Open Access News

Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born, Reality Bites: Periodicals Price Survey 2009, Library Journal, April 15, 2009.  Excerpt:

...Even if the recession is less severe than feared, experts say not to expect relief before 2012. In journals parlance, that’s three renewal cycles from now—more than enough to stress publishers without deep reserves. For an industry that is already in the throes of reinventing itself, this recession will hit hard.

Despite stronger than expected 2009 renewals, the outlook for FY10 is so bleak that libraries and consortia have already begun invoking financial hardship clauses and asking to renegotiate licenses for bundled content midterm. In an unprecedented move, the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) issued a statement to publishers in January warning that double-digit budget cuts over the next few years are expected and calling for creative strategies from publishers who want to keep their business. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) followed with its own statement in February, underscoring the need for publishers to take this crisis seriously.

Making open access mandatory

Some see in the financial debacle an opportunity to promote more open systems of scholarly exchange, and open access (OA) initiatives are clearly gathering momentum. Last year’s unanimous OA mandate from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences was quickly emulated by faculties from Harvard’s Law School and from Stanford’s School of Education. New mandates are under development at over a dozen U.S. colleges and universities. The mandate at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) went into effect in April 2008. Early numbers indicate strong compliance and high usage....The National Science Foundation (NSF) is considering a similar mandate. Lest one think the struggle is over, the publisher lobby is back in force, supporting legislation designed to overturn the NIH mandate and stop other agencies from following suit.

Nevertheless, publishers as a whole do seem to be making an effort to accommodate rising demand for OA-friendly practices, as evidenced in a report from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (Scholarly Publishing Practice, Third Survey 2008). Some are moving aggressively toward OA business models, but most are taking smaller steps—liberalizing copyright transfer agreements or facilitating manuscript deposit into designated digital archives, for example. Thirty percent now offer authors an OA option, up from 9% three years ago, with author fees typically running between $1000 and $3000 per article....On a less hopeful note, as the number of repositories and the practice of self-archiving have grown, large publishers have begun to restrict authors’ rights to post final manuscripts on the web; more require embargoes if they allow it at all....

The largest commercial and society publishers are probably not at risk in this economic shakedown, but 54% of the publishers in ALPSP’s survey produce five or fewer journals, and many of them will be in danger if cancellations escalate. Add to the endangered list those publishers whose journals price in foreign currencies and can inflate exorbitantly as a result, and we could be looking at a significant number of business failures worldwide. ARL invites worried publishers to consult with member libraries about new publishing models that might keep them afloat....

The ARL and ICOLC statements represent the views of their members, but they address concerns shared by virtually all libraries. The ball is now in the publishers’ courts....

A recent “Survey of Academic & Research Library Journal Purchasing Practices” (Primary Research Group, 2008) captured the practices and attitudes of a sample of international librarians on the eve of the financial downturn. Over the last three years, academic libraries in the sample canceled an average of 177 journal titles each....Regarding journal pricing, ACS, Elsevier, and Nature drew the most ire, with more customers dissatisfied than satisfied....

The state of openness

As economic times get harder, the rationale for open access becomes clearer. A major research study on the Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), released in January, estimates that British universities would save around £80 million a year by shifting to an OA publishing system....

Society publishers from all disciplines are surprisingly positive in their attitudes toward OA and see its potential for increasing membership, according to a survey conducted by SAGE (“Meeting the Challenges: Societies and Scholarly Communication,” Nov. 2008). Coupled with the good expectations, however, are concerns about how to convert to OA business models. Help may be forthcoming from the new Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, which debuted in October 2008. Founding members include BioMed Central (now Springer), SAGE, Hindawi, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Its purpose is to develop tools and standards, as well as business models, that support OA publishing....

The SCOAP3 project is approaching the 50% mark in commitments from libraries worldwide that support changing the publishing model in high-energy physics from toll access to open access. Under it, libraries will pay subscription fees into a common pool from which publishers of physics journals will be paid. The journals will be free to all readers upon publication. While most European libraries have signed on, some American libraries are afraid that the plan won’t achieve either cost savings or sustainability. Proponents believe the project, to be launched in 2009, offers an innovative model for funding journals in this discipline....

Publishers’ best hope of overturning the NIH mandate probably lies with a piece of legislation misnamed the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, or the Conyers Bill....Publishers are lobbying hard for passage, waving the usual flags—copyright violation, the end of peer-review and responsible science, potential economic losses in the publisher sector of the economy, etc. Countering those claims, 47 copyright experts went on record last September asserting there is no copyright violation associated with the NIH mandate, and 33 Nobel scientists wrote Congress saying that publishers were wrong to support the bill.

It is hard to believe that these publishers will be successful at sinking the mandate. At this writing, over 500 journals have signed on with the NIH to deliver the published version of NIH-funded articles to PubMed Central on behalf of their authors. Springer has actually decided to deliver the entire content of Genomic Medicine to PubMed Central, including articles with no connection to NIH funding. The mandate’s success, in fact, may have influenced an advisory board of the NSF in December to recommend mandatory open access for all data, publications, and software coming out of the NSF.

With key open access visionaries like Harold Varmus advising President Obama on science and technology, it’s also hard to imagine that this bill could be signed into law if passed. In the meantime, experts expect the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) to be reintroduced this year. FRPAA would expand the NIH mandate to most federal agencies that distribute significant research grants....

In recent years, price increases for journals have averaged 7–9%. Despite pleas for pricing mercies, we don’t have any information at this point that suggests those averages won’t hold for 2010....

Comments

• This is a superb review of the state of OA, not to mention the state of TA.  At the end of the article, Van Orsdel and Born present seven tables of data on journal prices and price increases in different fields, different countries, and different years. 
• Also see our past posts on the Van Orsdel and Born price surveys for 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2003.