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The Crisis in Scholarly Communication

Ray English

University of Houston

Transforming Scholarly Communication Symposium

October 4, 2006

Scholarly Communication: What’s the Real Issue?

Serials crisis? Cost of journals?Industry consolidation? Publisher monopoly power?Licensing restrictions?Big Deals?Monographs crisis?Permissions crisis?Loss of public domain?Legislative threats to fair use?Preservation of electronic information?Published knowledge growing faster than library

budgets?

Fundamental issue is access

Problems are resulting in

loss of access

barriers to access

Access to scholarship by users

Access to publishing opportunities

Problems are systemic

References

Sites and Cites for the Struggle:

A Selective Scholarly Communication Bibliography

Available on symposium website

Serials Crisis

Extraordinary price increasesWorst is scientific fieldsWorse for foreign publishersCommercial journals have substantially higher prices

and high profit marginsHighest priced journals tend to have lesser impactInelastic marketIndustry consolidation, publisher monopoly powerProblems with electronic licenses, Big Deals

Journal price increases

Currently averaging 8% annually*

Library acquisitions budgets are relatively flat

Ohio libraries increasing app. 2% annually

*Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006

Serial & Monograph Costs, 1986-2002

North American research libraries

ARL Statistics

Crisis in a nutshell

Average journal prices by broad discipline

Arts and Humanities US $116Non-US $230

Social Sciences US $385Non-US

$716

Sciences US $1,093Non-US $1,866

Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006

Average prices by specific discipline

Chemistry $3,254Physics 2,850Engineering 1,756Astronomy 1,724Biology 1,548Geology 1,323Math & Computer Sci 1,278Zoology 1,259Botany 1,238Health Sciences 1,132

Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006

Commercial vs. non-commercial journal prices

Henry Barschall study (1988)

Wisconsin and Cornell studies (1998)

Ted Bergstrom’s journal pricing pagehttp://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html

No correlation between price and impact

Higher priced journals tend to be published by commercial firms

Higher quality journals tend to be non-profit, published by societies

Costs of Economics JournalsCosts of Economics Journals Bergstrom dataBergstrom data

Publisher TypePublisher Type Number of Number of JournalsJournals

Price / Price / PagePage

Price / Price / CiteCite

Non-ProfitNon-Profit 9191 $0.18$0.18 $0.15$0.15

For-ProfitFor-Profit 206206 $0.82$0.82 $2.40$2.40

Costs of a Complete Economics CollectionCosts of a Complete Economics CollectionBergstrom dataBergstrom data

Publisher Publisher

TypeType

Percent of CostPercent of Cost Percent of CitesPercent of Cites

Non-ProfitNon-Profit 9% 62%

For-ProfitFor-Profit 91% 38%

Journal Prices by DisciplineJournal Prices by DisciplineBergstrom dataBergstrom data

Ecology 1.01 0.19 0.73 0.05

Economics 0.83 0.17 2.33 0.15

Atmosph. Sci 0.95 0.15 0.88 0.07

Mathematics 0.70 0.27 1.32 0.28

Neuroscience 0.89 0.10 0.23 0.04

Physics 0.63 0.19 0.38 0.05

CostCost per pageper page

Non-profitNon-profit ForFor-profitprofit Non-profitNon-profitFor-profitFor-profit

Cost per citeCost per cite

Bergstrom, Costs and Benefits of Library Site Licenses to Academic Journals, PNAS, 2004

Journal cost-effectiveness

Ted Bergstrom’s journal cost-effectiveness calculator

http://www.journalprices.com/

What’s going on?

