"An alarm bell is ringing in the ivory tower. Something's gone terribly wrong, frustrated scholars say, when scientific journals cost as much as new cars and diamond rings. Critics are complaining with growing intensity that the most important advances in human knowledge--the new research and discoveries of top universities--have been in effect seized and are being held for ransom by commercial publishers." Charles Burress, San Francisco Chronicle, 03/28/04
There is nothing new about the high cost of journals in the sciences; they were costly in the Print Era, but at least in those days they could be purchased or cancelled individually, as library budgets expanded and contracted. But the days of the single subscription are no more–in the Digital Age these high-priced resources are sold in packages that often contain hundreds of titles, leaving libraries to take all or nothing. (In a January 19, 2004 piece in the Wall Street Journal one publisher complained that librarians were being unfair in objecting to bundled subscription services, claiming, "It's like having a yearly magazine subscription, not liking the October issue and then saying, 'We want a refund.'")
In the beginning, this model was appealing: publishers offered libraries access to the electronic versions of an enormous number of journals for just a little more money than they had been paying for a much smaller quantity of print titles. However, before long publishers' price increases began seriously to outstrip inflation. Reed Elsevier, the British-Dutch publisher of large and popular Science Direct, doubled its science/medical revenues to $2.33 billion in the four years between 1999 when this product (with more than 1,000 titles) was introduced and 2003. Over the past dozen years, the average price of Elsevier journals has increased at three times the rate of the Consumer Price Index.
A faltering US economy left academic budgets feeling the impact. Libraries and their faculty clienteles began to panic: spending for materials was down, the flexibility to cancel journals selectively was gone, and the price of continuing had become usurious. There was much grumbling about a system in which colleges and universities were perceived to be paying twice for their faculties' scholarly output once, when they paid the salaries of the faculty who created the material, and then a second time when they paid commercial publishers to re-purchase the research given away by the faculty who generated it.
" 'It is ironic ... that many Stanford scholars--like scholars throughout higher education--volunteer their articles and labor in the production, review and editing of journal content, only to have the final product sold back to Stanford, sometimes at exorbitant prices.'" San Francisco Chronicle, 03/28/04
What to do?
Thus far the answer has been, "Not much." Some institutions have passed resolutions condemning the gouging of academe by avaricious publishers, but we have little more to show than anger. An inventory of recent actions includes:
At its December 17, 2003 meeting, Cornell University's Faculty Senate passed its "Resolution Regarding the University Library's Policies on Serials Acquisitions, with Special Reference to Negotiations with Elsevier." Among the document's recommendations: Recognizing that the cost of Elsevier journals in particular is radically out of proportion with the importance of those journals to the library's serials collection (measured both in terms of the proportion of the total collection they represent and in terms of their use by and value to faculty and students), the University Faculty Senate encourages the library to seek in the near term, in consultation with the faculty, to reduce its expenditures on Elsevier journals to no more than 15% of its total annual serials acquisitions expenditure ... Moreover, the University Faculty Senate encourages the library to work toward long-term pricing structures with Elsevier and other publishers based on reasonable measures of a subscription's importance to the Cornell collection.Recognizing that the increasing control by large commercial publishers over the publication and distribution of the faculty's scholarship and research threatens to undermine core academic values promoting broad and rapid dissemination of new knowledge and unrestricted access to the results of scholarship and research, the University Faculty Senate encourages the library and the faculty vigorously to explore and support alternatives to commercial venues for scholarly communication.
... the UCSC Academic Senate resolves to call upon its tenured members to give serious and careful consideration to cutting their ties with Elsevier: no longer submitting papers to Elsevier journals, refusing to referee the submissions of others, and relinquishing editorial posts should the UC/Elsevier negotiations prove unsuccessful.
"... the consolidation of individual journals into a few large subscription packages continues to severely strain the Library's resources. On the College's end, the library continues to benefit from consortial subscriptions within the CUNY system in order to reduce the cost of online subscriptions and to continue providing access to as many titles as possible. Unfortunately this set-up is unlikely to prevent significant cuts in on-line journal subscriptions in the near future. The committee recommends that the College consider joining together with other affected colleges and universities and apply serious political pressure on publishers to bring pricing on journal packages down. ... It is important that the public and politicians be made aware that the content in these online journals is the result of tax dollars that support academic research. Furthermore, the information contained in these online articles leads to advances and improvements that benefit the community as a whole. Private businesses should not be allowed to prevent the public from accessing the vast resources they have invested in through their tax dollars. Arguments of this nature should be voiced more loudly--the College will benefit greatly from doing what it can to get this message out." Faculty Council's Committee on the Library, Annual Report 2003-2004
Do any or all of these actions have Elsevier running scared? Hardly. The company reports that submissions by faculty to its journals have not declined, dismissing the idea that open-access science resources threaten their profits as "a lot of noise." " 'There is no serials crisis,'" according to Elsevier "'What there is, is a library funding crisis.'" (San Francisco Chronicle 03/28/04) Nonetheless, the open-access model would be buoyed if a bill eliminating copyright protection for publicly-funded research were to become law; that bill is presently before Congress. And, Elsevier is allowing some of its older material journal articles six months to a year old–to become part of www.biomedcentral.com.
For Brooklyn College, however, all of this is academic: it is sad but certain that we will be forced to reduce our e-journal offerings before the present system of scholarly communication undergoes significant change.