Scholarly Publishing News for the UI Community
As reported by Jennifer Howard the The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus, the proposed Digital Public Library for the Humanities netted a $1-million grant from the National Endowment. DPLA hopes to become an open-access national digital library. Read the full story here.
More and more research libraries are using patron-driven acquisitions (PDA), a service where their patrons choose the titles libraries purchase (usually e-books) by actually using them. PDA can allow a library to only buy books that someone reads, and pass on those that aren’t used. But university presses — which rely on these libraries for sales — often publish titles that garner very little readership. If the libraries — or their users — aren’t buying, how will the presses cope? Soon-to-be published research by Joe Esposito offers some insights. Click here for the story by Steve Kolowich in Inside Higher Ed.
PeerJ is a peer-reviewed journal-and-preprint service with a new publishing model: researchers pay a modest membership fee to publish in the journal, while retaining copyright to their work. Lifetime memberships begin at $99.
For more details, see this entry on the Wired Campus blog: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-publishing-venture-gives-researchers-control-over-access/36651
In a statement dated April 17th, Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council, in a memo to all faculty, stated:
We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.
For the full statement, see http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448
The memo goes on to point out that Harvard’s costs for these publishers now approaches $3.75 million. Iowa’s costs for the three largest publishers (presumably the same group, though precisely which are included in the Harvard figure is not clear) is expected to be around $3.2 million in FY2012. While the figure quoted is said to be around 10% of Harvard’s total acquisitions budget, $3.2 million is over 20% of Iowa’s total.
The memo concludes with a strong statement and list of suggested actions, worth quoting at length. Note that DASH is equivalent to our own Iowa Research Online, though unlike Harvard, Iowa does not have an open-access policy (aka “mandate”).
It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. Moreover, some providers bundle many journals as one subscription, with major, high-use journals bundled in with journals consulted far less frequently. Since the Library now must change its subscriptions and since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable….
1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F).
2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F).
3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).
4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues (F).
5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations (F).
6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options (F).
7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals (L).
8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system, (L).
9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public (L).
A Chronicle of Higher Education article on the financial positions of various scholarly societies. Journals published by such societies often help subsidize the operations of the society, and their outsourcing to commercial publishers usually leads to higher costs to libraries.
See the story “Scholarly Groups’ Choices Yield Diverging Fortunes” in the April 1 Chronicle.
At the recent annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers, issues related to copyright and open access took center stage, as did the recent deep-sixing of SOPA/PIPA, two bills the AAP supported. It was clear from the discussion that the publishers were still smarting from that loss. Librarians also weighed in at the meeting, on e-books and the need for more cooperation. Here’s a link to the story from The Chronicle online.
A boycott of Elsevier journals has been growing to show opposition to their support of the Research Works Act and their 36% profits (see Research Bought, Then Paid For – an Op-Ed in the New York Times, Elsevier boycott gains momentum, Elsevier responds to the boycott, and “Of goats and headaches”–The Economist on journal publishing for previous posts on these issues ).
There have also been prominent articles about the lack of public accessibility of academic research, such as “Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons Academic Research” which appeared in The Atlantic on Jan 20, 2012. This particular article points to JSTOR as an example of the “broken economics of academic publishing”. Nancy Sims from University of Minnesota wrote “Academic publishing is full of problems; lets get them right” which is a good response to the Atlantic article, correcting some of the specifics.
Since that time, we have seen faculty taking note of the cost of some e-journal packages and collections of titles, most notably the $2.9 million figure from Purdue when that institution came close to cancelling their Elsevier package in December. (“Purdue re-signs contract for online scholastic access” )
In order to keep Iowa faculty informed about the cost of journals from a variety of sources, we offer these figures for University of Iowa costs from FY 2011:
| Publisher | Cost | # of Titles |
|---|---|---|
| Elsevier | $ 1,641,530 |
2095 |
| Wiley/Blackwell | $ 868,031 |
1304 |
| Springer | $ 607,540 |
400 |
| Sage | $ 243,647 |
608 |
| JSTOR | $ 97,602 |
2319 |
| Cambridge UP | $ 43,940 |
145 |
| Project Muse | $ 33,210 |
500 |
| Oxford UP | $ 21,313 |
250 |
Please note that the JSTOR figure is for back content (the so-called moving wall), not current issues.
The following chart offers another way to view the relative size shares of the pie different publishers receive from our acquisitions budget (the denominator for these percentages is total spending on e-journals). The data is slightly older than that used above.
