Growing numbers of university librarians are reporting difficulties in continuing agreements to pay for increasingly expensive academic journals that their budgets can no longer afford.
Academic librarians and publishers attending the annual meeting of the UK Serials Group (a professional interest group on scholarly communication) last week said that the organisation and funding of research publications would have to change.
“The budgets of academic libraries have not kept pace with the increasing number and price of journals their users want to use,” said Dr Fytton Rowland, senior lecturer in information science at Loughborough University.
The underlying problem is that journals are monopolies, argued Mr Jan Velterop, publisher of BioMed Central, which publishes online journals with free access and whose administration costs are paid by the authors.
Some librarians consider that some academic publishing companies are making excessive profits on journal subscriptions. An article in the Wall Street Journal (2003 Feb 21) claimed that the 43% net profit declared by Reed Elsevier was “buoyed by strong subscription revenue for its science and medical publications.”
It added that the company “reported sharply higher net profits and predicted double-digit per-share earnings growth this year.”
Daviess Meneffe, library relations, Elsevier, countered that its increased revenue “came mainly from its recent acquisition of Harcourt, [another publisher], and not from price increases.” Eric Merkel-Sobotta, director – corporate relations, Elsevier, said: “The problem is not the pricing of journals. It is the funding of research. Librarians are having a tough time persuading research funders to keep pace with the costs of research. Journals account for only 0.5% of the costs of research.” He acknowledged that there were problems with the prices of some Elsevier journals in the 1980s and 1990s, but these had now been addressed.
However, Mr Robert Michaelson, head librarian at the Seeley G Mudd Library for Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, said: “Elsevier is the big cartel that we face in science and engineering libraries. At my university, about half of the dollars we spend on science and engineering journals go on Elsevier owned publications. Elsevier is obviously trying to make a profit, but it is difficult to understand the enormous difference in the cost of some of their journals compared to similar journals published by learned societies.”
Another problem is “big deals”—contracts in which libraries pay for a package of journals and online access to journals from a particular publisher for several years, with restrictions on early cancellation.
Mr Velterop suggested that the monopolies could be broken by open access publishing, in which academic institutions pay for publication of their researchers' papers at input, and papers are then made available for free on the internet. BioMed Central charges authors $500 (£320; €470) for the processes, including peer review, required for its online publications. The online Public Library of Science is also developing an open access journal, with plans to charge authors $1500 for the publication process, and other publishers are experimenting with open access publishing.
Footnotes
Competing interests: The BMJ Publishing Group is a small to medium sized publisher that profits from the current market but is threatened by the large publishers.