Sir Crispin Davis, Science books are vanishing from reach, Guardian, February 19, 2005. Excerpt: 'The last quarter century has seen exponential growth in academic productivity, especially in the sciences, and this has been accompanied by increases in the number and size of scientific, technical and medical journals, such as those published by Reed Elsevier. But with reduced funding for university libraries, their purchasing power has fallen in relative and absolute terms. Although university budgets have kept in step with inflation since the 1970s, and in many cases outpaced it, the proportion of the budgets allocated to libraries has fallen by about a quarter, from 4% to 3% of total spend....Access to scientific, technical and medical material has improved hugely with the advent of electronic publishing, distribution and archiving. At Elsevier, for instance, we have invested more than $400m (£212m) in our Science Direct subscription database, which holds some 6m articles and 80m abstracts from 1,800 journals, making them available to more than 17m researchers. Put another way, that is to more than 90% of all the world's scientific research community. The increasing volume and availability of peer-reviewed literature means that scientists are more widely read than ever....Furthermore, despite advances in the quantity, breadth and accessibility of scientific literature, university libraries increasingly struggle to cover their costs....It could be that the government needs to lay down guidelines on the proportion of university funds that should be set aside for the acquisition of books and journals, or even increase funding to ensure that universities can buy all the material they need. After all, books and journals are the lifeblood of academic research....But if the shortfall in funding is not addressed soon, access to the scientific literature is likely to begin rapidly to shrink.'
(PS: Some quick replies. (1) Where access to priced literature has increased, it is due to bundling, not to lowered prices. (2) The access crisis is due to high prices, not to inadequate library budgets. Even if library budgets kept pace with inflation, journal prices have risen four times faster than inflation for more than two decades. (3) OA is the only scalable way to increase access. As the volume of published knowledge continues its explosive growth, even low-priced journals would inevitably put the sum-total of knowledge beyond the reach of the wealthiest institutions. (4) Elsevier has lobbied fiercely against mandated OA to publicly-funded research, but it would like to see a government mandate on how much universities should spend on Elsevier's product. Which is the better role for government: to share publicly-funded knowledge with the public or to raise taxes and coerce universities to enrich companies that sell publicly-funded knowledge back to the public?)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/20/2005 07:51:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
