the crisis in scholarly communication ray english university of houston transforming scholarly...
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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
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/