Hardin Scholarly Communication News

Press Release/Announcement

University of California Libraries Announce Pursuit of Value-based Journal Prices
January 18, 2007

The University of California libraries are pleased to announce the availability of a report describing their work on “value-based” prices of scholarly journals. Authored by a task force of the ten-campus library system’s Collection Development Committee, The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is a direct outcome of the UC libraries’ collective strategic priority to advance economically balanced and sustainable scholarly communication systems.

The report details UC’s rationale for value-based journal prices and modeling of prices for scholarly materials that are reasonable, transparent, and based upon the value of the material to the academic mission of the University of California. The report describes a value-based approach that borrows from analysis done by Professors Ted Bergstrom (UC Santa Barbara) and R. Preston McAfee (Caltech) on journal cost-effectiveness (www.journalprices.com). The UC approach also includes suggestions for annual price increases that are tied to production costs; credits for institutionally-based contributions to the journal, such as editorial labor; and credits for business transaction efficiencies from consortial purchases.

Through the report the libraries ask how an explicit method can be established, validated, and communicated for aligning the purchase or license costs of scholarly journals with the value they contribute to the academy and the costs to create and deliver them. In addition to describing the work done to date, the report provides examples of potential cost savings and declares UC’s intention to pursue value-based prices in their negotiations with journal publishers. In addition, the report invites the academic community to work collectively to refine and improve these and other value-based approaches.

The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward is available at: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/cdc/valuebasedprices.pdf.

For more information, contact:
John Ober
Director of Policy, Planning, and Outreach
Office of Scholarly Communication
California Digital Library
(510) 987-0174
John.Ober@ucop.edu

Julia Kochi
Director, Digital Library & Collections
Library & Center for Knowledge Management
University of California, San Francisco
(415) 502-7539
Julia.Kochi@library.ucsf.edu

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on March 16, 2007, that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private supporter of biomedical research, announced that it would pay the publishing giant Elsevier to open up access to papers that scientists affiliated with the institute have published in any of the 2,000 journals in the Elsevier family, including the prestigious Cell Press line of journals.

According to the agreement, Elsevier would deposit the articles in PubMed Central, an online archive maintained by the National Institutes of Health, six months after they were published. The publisher would deposit versions of the manuscripts that had gone through peer review but had not yet undergone editing and formatting.

The agreement would satisfy the conditions of the Hughes institute’s proposed policy on public access, which the institute is considering but has not yet adopted. “Our scientists would be free to publish in these journals, which they would not have been otherwise,” says Avice A. Meehan, the vice president for communications at Hughes.

“It’s a win-win situation,” said Emilie Marcus, executive editor of Cell Press.

Thomas R. Cech, the president of Hughes and a Nobel-prize winning professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said that during discussions of the Hughes institute’s proposed policy, investigators were particularly concerned that they would be unable to publish articles in Cell Press journals. The new agreement would pay Elsevier $1,000 for each article published in a Cell Press journal and $1,500 for each article in other Elsevier journals.

Even without this deal, Elsevier (but not Cell Press) allows authors to immediately post the final draft (post-peer review) of their papers on personal or institutional servers. So it seems that Hughes is ensuring compliance with it’s proposed mandate that funded research be available within 6 months of publication. It seems that 6 months is becoming the acceptable lag period for many such mandates.

It’s unfortunate that Elsevier will only be posting the final draft versions (post prints) of the articles — not the publisher’s PDF version. Post prints are considered by many less than optimal versions of articles since they may not be the version of record. For example, sometimes articles get “corrected” in the proof stage, and these corrections likely won’t be in the post script version.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i28/28a02001.htm

[thanks to Issues in Scholarly Communication, SC News for the UIUC Community]

ASCB Press Release, 01/31/2007 :

Timely free access to taxpayer-funded research does not threaten financial stability of scientific journals, says the American Society for Cell Biology

Bethesda, MD – Free and timely public access to scientific literature is not only the right thing to do, it needn’t undermine the financial stability of publishers, states Gary Ward, PhD, Treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The case of ASCB’s own high-impact journal demonstrates clearly that “free access and profitability are not mutually exclusive.”

Nevertheless, concerns are repeatedly raised by commercial and nonprofit publishers of scientific journals that providing free access to reports on federally funded research would undermine their business models and financial stability.

The ASCB, a nonprofit scientific society with over 11,000 members, makes the contents of its monthly research journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBC), available online two months after publication. The Society reports that after six years of doing so, Molecular Biology of the Cell remains not only financially sound, but profitable. Thus the ASCB is able to continue to fulfill its mission and expand its programs. The ASCB’s mission is to promote and develop the field of cell biology, further biomedical research and sound science education and policies, increase public awareness, and support career development of women, minorities, and others in biomedical research.

In a statement released today, the ASCB said that, “Some publishers argue that providing free access to their journal’s content will catastrophically erode their revenue base. The experience of many successful research journals demonstrates otherwise; these journals make their online content freely available after a short embargo period that protects subscription revenue.”

For more information, contact ASCB Public Policy Director Kevin Wilson at (301) 347-9300.

Additionally, Biomed Central has an interview with the Executive Director discussing ASCB’s economic model.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=6

Bevin P Engelward and Richard J Roberts
PLoS Biol. 2007 February; 5(2): e48. Published online 2007 February 13. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0050048.

Excerpt:
With very little fanfare, American science will make a sizeable leap forward in the coming year—if Congress and the National Institutes of Health deliver on their promise for public access to medical research. As scientists—one of us a Nobel researcher in biomedical science and one of us a recently tenured faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—we may have much to celebrate for scientists of all generations.

As scientists, scientific literature is our lifeblood, because only by reading our colleagues’ work can we know where the cutting edge of knowledge currently lies and hence where our work should be directed.

Yet increasingly, subscriptions to the very journals that we must read are becoming too expensive—often in the thousands of dollars. The availability of the information vital to our research is needlessly restricted by the publishers of the scientific literature, who are mainly large commercial entities for whom maximizing profits is their priority. Fortunately, help is at hand. The big “if” remains whether this will happen.

read the full article: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1796937