[GOAL] COVID budget cuts, big deals, faculty positions and salaries & bibliodiversity

[Heather Morrison]

Many governments are, or will, need to divert funds from the usual priorities to address the pandemic and issues arising such as economic impact. No doubt this will impact many post-secondary institutions. For example, yesterday we learned that post-secondary institutions in Manitoba have been asked to decrease expenditures by 30%
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-universities-budget-cuts-pandemic-1.5537883

Most faculty members are not involved in making decisions about library budgets. They likely see the big deals of commercial publishers as a service that they do not wish to lose, rather than high-priced services that are paid for from the same pool of funds that pay their salaries.

One way to help faculty understand would be to prepare an explanation of the cost of the big deals that puts the two together, i.e. if we need to cut something, should be cut x number of faculty positions or big deal y (or x% of faculty salaries v. big deal y), for presentation to faculty associations and university administrators.

Explaining the financial and academic-social benefits of an approach prioritizing bibliodiversity would be a little bit more complicated, but arguments that faculty would likely understand and support can be made. For example, instead of 100% of savings from cancelling all big deals to retain as many faculty as possible, perhaps using 80% of savings for this purpose and using the remainder to provide salaries for academics and support staff in local publishing (university press, scholarly society or library-based).

I suspect this is best done proactively, early on when discussions about how to go about cuts are getting started.

Is anyone doing anything like this? Thoughts?


Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706

[On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020]
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