Attention, UNC Chapel Hill faculty: that scholarly journal you like thumbing through from time to time may be on the chopping block.

So if you can't live without the Belgian Journal of Botany, or the European Journal of Protistology, or the Journal of Cutaneous Pathology, or any of the other 800 or so titles the university is poised to cancel, you'd best write a strongly-worded e-mail.

In this era of budget cutting, the university stands to save hundreds of thousands of dollars by killing off subcriptions to hundreds of journal subscriptions, some arcane, some outdated, many very, very expensive.

The Health Sciences Library has identified 153 titles that alone will save $322,000. And the main UNC-CH library system has 640 more titles is is expecting to discontinue.

In deciding what to cut, library staffers have surveyed faculty and looked at usage. They know which journals are popular and which are rarely used, but rely as well on the surveys to find the titles that are used rarely but are still important.

"Sometimes, the audience for a journal is a small group, but it may be very important to them," said Christie Degener, with the health sciences library.

The health sciences library spends about $3 million a year on about 4,300 books and serials each year, so the 153 titles to be axed are just a fraction.  

Still, Degener said she'd like not to have to do so.

"We are now down to issues people use," she said. "We've gotten beyond the fat."

Bill Marzluff, for one, is nonplussed by the cancellations. Marzluff is an associate dean in the UNC-CH medical school director of its molecular biology and biotechnology program.

Asked his reaction to the cancellation of several titles related to his field, including one, "Biotechnology and Bioengineering," which costs the university $6,352 for a one-year subscription, he said "That is an outrageous price."

"These are not anywhere near the top tier," he continued. "It doesn't mean they don't have some good stuff in them. But I didn't see anything on that list that made me think, as a scientist, that I wouldn't have access to something I needed."

While faculty members rely heavily on journals, they have learned ways around the traditional subscription format. Often, the university library can find an issue or article at another university library. Or, a researcher can buy a single article rather than an entire issue or subscription. Some researchers even ask the author of an article directly for a copy if it's important.

Sharon Campbell, a UNC-CH biochemistry researcher, calls journals the lifeblood of her work, a "precious resource." And yet she too understands the need to trim costs.

"Understanding and having access to literature is critical; you want to know who is doing what," she said. "But on the flip side, if the journals aren't being accessed much and the university is having budget cuts, there's always a [different] way to get them."