Internet Ruffles Pricey Scholarly Journals - NYTimes.com

"[W]ith British universities already spending 65 percent of their library acquisition budgets on periodicals — up from 50 percent 10 years ago — and university funding cut back, the pressure for change is mounting. “It’s not just that journal prices keep going up without any evident relationship to costs,” said Robert Kiley, head of digital services at London’s Wellcome Library. “There is also a concern that so much research, which in many cases has been funded by the taxpayer, is locked behind publishers’ pay walls.” Asked to explain how publishers justify their rising prices, Tom Reller, a spokesman for the scholarly publisher Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, declined to comment....“Scholars write journal articles for impact, not for money,” said Peter Suber, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. “And while there are a lot of misunderstandings most people understand that open access is not like file sharing music or video piracy. Open access relies on the copyright holder’s consent.” ...Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning, an organization that helps developing countries improve access to education, said...that open access scholarly publishing is a matter of international justice has become increasingly influential...."