Harvard pushes back against academic publishers’ pricing, encourages open access - The Boston Globe

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-05-01

Summary:

“Harvard may be the world’s wealthiest university, but fees for its academic journal subscriptions have gotten so steep - some as much as $40,000 a year - that an advisory council is encouraging faculty to submit their work to ‘open access’ online journals that are available for free. The council also asked Harvard faculty to consider resigning from the editorial boards of the high-priced subscription publications and to urge professional associations to ‘take control’ of scholarly literature in their fields. In a memo sent to faculty last week, the council called the rising prices of journals, which connect researchers with cutting-edge ideas and findings, ‘untenable,’ ‘fiscally unsustainable,’ and ‘academically restrictive.’ It is a sentiment being aired by scholars and universities around the world as academic libraries struggle with rising costs. ‘The escalation is simply spectacular and it’s inflicting serious damage,’ said Robert Darnton, a university professor and chairman of the council. The memo states that in 2010, a fifth of the library’s entire expenditures on subscriptions went to certain unnamed publishers that bundle together journals and raise prices. This year, the memo said, the library is spending about $3.75 million on journals from just those publishers. The memo does not mention publishers by name, but says that the price of online content from two providers increased by 145 percent during six years, and that journals can cost tens of thousands of dollars each per year. Darnton said that even when university libraries nationwide have been suffering because of the recession, subscription fees have risen. In 2008 when Harvard library expenditures were cut 10 percent, some journals raised their prices 10 percent, he said. Meanwhile, the memo notes that some publishing houses are making significant profits - as much as 35 percent. The most visible target of academia’s wrath worldwide has been Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based publisher of scientific and medical journals, that reported an operating profit of $1.12 billion in 2010. More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition vowing not to publish in, or review papers, or do editorial work for its journals, including more than 60 people affiliated with Harvard, ranging from scientists to humanities scholars. A spokesman for Elsevier, Tom Reller, said in a statement the company had a good relationship with Harvard. ‘We do not believe that the facts in the letter which relate to price increases pertain to Elsevier. Elsevier’s average print list price increases have consistently been among the lowest in the industry for the past several years, averaging around 5%,’ Reller wrote. ‘In addition, we believe Harvard will continue to see the value in publishing in Elsevier journals, which include a range of access options, and contributing as editors.’ The issue is also a hot topic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where at least 45 researchers have signed the petition. A group of MIT faculty formed an Open Access Working Group this spring to examine journals’ responses to the university’s policy that its faculty’s work be made freely available, but it will also likely examine publishers’ pricing practices, said its chairman, philosophy professor Richard Holton. An analysis published online earlier this month by two mathematicians, including one from MIT, reported that between 1986 and 2009, MIT’s spending on journals increased by 426 percent, while the number of journals purchased decreased by 16 percent. The idea that research should be freely available is easy to support in theory, but it is a transition that will require a shift in how research journals are financed. Rather than billing subscribers to support their work, open-access journals typically ask authors to pay fees to have their work published. Universities such as Harvard and MIT have made funds available so that researchers who want to publish in open access journals will not be deterred. Still, that payment model concerns Dr. Clifford Saper, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He said that it can cost $1,500 or more to get a paper reviewed, edited, and posted online in the right format. In fields where researchers may be publishing many papers each year, that can add up - and it essentially hands that information to corporations and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of researchers or their institutions. ‘This basically takes the cost of disseminating scientific information - it gives industry a free ride,’ Saper said. ‘And the people doing science have to work harder to get more grants, so they can afford to publish their papers.’ But the biggest hurdle to surmount may be the cultural biases built into fields, where a person’s career can depend on getting papers into the very best journals, which are not traditionally the open access ones. A new biomedical research journal, eLife, being launched by top research organizations in three countries - the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and the M

Link:

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/cambridge/articles/2012/04/28/harvard_pushes_back_against_academic_publishers_pricing_encourages_open_access/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.universities oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.uk oa.impact oa.funding oa.librarians oa.prices oa.funders oa.fees oa.wellcome oa.mit oa.profits oa.recommendations oa.harvard.u oa.budgets oa.elife oa.encouragement oa.colleges oa.prestige oa.hei oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

05/01/2012, 20:01

Date published:

04/28/2012, 18:09