"On May 2, The Daily Californian, an independent, student-run newspaper for the University of California, Berkeley and its surrounding community, published an article 'Campus joins movement demanding access to research.' The reporter emailed me a set of questions I was happy to respond to (see breakout box below).
Here are some excerpts from the section quoting me on the rising costs of publications: 'Journal price increases reflect increases in global research budgets and outputs, said Tom Reller, Elsevier’s vice president of Global Corporate Relations, in an email. He noted that countries around the globe are investing more in research, which in turn has resulted in more articles being submitted to and published in journals.' 'I don’t think those costs have ‘shot up so much’,' Reller said. 'In fact, on an article-by-article basis, the costs per download have declined each year as electronic dissemination continues to proliferate and improve.' Reller emphasized that Elsevier supports open access, citing the company’s nearly 40 fully open-access journals and more than 1,600 hybrid titles that accept open-access articles.'
The story also reports that our parent company is opposed to AB 609 along with the Association of American Publishers.We think the bill is unwise because legislative mandates such as the inflexible, one-size-fits-all post-publication embargo periods proposed in AB 609 are not economically sustainable for publishers and will undermine the peer review system that helps ensure the quality and integrity of scientific publications. For example, an embargo set at one year may be fine for journals in disciplines where a significant element of the value to subscribers is in the immediacy and timeliness of the content. Cell, one of our Cell Press flagship titles in the biomedical sciences, for example, began making all research articles freely available one year after publication in 2005. But for fields like the physical sciences or humanities, where the dynamics of usage are different and take longer to build up, a one-year embargo would adversely affect the viability of the journal. So yes, we do feel that it is quite fair and reasonable to be pro open access — and develop such mechanisms in partnership with the community and in flexible ways that meet the various needs of different journal fields — yet oppose government efforts to impose inflexible mandates that do not meet such needs. And while policy makers are an important partner for publishers to work with, we question the need for legislation that reshapes an ecosystem that is dynamic, innovative and competitive. Publisher’s expansion of gold (author/funder-pays) open access is a good example of this in practice. The introduction of a wide range of new competitors and publishing business models is another. Authors have more choices in how and where to publish than ever, and purchasers similarly have more options for what, from whom, how, and how much they pay to access the high-quality content they need to serve their own research community.But more importantly, at Elsevier we believe partnership and engagement with relevant stakeholders to find consensus solutions is the best way to promote science. We may have learned this the hard way last year. We’ve taken it to heart and are closely engaged in a wide array of very constructive conversations and initiatives and pilots and stakeholder processes to advance open access. Publishers want and should be part of the dialogue about increasing access to research, particularly that which the taxpayer funded. Indeed,PubMed Central itself was an initial success because of the high voluntary participation rates from publishers well before mandates were introduced. Publisher insights into field-specific author behavior and article use are critical to ensuring the long-term sustainability of journals, particularly for learned societies and smaller publishers ..."
We look forward to continuing this dialogue.