Over the last few days, I have been exchanging emails with the chief librarian at my university to find out how much Springer charges us for access to its LNCS proceedings series. My enquiries were prompted by some remarks from a colleague from outside Iceland who told me that her library will likely stop subscribing to LNCS starting in 2011.
Yesterday, my contact at our library wrote to me saying that LNCS is not part of the Icelandic National Licence to Springer journals, SpringerLINK. Our library used to buy it as a special subscription and we had a deal with Springer for a three year period. This subscription was one of the special subscriptions we had to cancel after the financial crisis. She also told me that the subscription fee for access to LNCS for the year 2009 was the "special price" of 7.566,00 EUROS. (I wonder what the standard price is.)
I wonder whether your library will continue subscribing to LNCS. (Do post a comment if you have any information on this!) Times are hard for everyone, or so it seems, and perhaps university libraries are becoming more selective in choosing what journals and proceedings series they subscribe to.
2 comments:
As a 1st year PhD student I had to work 20% of my time in the CS department’s library (Lund University) and I was shocked when I saw how much the department had to pay for the journal subscriptions (especially since most of them weren’t read by anyone). The LNCS subscription is outrageously expensive but at least you get a lot of paper...
A few examples from Elsevier’s 2010 subscription price list for librarians: “Applied Mathematics and Computation” 5499 Eur, “Computers & Operations Research” 3348 Eur, “Computer-Aided Design” 1911 Eur, “Computer Networks” 2194 Eur. However, Elsevier has a TCS “student package” with 12 TCS journals for only 1074 Eur.
Luckily we have ACM and IEEE journals that are much cheaper, and of course the completely free journals such as Journal of Graph Algorithms and Journal of Computational Geometry.
our library has not renewed the subscriptions to LNCS since last year due to budget cuts, and next year will be worse...
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