For nearly a century, a symbiotic relationship existed between scholars and scholarly publishers. Academics freely provided their discoveries, work, and time editing and reviewing, and scholarly publishers provided packaging and sold the output of the academics’ labors for a modest profit. This benefited both groups, because the publishers received the most valuable inputs for free, while the academics were sheltered from the business end of publishing....In the 1970s, some for-profit scholarly publishers discovered that library demands for journals were remarkably unresponsive to price increases and that the publishers could greatly increase their revenues by sharply increasing their prices....This gap widened in the 1980s and further widened in the 1990s, so that the for-profit journals charge about five times as much per page and fifteen times as much per citation as the non-profits....It is time to recognize a simple fact, and react to it. The symbiotic relationship between academics and for-profit publishers has broken down. The large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear.....So far, universities have failed to use one of the most powerful tools that they possess: charging for their valuable inputs. Journal editing uses a great deal of professorial and staff time, as well as supplies, office space and computers, all provided by universities....Academics consent to edit 2 of 3 journals and their departments offer them facilities and sometimes even released time from teaching classes....For those journals that uphold their side of the bargain by setting reasonable subscription prices, this policy remains a reasonable one. However, we see no reason for universities to subsidize editorial inputs to journals that are priced to extract maximum revenue from the academic community....We recommend the following policies. (i) Universities should assess overhead charges for the support services of editors working for journals that have basic library subscription rates of more than a threshold level of cost per measured unit of product. (ii) University libraries should refrain from buying bundled packages from large commercial publishers and should set clear minimal standards of costeffectiveness for individual journals to which they subscribe. We believe that it is reasonable to figure that a journal editor who handles about 100 papers annually would use about 20% of a secretary along with the associated space and other overhead materials, an overhead charge of at least $12,000 per year would seem appropriate. While some have encouraged individual academics to boycott expensive journals, such a challenge should occur at the university level. Overall, it is the entire university community that is harmed by the draining of library budgets and restrictions on dissemination of articles....We have created a website that lists the price per article and the price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals. Using these statistics, we have constructed an index of costliness for each journal in each of several broadly defined disciplinary areas....We used this index to construct lists of journals that we believe represent poor value for university library subscription. Our criterion for a journal to be “overpriced” is that a weighted index of the cost per article and the cost per citation is more than two and a half times as large as the median index for non-profit journals in the same discipline. We suggest that universities assess overhead charges, and libraries not subscribe to any of the journals on the “expensive” list. Of course universities are invited to construct their own measures of journal cost-effectiveness. Our website presents the data that can easily be used to construct such measures. We realize that individual universities should probably compose their own policies, because broad collective action on pricing may risk an antitrust violation.
Bergstrom is the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Professor of Economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. McAfee is the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics & Management at the California Institute of Technology.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/01/2005 08:07:00 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.
