Expensive journal subscriptions must pave way towards open access information — The Bowdoin Orient

" ... It meant that if Bowdoin College did not pay for my access, I would have to find some other way to read journals featuring top-tier academic and scientific research. Over the last few decades, the cost of subscriptions to academic journals, particularly scientific ones, has been rapidly increasing. In order to stock certain high-end journals, libraries have to pay ever-increasing amounts of money to publishing companies.  In 2005, the 10 most expensive journals Bowdoin bought—all scientific—cost a total of $99,361. According to a 2012 Library Journal periodicals pricing survey, chemistry journals sit at the top, with an average subscription cost of $4,227 a year. Even the wealthiest universities have a difficult time managing journal subscriptions. A liberal education rests fundamentally on the free exchange of ideas. Researchers and laypeople alike can only benefit by having knowledge as openly accessible as possible. And at a time when the Internet provides a medium to distribute information widely and inexpensively, why do journal prices continue to rise? In the library journal survey, the authors describe how many journal titles are published by a small number of companies and that there is no real substitute for the unique intellectual content in journals. Consequently, 'there are powerful reasons for believing that high and rising prices are due not to costs, but rather to the combination of highly inelastic demand and supplier’s substantial market power.' Ostensibly, the money that institutions pay to publishing companies goes to cover the costs involved in the final product, and there are always costs involved in having work peer reviewed and published. But publishing companies neither pay the people who write the academic papers, nor do they pay the people who review them. Much like the difficulty of switching from printed to digital news, figuring out a viable financial model for digitized scholarly publishing is at the heart of the issue. As the academic world catches up with digitization, the open access movement has been gaining momentum. open access pushes for the free availability and unrestricted use of academic scholarship. A growing number of open academic digital repositories and publishing options are available on the Internet. However, while access to these articles is free, there is always a cost to publishing that must be borne by someone. Open access advocates experimenting with various ways to pay the costs of publication and peer review. Some open access journals charge publication fees paid for by author-sponsors such as employers or funders ..."