We're not paying that much!

"The release earlier this month of a report estimating the cost to the UK academy of carrying out peer review signalled that, after years of grumbling about rising prices for journal subscriptions, universities just may be ready to say enough is enough....Lorraine Estelle, the...chief executive [of JISC Collections], said the report aimed to help convince large journal publishers to rein in price hikes, which have continued to outstrip inflation despite pleas for restraint....She said publishers, some of which boast operating margins of 35 per cent, had reached a "wake up and smell the coffee" moment. "They may not realise, but their gung-ho attitude is pushing the system to breaking point. They are talking about rises above 25 per cent over the next few years when universities are seeing budgets fall." ...The academy's fightback was heralded in June by the financially troubled University of California system, which threatened to cancel its subscription to Nature journals and to organise an academic boycott of Nature Publishing Group when the publisher tried to quadruple charges for access to its e-journals....John Houghton, professorial fellow at the Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Australia's Victoria University...believes academia should take a principled approach and simply circumvent journals' unnecessary "tollbooth on the highway of knowledge" by self-archiving or publishing in open-access journals. [Julia] Blixrud [of the ARL"agreed that the California case had strengthened support for open access...."