Inelastic marketcoke vs Coke

Publishers have pricing power

High profit margins

Industry consolidation

Increasing corporate control of journal publishing

Some mergers since 1980: • Kluwer: 11 major publishers • Wiley: 8 major publishers• Taylor & Francis: 16 major publishers• Elsevier: 18 major publishers plus Endeavor ILS• Thomson: 15 publishers

Migration of non-profit journals to commercial sector

Mergers produce price increasesMark McCabe data

Pergamon titles increased 22% after purchase by Elsevier

Lippincott titles increased 35% after purchase by Kluwer

Antitrust issue

McCabe, ARL Bimonthly Report, Dec. 1999

Electronic journal licensing issues, Big Deals

Provisions of licensing agreements can impede access

Issues related to bundled licenses: Increased cost Loss of library choice over content Loss of budget control Rates of price increase Length of contracts Threats to subscriptions outside the bundle Pressure on monographs budgets

Antitrust issue -- anticompetitive practices

Independent industry analyses

UK House of Commons

Science and Technology Committee report (2004)Scientific Publications: Free for All?

European Commission Report (2006)Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of Scientific

Publication Markets in Europe

Journal industry analystsCredit Suisse First Boston BNP Paribas

What if you owned this business?

People produce your product for youThey check it for qualityThey’re even kind enough to give you their intellectual

propertyYou polish it up and distribute it And you charge those same people handsomely to

make their product available back to them They think they must have your product, even though

they created it, so you’re free to raise prices

What a magnificent ship! What makes it go?

Cartoon by Rowland B. Wilson

Library responses

Request increased budgetsCut subscriptionsReduce monograph purchasesCut subscriptions and reduce monographsCollective purchase of electronic journalsRely on document delivery or ILL

Effective Effective YearYear

Journal Titles Journal Titles

Not RenewedNot Renewed

Dollar cost of Dollar cost of

Titles Not RenewedTitles Not Renewed

1987 843 $160,425

1991 1,417 $263,614

1992 68 $17,944

1993 1,933 $371,734

1996 605 $196,826

2000 1,063 $213,506

2001 274 $41,000

2002 555 $93,542

TotalTotal 6,7586,758 $ 1,358,591$ 1,358,591

Cancellations history at a Research I institution

Serial & Monograph Costs, 1986-2004

North American research libraries

ARL Statistics

Crisis in a nutshell

Issues for faculty

Loss of ready access to journal literature

Lack of access to desired literature

Monographs crisis

University presses under pressure Library markets in declineReduced print runsLimited sales of specialized monographs

Monographs crisis

How are university presses responding to economic pressures?

Publish BullshitReduce specialized monographs

Issue for faculty

Monograph publishing opportunities in decline

MLA Letter from Stephen Greenblatt (2002)

ReportThe Future of Scholarly Publishing (2002)

MLA report

• Library budgets for monographs declining• Far fewer scholarly monographs being purchased• Fewer outlets for traditional scholarly monograph• Junior faculty between a rock and a hard place• Need for alternative forms of scholarly expression• Publishing subventions for junior faculty

MLA, 2002, The Future of Scholarly Publishing

More on monographs crisis

Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, Or How Can I Get Tenure if You Won’t Publish My Book

1997 conference proceedings on ARL website:

http://www.arl.org/scomm/epub/program.html

Permissions Crisis

Peter Suber’s term:Legal and technological barriers to access

Legalcopyrightlicensing terms

Technological Digital rights management

Public domain Bono Copyright Term Extension Act

Orphaned works

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

National policy issues

Preservation of electronic information

Libraries responsible for preservation of print journals

Electronic journals are licensed from publishers Libraries lack control over electronic version

Major issue that we are just beginning to address

Growth of published knowledge

New journalsBook production

Scholarship as a public good

Substantial portion isfunded by taxpayerssupported publicly

created in non-profit sectorJournal literature is freely given away by authors

But journal publishing is largely under corporate controlA public good in private hands

Need for transformative change

Traditional system is unsustainable

Scholars are losing access

System of out of the control of researchers and the academy

The Immovable Object

Traditional journal publishing system

Copyright and licensing

The Irresistible Force

Networked technologies, WebOpen Access

See Paul Courant, “Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their Kin) in the World of Google,” First Monday, August 2006. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_8/courant/

Bet on the Force

Many reasons for optimism Faculty engagement Librarian engagement Success of OA and other change strategies Progress at the national level

Contact information:

Ray English

Director of Libraries, Oberlin College

ray.english@oberlin.edu

440-775-8287

Copyright information

Copyright 2006 by Ray English

This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 License.

See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/

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