Education should no longer be held to ransom by publishers | Opinion & Analysis | BDlive

page_amanda's bookmarks 2015-11-12

Summary:

BALANCING tertiary institution budgets — without fee increases and with increases in costs due to inflation and potential insourcing — are not the only headaches facing vice-chancellors and their councils. The growing challenges over procuring essential research information will be adding to their woes. Around the world, frustration at the price of academic journals is growing. The research and academic library market is finite, so publishing companies (for profit and nonprofit alike) increase revenue and shareholder value by increasing the price. At the time of writing, exchange rate volatility has been such that even a zero percent increase in academic journal and database subscriptions purchased in dollars will amount to a 23% increase in rand costs. In the past five years, inflation linked to the exchange rate has increased by 118%. It gets worse. If the increase in essential academic resources is 5% in dollar terms next year, for example, this will mean an effective increase of 30% in rands, a clearly unsustainable situation. As subscription costs increase, the latest peer-reviewed academic research is being placed beyond the reach of more and more institutions and those who benefit from it: researchers, academics and students. Over the years, there have been boycotts and expressions of resistance from academics over the issue. After Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest academic publishers, announced a more restrictive "sharing policy" in April, 284 organisations and 2,748 individuals around the world signed a statement, objecting to the policy. Most recently, the editorial staff and board of Lingua, a top global linguistics journal, resigned in protest against Elsevier’s pricing and the publisher’s refusal to make content available free of charge through open access.

Link:

http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2015/11/12/education-should-no-longer-be-held-to-ransom-by-publishers

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » page.amanda

Tags:

oa.new oa.lingua oa.elsevier oa.gold oa.economics_of oa.business_models oa.budgets oa.prices oa.libraries oa.access oa.boycotts oa.signatures oa.fees oa.linguistics oa.journals oa.ssh

Date tagged:

11/12/2015, 11:23

Date published:

11/12/2015, 06:23