Elsevier seeks to build bridges

The new director of library relations at Elsevier, Tony McSean, has admitted that it needs to improve relationships with information professionals, and is calling for a new era of co-operation.

Relationships between Elsevier and academic libraries reached a nadir in the winter of 2003/04, when a raft of US universities - including Cornell, Harvard and the University of California - rebelled against escalating journal costs and cut their subscription levels dramatically.

Since then, Elsevier has been trying to mend fences, but McSean - former director of the British Medical Association library - acknowledges the challenge ahead.

"The relationship is like a marriage, if you lose the trust, it is very hard to get back."

In an exclusive interview with IWR, McSean said he has spent the last few months meeting library customers and listening to their concerns. "I have not spent the whole time being told what I want to hear," he said, adding: "We are held up as an example of what librarians hate; we take stick for the entire industry because we are visible."

But McSean's version of Tony Blair's "masochism strategy" seeks to highlight pain on both sides of the relationship. "Libraries are suffering budget cuts," he said. "Information spend has not gone down, but the spend on libraries has. The crucial concern is that they are being given a job to do and not the money to do it."

However, librarians should also appreciate Elsevier's side. He said: "Each scientific paper costs between $3/4,000 to publish. There is a perception that authors deliver finely honed copy, and all we do is make a PDF and sit surrounded by bags of gold that librarians give us."