Universities should sink their resources into publishing partnerships with scholarly societies | Impact of Social Sciences

"In UK universities this year, conversations are dominated by the REF. Whether a colleague is ‘REFable’, who has the gold-standard ‘4×4’, or whether x journal is a 2 or a 3 are all matters impacting on academic identities, careers and teaching loads. What is less often discussed is the business model used by the journals that publish the majority of REF submissions. Most academic journals today are published by a handful of commercial houses whose primary purpose is to profit from controlling access to academic knowledge. The most common business model is to restrict and then charge for access to research outputs. Charges for individual papers are high enough to effectively exclude the vast majority of the world’s population... Behind the scenes, however, the cost of this access is significant. University librarians have had to work with escalating subscription costs for years. Between 1970 and 1997, journal costs rose at an average of 13 per cent per annum. The 2012 Finch Report found that 'between 2006 and 2010, the global total of journal articles alone increased by a fifth” whilst UK and US library budgets have been falling since at least the 1980s.  Despite this, academic library subscriptions account for an estimated 53% of direct publishing costs, and “a further 11% in the form of the unpaid costs of peer review.' Non-academic subscriptions account for around 29% of the remaining costs.  For the academic publishers this is big business. The global market for professional, social science and humanities publishing was worth around $10 billion in 2010. In the UK alone, universities spent £112million on journal subscriptions in 2011. Companies can command profit margins in the region of 30-40 per cent, unheard of in any other sector.  These exceptional profits come at a price. Not only is access to what should be a public good restricted but the public foots the bill. A House of Commons report from 2004 notes that ‘public money is used at three stages in the publishing process: to fund the research project; to pay the salaries of academics who carry out peer review for no extra payment; and to fund libraries to purchase scientific publications’. All that would appear to be left is for the journals to market their contents but even this work is being devolved to authors. Following the publication of the article on which this blog entry is based, I received an email from Sage outlining ‘10 Ways to Increase Usage and Citation of your Article’, adding another form of free labour to the academic workload...  To this end I would like to suggest four possible strategies for modernising the academic publishing industry: increasing open access through institutional repositories or a publisher-pays commercial model; a ‘fair trade’ model that would reimburse universities for at least some of the work they currently provide to publishers for free; a revival of the university presses; a move toward self-organized, academic publishing collectives..."