Following budget cuts, the Mason Library has terminated its subscription to the Web of Science research database, said Celia Rabinowitz, the director of the library.
Rabinowitz said that although Web of Science has many features that researchers may find useful, including keyword search and citation search for easier access to relevant information, it was also the most expensive database subscription the library had, at over $20,000 annually.
According to the website for Clarivate, the company that provides Web of Science, the database aims to “[a]ccelerate novel research of the highest quality with premier scholarly and scientific research tools.”
Rabinowitz added she tries to build the library’s budget based on use rather than exclusively on cost.
“Small programs with lower and fewer students in them need resources just as much as the large programs do, so my job is to be equitable,” Rabinowitz said. “We aren’t spending equal amounts of money. The science databases cost a lot more than the English databases but we’re trying to be equitable to make sure students and faculty in all disciplines have the resources they need.”
Rabinowitz added that many of the other databases to which the library subscribes provide access to materials that overlap with what Web of Science can provide and that even free tools like Google Scholar can provide some similar desirable features such as citation searching.
Professor of Biology Cynthia Hays said she found out Web of Science had been cancelled while working on a manuscript about a week before the start of this semester. She reached out to library staff who introduced her to alternatives, and she has since adapted her courses for the semester to use Google Scholar in place of Web of Science.
“It’s [Google Scholar] not quite as seamless, but it’s not as terrible as I originally feared, so it has not been a disaster, but it has been an adjustment,” Hays said.
Hays said one of the biggest advantages of using Web of Science in the classroom was the guarantee that the materials students were accessing were primary literature that had gone through appropriate peer review. Tools like Google Scholar do not have such a guarantee.
“If you are not using a search engine that has those criteria, you can look up the journal name and find on their web page [if a source is] peer reviewed and double-check and I show students how to do that, but again, it’s another step,” Hays said.
Rabinowitz said those looking for alternatives for Web of Science can also look to the individual journal subscriptions the library maintains as well as the interlibrary loan program that provides access to materials from around 60,000 libraries.
“If you find an article that we don’t have – let’s say maybe you used to be able to get to it in the Web of Science – if you use our system to make a request, we retrieve articles that are digital and we can get them to you within six to 24 hours,” Rabinowitz said. “I have sometimes requested an article in the morning and literally in the afternoon, it’s sitting in my inbox. We have somebody here working on doing that.”
Hays said although other research databases are synced with the interlibrary loan system, accessing the correct link is not always as seamless as it was with Web of Science.
“We have an absolutely fantastic interlibrary loan staff, and they have always been phenomenal about getting resources to to us, to scientists and to students,” Hays said. “One of the things that has worried me about the shift to other search engines is that link isn’t always as apparent and so students have to do a little bit more work to get the article, and I always worry that that creates a path for picking papers because they’re accessible, not because it’s the right source for the question they’re asking.”
Rabinowitz said the five percent cut the library, along with all other budgets across campus, experienced this past year, led her to already pursue other areas to trim, so she wanted to look elsewhere in the budget.
“When we are faced with a request to do a budget reduction, which may happen again this year for next year, [databases are] not the only place that I look, but we’ve had other reductions, and so I have fewer places to look,” Rabinowitz said. “I can look at the student labor budget and we can look at our hours. We’ve done already a little bit of changing of our hours. I want to be very careful about that.”
Rabinowitz said she is currently looking at another database vendor, a competitor to Web of Science that has a reputation for high prices but is currently offering a much lower rate. She clarified she wants to be sure about it before making any decisions.
“If I went to that vendor I’d want, for example, a commitment to not giving me a really attractive price for year one only to turn around in year two and have them say, ‘OK, well, now you have a 10 percent increase,’” Rabinowitz said. “This is always a challenge. Sometimes we can get that kind of assurance and sometimes we can’t.”
Rabinowitz said this is an issue that arises with any product, but particularly with databases she wants to avoid subscribing to a product only to take it away.
“I don’t want to get something for a year, find out the price is going to be unsustainable and then turn around and cancel it and then have people say, ‘We really liked it. We were really using it,’” Rabinowitz said. “I think that’s not fair.”
Professor of Psychology Shailee Woodard was not available for an interview but stated in an email to The Equinox, “I do think it’s a shame that the library is losing access to research databases. It makes it a lot harder for faculty and students to do research when they don’t have access to literature in the field.”
Hays said she felt there was a greater message to take away from the situation.
“I hope that Keene State and the USNH system continues to support library sciences here because it’s really important,” Hays said. “[The loss of] this particular tool has been a little bit challenging for me personally, but the bigger picture question is making sure that libraries in general are supported.”
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
