One of my faculty sent this out on our campus. I've been trying
for years to get them to "awaken" to journals costs, maybe its starting to
register.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Science world in revolt at power of the journal owners
James Meek, science correspondent
Saturday May 26, 2001
The Guardian
Scientists around the world are in revolt against moves by a powerful group of
private corporations to lock decades of publicly funded western scientific
research into expensive, subscription-only electronic databases.
At stake in the dispute is nothing less than control over the fruits of
scientific discovery - millions of pages of scientific information which may
hold the secrets of a cure for Aids, cheap space travel or the workings of the
human mind.
More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161 countries
in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals who refuse to make
research papers freely available on the internet after six months.
"Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public domain," said
Michael Ashburner, professor of biology at Cambridge University and one of the
leading British signatories of the campaign, the Public Library of Science
(PLS). "In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of science
shouldn't be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge profits. The
fruits of our research - which is, overwhelmingly, publicly paid for - should
be made available as widely and as economically as possible."
Anger has been simmering for more than a decade in the research libraries of
Europe and the US at the massive increase in the cost of subscriptions to
scientific journals, which collectively make up the sum of the world's
scientific research.
As the power of the internet to mine electronically archived journals for data
grows, scientists have become increasingly frustrated at the journal
publishers' plans to keep tight, lucrative control over decades of their work.
Last year the most powerful journal publisher, the Anglo-Dutch firm Reed
Elsevier, made a profit of £252m on a turnover of £693m in its science and
medical business.
Elsevier Science and other journal publishers effectively benefit from the
public purse twice: once when taxpayer-funded scientists submit their work to
the journals for free, and again when taxpayer-funded libraries buy the
information back from them in the form of subscriptions.
In Britain, the government is so concerned about the power of Reed Elsevier
that it has blocked its £3.2bn takeover of another big journal publisher,
Harcourt, while complaints about its market dominance are investigated.
Derk Haank, the head of Elsevier Science, protested at the singling out of his
company, and portrayed the boycott group as naive idealists. "Everybody would
like to have everything available, all the time, and preferably for free," he
said. "That's a general human trait, but I'm not sure the business model is
realistic. I'm not ashamed to make a profit. I would only be ashamed if people
were saying I was delivering a lousy service."
He added: "Research is publicly funded, but the cost of publishing it isn't. If
the funding authorities were to decide to pay for publication I would provide
it for free."
You won't find copies of most of Reed Elsevier's 1,100 journals on newsagents'
shelves. With titles like Thin Walled Structures, Urban Water, Journal of
Supercritical Fluids and Trends in Parasitology, their publications don't have
the allure of Elle or FHM but the price of a year's subscription would make
mass market publishers drool with envy.
A year's subscription to Alcohol - nine issues - comes in at about £100 an
issue. One Elsevier journal, Brain Research, costs more than £9,000 a year.
Another, Preventative Veterinary Medicine, is now £713 a year, an increase of
more than 300% over its 1991 price of £171.
Elsevier justifies the increases on the grounds that the number of articles
being submitted increases each year, adding to the firm's costs. Each article
must be peer-reviewed by fellow scientists to see if it is worthy of
publication.
Mr Haank added that his firm's price increases forced libraries to cut
subscriptions, which in turn cut Elsevier's income, forcing them to increase
prices still more.
Elsevier wanted to get out of this vicious circle, he said, and was trying to
get universities to sign up for electronically archived versions of its
journals. The firm has taken on 1,500 people to put its entire journal archive -
going back to 19th century editions of The Lancet - on computer databases. But
he said the price of subscription to the electronic database would still be
tightly linked to the ever rising cost of the paper journals.
"Our plan is to make everything available in the academic or professional
environment, not just in six months, but on day one," he said. "Somebody has to
pay for the cost of the system."
Scientific research is not considered real unless it has been published in a
recognised journal, and scientists' status and promotion is tied to
publication.
As a rule, neither the scientists who write the papers, nor their colleagues
who peer review them, nor the editorial boards who vet them, are paid. The
publishers' costs are printing, the tiny full-time staff on each journal -
typically two people - marketing, and distribution.
While the feud over the price of journals was between libraries and publishers,
the scientists stood aside, but the advent of the internet has changed
everything.
Powerful search engines trawling computer databases make it possible for
scientists to discover groundbreaking links between different research results
which would previously have taken years of trawling through a jungle of
indexes.
The prospect of this incredible new tool being controlled by large private
corporations has jerked scientists into action.
"The major commercial publishers have every reason to feel threatened," Prof
Ashburner said. "They charge very high prices, and they are very insistent on
copyright transfer. We are not paid for publication, and we see no reason
whatsoever why we should hand over copyright to a commercial publisher, having
done the work, both the science and the writing.
"The costs these publishers are charg ing are such that even in the wealthy
countries we can't always afford to buy the information back, and it's off-
limits totally for the developing world."
In a letter to the competition commission in March, Clive Field, librarian at
Birmingham University and head of the Consortium of University Research
Libraries said that the Elsevier-Harcourt merger would give one company control
over journals representing 42% of a typical university's spend in that area.
He said Elsevier and Harcourt were already trying to drive too tough a deal
with their electronic archive. "Neither publisher has yet offered a deal which
is recognised to be fair and equitable," he wrote. "It is not unnaturally
feared that a merged publisher, operating in a market where the buyer is weak,
would be even less subject to the price checks and balances that a more open
market would offer."
A nice little earner
Title Brain Research
Publisher Elsevier
Annual subscription 1991 £3,713
Annual subscription 2001 £9,148
Increase 146%
Title Journal of Virological Methods
Publisher Elsevier
Subscription 1991 £527
Subscription 2001 £1,555
Increase 195%
Title Neuroscience Letters
Publisher Elsevier
Subscription 1991 £1,125
Subscription 2001 £2,805
Increase 149%
Title Preventative Veterinary Medicine
Publisher Elsevier
Subscription 1991 £171
Subscription 2001 £713
Increase 317%
Title Biochemical Journal
Publisher Biochemical Society (not-for-profit body)
Subscription 1991 £793
Subscription 2001 £1,334
Increase 68%
Source: Consortium of University Research Libraries
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