"We think the model of scholarly publishing is broken and needs to be changed," said Thomas Leonard, UC Berkeley’s head librarian. "Once you think about material delivered digitally, you start to think whether a journal is needed at all."
Leonard and others from the academic and corporate worlds will meet today on the Berkeley campus for a forum on the journal industry's future. The event is sponsored jointly by UC Berkeley's Center for New Media and Elsevier, one of the world's largest publishers....
In the 1980s and 1990s, universities balked at the publications’ rapidly rising prices. Some librarians, including those in the UC system, talked more openly about boycotting expensive titles. But faculty members, especially those at research-oriented institutions such as UC, simply cannot do without academic journals. Without access to research available only in journal articles, promotion and tenure is out of reach....
The pressure to provide the latest research to instructors and students has led institutions to continue to pay for the expensive publications, but not without a fight. When it came time for the UC system to renew its approximately $6 million contract for a wide range of Elsevier titles, university officials bargained aggressively until the company lowered its asking price. The Netherlands-based company does the best it can to limit annual price increases, said Karen Hunter, an Elsevier senior vice president who will speak at the Berkeley seminar. But the priciest journals can produce more than 300 new pages per week, she said....
But critics remain steadfastly opposed to such business practices. Publicly traded publishers such as Elsevier charge four or five times as much for their journals as nonprofit publishers, said Ted Bergstrom, a UC Santa Barbara economics professor who has studied journal prices since 2000. With technology evolving, publishers will need to innovate themselves to survive, Bergstrom said. "I wouldn’t underestimate them," he said, "but I would worry if I were one of the stockholders."...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/09/2006 10:09:00 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.
