Assistance for library resources significant boost to Australian research

CAPA hails the seventeenth recommendation of the Senate Committee report, Universities in Crisis, that the Commonwealth contribute to the establishment of national site licence agreements to facilitate Australian researchers' access to essential journals and other research materials.

"The massive disinvestment visited upon Australia's university research infrastructure by the present Government has hit no operating units of our higher education sector harder than our libraries," said CAPA President John Byron today.

"The effect of this upon our national research capability is significantly amplified by the fact that libraries are probably the single most important research resource available to us - more fundamental even than our laboratories, field sites, or sample populations."

The starvation of funds has been exacerbated by the consolidation of monopolistic practices in the international academic publishing business, combined with the declining purchasing power of the Australian dollar.

"While the allegedly good economic managers of the Liberal Party would have us to believe that it is good for us to pay through the nose for foreign goods, the librarians of Australia are struggling to find ways to keep us in the global research loop," he commented.

"At present, they are comprehensively losing that battle."

Mr Byron continued, "The squeeze has resulted in massive cuts in subscriptions to essential serials and other resources, which severely hamper the ability of Australian researchers to conduct even rudimentary research activity, let alone the world class work to which we aspire, and of which we are capable.

"The Howard Government has been unmoved by well-documented pleas for assistance, and has instead preferred to talk big about supporting innovation, while starving its most basic foundations of essential funding," he observed.

CAPA therefore warmly welcomes the Committee's sensible appeal to the Government to assist universities financially in establishing a series of national site licence deals to secure access to the world's cutting edge journals and other research resources.

"If recommendations like this one are not taken up, top class Australian researchers will be faced with the cruel irony of being published in journals to which they have no access - assuming, that is, that our top-class researchers remain in a country that refuses to adequately resource them to do the work required of them," Mr Byron noted.