...[T]were two points on which almost everyone agreed: The high costs for journal subscriptions charged by commercial publishers in recent years are unsustainable, and the ability to distribute articles electronically has fundamentally changed academic research and publishing....
From 1986 to 2003, the unit cost of serials purchased by academic research libraries rose by 215 percent compared with a 68 percent rise in the consumer price index over the same time period, said Doug Brutlag, professor of biochemistry and current chairman of the Academic Council's Committee on Libraries. The Faculty Senate passed a resolution in 2004 encouraging faculty to consider journal pricing as well as reputation when considering where to publish or serving on editorial boards.
There is a big discrepancy between the prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit journals, reported Ted Bergstrom, professor of economics at the University of California - Santa Barbara, in a talk titled "The Changing Economics of Scholarly Journals." Bergstrom presented data comparing journal costs in 2004 that showed that the price-per-page of for-profit journals was about three times the average price-per-page of nonprofit journals.
Prices should be decreasing rather than increasing, since the ability of scholars to publish papers on their own websites has reduced the value of journal subscriptions, Bergstrom said.
In a recent analysis of articles published in economics journals, Bergstrom found that 73 percent of all articles and 100 percent of the papers published in the four leading journals could be found for free online. Not only are papers that are free on the web more often cited than those that are not, but also authors of papers that appear in high-impact journals are more likely to post them on their own websites than authors of articles in minor journals and papers, Bergstrom said....
A similar analysis of science and medical journals completed 18 months ago showed that from 37 to 45 percent of the content of three leading journals, Science, Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine, made its way into the free zone in cyberspace, said John Sack, director of HighWire Press, who moderated a panel of Stanford authors and editors. The study corroborated Bergstrom's finding that the higher impact a journal has, the more likely it is that the content would become free from the authors' own websites, Sack said.
Research belongs in the public domain, to advance science and also because taxpayers, including the "guy flipping hamburgers," help foot the bill for publicly funded research, said Patrick Brown, professor of biochemistry and a co-founder and co-director of the Public Library of Science (PLoS)....
Slides from many of the presentations are archived at the Scholarly Communication and Publishing Issues website.
The website also contains tools to help faculty authors analyze journal cost and impact, as well as information about the strategies Stanford University Libraries have developed for maintaining their serial collections.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2006 08:27:00 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.
