It's time to stand up to greedy academic publishers | Higher Education Network | The Guardian

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-19

Summary:

"How should research travel from the notebooks, hard drives and laboratories of researchers to the desks of their peers? Who should get access? And who should pay?  Over the past few years, these deceptively simple questions have been beset with controversy. Librarians at some of the world’s wealthiest institutions have announced that they can no longer afford to purchase the materials their researchers need. Leading academics have organised boycottspetitions and mass resignations to protest the combination of prohibitively high prices and profit margins that rival those of the big oil, pharmaceutical and technology firms. A recent paper found that just five multinational publishing conglomeratesaccounted for 50% of all papers published in 2013 ... What do we know so far? Thanks to hundreds offreedom of information requests, we have a window into how higher educational institutions spend more than £180m every year on journal subscriptions. The lion’s share of this (just over 42%) goes to four of the largest publishers. Data about article processing charges is much more difficult to get hold of. Thanks to the valiant efforts of a few librarians and institutions we now have partial information for a selection of institutions, but this is still only a very small part of the picture. From what we can tell so far, the same big publishers who receive most money from subscriptions also take home the most money from article processing charges ..."

Link:

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/apr/18/why-academic-journals-expensive

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.economics_of oa.prices oa.profits

Date tagged:

04/19/2016, 08:49

Date published:

04/19/2016, 04:48