John Ewing, Open Access to Journals Won't Lower Prices, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpts with interposed comments:
Journals publishing is in crisis. For years, subscription prices have gone up rapidly, with the average annual increase now close to 10 percent; some journals cost three times as much today as they did a decade ago. The budgets of university libraries have fallen far behind, forcing librarians to cancel subscriptions....Scholars and librarians have become increasingly unhappy about the state of affairs, and they demand action. So what action do they suggest? They want to change the way in which publishers collect the money. Go figure....By the time people realized that electronic journals did have costs -- editing, hardware, and software, for example, are not free -- what had been considered a side benefit (open access) had become an ideology.... (PS: One more time, in case anyone is listening: No serious OA advocate ever said that OA literature was free to produce, merely that there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers.)
Will open access solve the real problem of scholarly publishing, the exorbitant and unsustainable prices of journals? We are asked to accept on faith that changing who pays will somehow magically change how much we pay altogether. The only evidence to support that argument is a calculation that multiplies the number of articles in all scholarly journals (at present) by a per-paper charge (which is highly uncertain). The calculation shows that the total charges to authors are less than the total revenue from all present subscriptions.... (PS: No serious OA advocate ever said that merely changing the source of payment also changes the amount. Note, however, that changing the source does remove a potent access barrier for readers. In any case, the asserted calculation is relevant and important. But why withhold the numbers? Show us the numbers and then we can talk constructively about whether they are accurate.)
But as access has increased during the past decade, journal prices have continued to escalate. In spite of that deepening crisis, we now focus on access....Scholars and librarians have to stop dealing with high-priced journals, as authors, editors, referees, or subscribers. Soon the publishers of less-expensive journals will grow, and those of more-expensive journals will decline....Will cutting off ties to high-priced journals be easy? Surely not. But it is far more likely to solve the problem of prices than changing the way we collect the money. No magic is needed. We have only to focus our attention on the real problem. (PS: It's hard to believe that Ewing thinks that OA advocates do not share his complaint about journal prices or even his remedy. But OA advocates have more than one remedy. Let's remember why high prices are harmful. The primary reason is that they force cancellations and non-subscriptions, and therefore decrease access. OA gives primary attention to the primary problem. OA archiving increases access even if journal prices do not change. OA journals increase access and reduce prices, to zero, even if conventional journal prices do not change. So yes, let's try to reduce conventional journal prices, using Ewing's methods among others. But let's not wait for that effort to succeed, and let's not settle for lower access barriers when we could have none at all.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/27/2004 07:59:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
