, it seems, is connected today. While some of us might like to believe that the academic universe is separate from the greed-driven machinations of Wall Street and business, and that we may, therefore, safely ignore such petty pecuniary concerns, it is not so. When Wall Street and the financial system stumble today, they take the rest of us with them. Just as a rising tide is said to lift all ships, so, it would appear, an outgoing tide strands all vessels in the mud flats.

As the academic community braces itself for the worst in this spring of our discontent, so must scholarly publishers. This is abundantly clear from the recent “ARL Statement to Scholarly Publishers on the Global Economic Crisis.” While no specific percentages are cited, a fair summary of ARL’s predictions for library materials budgets might be “budget cuts, more budget cuts, and major cancellation projects.” For scholarly publishers, the news is grim indeed, and ARL’s recommendations are unlikely to lift the gloom. Among ARL’s recommendations are that publishers should

• “consider carefully decisions to invest in new products, functionality, and marketing efforts”
• “seek new efficiencies that can result in price reductions in the short as well as the long term”
• “be open to mid-term renegotiations of contracts”
• “accelerate … commitments to third-party archiving services as the potential for business failure increases”
• “generously and completely … provide ongoing access to back issues of cancelled subscriptions.”

Still, it is fair to ask, what exactly is the point of this type of exercise?  The budgetary crisis affecting academic libraries is a topic of great importance, one on which ARL can speak with real authority.  It is less clear how ARL’s current set of recommendations are likely to be helpful, particularly to the publishers to whom they are ostensibly addressed but whose own problems seem to be of no interest.  Is there not, especially in these troubled times, a better way to foster dialogue among the players who make up the scholarly communication community? And wouldn’t such a dialogue be more likely to produce a sustainable, scalable, long-term solution (or set of solutions) that would benefit all parties?

Or perhaps we really do think there is no connection between the health of academic libraries and the health of other players in the scholarly communication community. If so, we might do well to remember the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”—IER