The University of California Academic Council and university librarians have sent an open letter to UC faculty about journal price increases. Excerpt: 'Initial proposals from some of these publishers are at odds with both the extent and severity of UC’s budget situation and the seriousness of our purpose in pursuing a sustainable, long-term acquisition policy. These publishers uniformly derive their base subscription pricing for electronic journals from historical and outmoded campus expenditures for print materials; in addition, they often propose annual price increases that significantly outpace the Consumer Price Index. As you know, because of faculty action during the Elsevier negotiations, UC libraries achieved a multi-year agreement for access to over 1200 journal titles, lowered the base subscription cost, and eliminated the hyperinflation in the yearly price increases sought by the publisher. Now we ask you to support us in our resolve to say no to similar unfair or hyperinflationary price increases....The challenge is particularly troubling this year as we find ourselves negotiating subscription renewals for a large number of academic society publications. Over the past 15 years U.S. society journals have averaged 7.5% in yearly price increases, while, for the same time period, the Consumer Price Index has averaged a 3.1% yearly rise.1 Although there are notable exceptions - the American Physical Society lowered its journal prices this year - it appears that many societies are relying on similar hyperinflation library subscription price models....At the end of the day one simple fact remains: price increases at current levels are unacceptable and will restrict the number of scholarly publications available to each of us.' (PS: See my list of previous actions by the University of California system to combat rising journal prices.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/14/2005 10:56:00 AM.
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.
