The solution to the ‘serials crisis’ on campus - Opinion - The Boston Globe

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-05-10

Summary:

“When Harvard says it cannot afford something, people notice. So it was when the Globe and others recently reported on a declaration by Harvard’s libraries that their centuries-old mission to provide the university community with access to the entirety of the world’s scholarly literature was not sustainable — a victim of the ever rising cost of subscriptions to research journals. The accompanying call by senior faculty for corrective action is being hailed as a major challenge to the big publishers who have long dominated the academic market — a watershed event in the history scholarly publishing. But the celebration is premature. Harvard and other major research universities have known about the ‘serials crisis’ for decades, and yet they have done next to nothing to address its root causes. The predatory pricing practices of publishers are bad. But it is the basic way universities function that is truly to blame, and the continued vitality of America’s academic research effort depends on fixing it, and fixing it now. The problem begins when universities tell their faculty, and those aspiring to join their ranks, that to be hired and climb the academic ladder they must publish in prestigious research journals. Facing stiff competition, researchers seek out the highest-ranking journal that is willing to accept their work, and willingly exchange copyright in their work for the journal’s coveted imprimatur. But this transaction, repeated millions of times a year across the world, has disastrous consequences for libraries who are charged by the university with buying back the right to access all these papers. Libraries under intense pressure to subscribe to as many journals as possible – each, after all, contains a unique slice of the universe of scholarship. Publishers long ago realized this meant they could raise prices and launch new journals more or less indiscriminately, and the cost of journal subscriptions has skyrocketed, increasing at roughly four times the rate of inflation since the mid-1980s. While it is tempting to focus on the predatory pricing strategy of publishers, it is the persistent unwillingness of universities to address the fundamental misalignment between the interests of their faculty and their libraries that has allowed the situation to fester. Had the leaders of major research universities attacked this issue head on at any point since the deep economic flaws in system became apparent in the 1990s, we would not be facing this problem today. The solution is obvious: universities must stop outsourcing vital functions to publishers. They need to shift the currency of academic success from the title of the journal in which a scholar’s works are published to the inherent quality of their research. And they need to immediately stop spending money on journal subscriptions, investing instead in the new forms of scholarly communication appropriate for the Internet age. Harvard’s admission that there is a problem is an important first step. But its response so far has only involved toothless pleas for faculty engagement and support. America’s richest and most prestigious academic institution is ideally poised to lead the charge to reclaim for universities the primary role they once held in disseminating the output of their faculty. Let us hope they can overcome the legacy of neglect that created the problem in the first place.”

Link:

http://bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/05/09/the-solution-serials-crisis-campus/sF4jZkPDqQGjB9JLG5COFI/story.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.universities oa.libraries oa.impact oa.prestige oa.librarians oa.prices oa.harvard.u oa.budgets oa.colleges oa.hei

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

05/10/2012, 10:24

Date published:

05/10/2012, 10:34