Crisis in Scientific Publishing
Starting about 20 years ago,
librarians began complaining (to each other and their administrators) about the
growing imbalance between scholarly output and the library budget resources
necessary to collect this output. However,
it wasnt until the 1990s that the crisis became much more pronounced and
librarians were able to bring it to the notice of university administrators and
faculty as a very serious issue in need of immediate attention. Much of the notice has been due to the need
for multiple (and, in some cases, annual) journal cancellation projects in
almost every library in the country.
High impact presentations such as Sticker Shock
served as a wake up call to librarians and scholars alike by dramatically
bringing journal pricing into perspective.
The scientific community, in particular, has been hit very hard by this
crisis.
If this is news to you, please
take time to investigate some of the resources provided below and find out what
you can do to help resolve the crisis!!
Jump to
individual sections:
Non-profit and scholarly ventures
Ruminations on
the Sci-Tech Serials Crisis by Emily R. Mobley, from Issues in Science
and Technology Librarianship, Fall 1998.
A bit dated, but a very easy-reading article that discusses the history
and causes of the crisis.
ALA publishes journal price comparisons each year in U.S.
Periodical Prices. It is free on the
web. The most recently published data is
from 2005.
Journal
Cost-Effectiveness is still in beta test but this search engine can be
used to find internationally-published journals and rank them by price per
article or citation.
Scholarly
Journal Prices: Selected Trends and
Comparisons LISU Occasional Paper No. 34, from
Sticker
Shock: The Rising Costs of Scientific
Journals originally created in 2002 this gives price comparisons for
everyday purchases compared to specific scientific journal costs.
Faculty comments on the situation:
Steven Bachrach et al., Who Should Own
Scientific Papers? Science 281 (5382):1459-1460. September 4 1998.
Michael Rosenzweig,
Reclaiming
What We Own: Expanding Competition in Scholarly Publishing. Plenary address to the Ninth Conference of
the Association of College & Research Libraries;
Additional links of individual faculty comments as well as
institutional reactions can be found at Faculty Speak Out hosted
by ARL.
Proposals for change have been
made by a wide variety of organizations:
The Case for
Institutional Repositories: A SPARC
Position Paper from the ARL Bimonthly Report 223 (August 2002)
see also the SPARC page of Institutional
Repository Resources
Digital
Scholarship: How scholarship is being
transformed an excellent series of webpages designed to educate authors, researchers,
faculty members to the issues related to the rapidly changing scholarly
publication process from the createchange.org website.
The
Future of Scholarly Communication: A Proposal For Change (June 5, 1997 - a
decoupling proposal by Charles E. Phelps, Provost, University of Rochester)
Open
Archives Initiative (formerly called the Universal Preprint Service
Initiative launched in July 1999 by Rick Luce, Herbert Van de Sompel, and
Paul Ginsparg of the Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Reforming
Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences: A Librarian Perspective (PDF version
of article from Notices of the AMS
by Joseph J. Branin and Mary Case, April
1998.)
Scholars' Forum:
A New Model For Scholarly Communication (March 23, 1999 by Anne M. Buck,
Richard C. Flagan and Betsy Coles, California Institute of Technology)
SPARC
(Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries, founded in
1998.)
Non-profit and scholarly
publishing ventures:
BioOne TM
is a collection of journals in the biological, ecological and environmental
sciences. There was an article, written
by Adrian Alexander and Marilu Goodyear, on The Development of
BioOne TM in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
Copernicus.org
provides free online access to a number of European journals in geosciences,
high energy physics and radio science.
DARE:
Digital Academic Repositories provides access to academic research output
from digital repositories of 16 institutions in the
Directory of Open Access
Journals free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly
journals in all subjects and languages.
Nonprofit
Journals Group collection of journals published by 17 nonprofit
scientific societies and associations focus is currently on agriculture,
food, and biological sciences.
For a good definition and lengthier
overview of Open Access see the Public Library of Science pages on this topic.
Publish or
Be Damned: The Future of Published Science BBC radio program, December
12, 2004 Scientific
publishing is undergoing a revolution. Scientists and policy makers, fed up
with valuable research being locked away in expensive subscription only
journals, are mounting a challenge to the publishers. They are launching their
own competing Open Access journals and giving away the results for free. In Publish or be Damned, Richard
Black examines this dramatic change from both sides of the debate and assesses
its likely consequences for science. (Requires RealPlayer to listen to
program.)
Stern, David. Open Access or
Differential Pricing for Journals: The
Road Best Traveled? Information Today,
March 2005. Provides a business analysis
of the Open Access model to demonstrate the flaws and recommends changes.
For more information, consult the Non-exhaustive
List of Resources about Open Access Publishing.
Peer review:
Arms, William Y. What are the Alternatives
to Peer Review? Quality Control in
Scholarly Publishing on the Web, Journal
of Electronic Publishing, August 2002.
Harnad, Stevan. The Invisible Hand of
Peer Review, Exploit Interactive,
issue 5, April 2000.
Peer
Review and Acceptance of New Scientific Ideas - discussion paper from a
Working Party on equipping the public with an understanding of peer review -
June, 24 2004.
Promotion, Tenure, and Open Access
section of the Symposium on Scholarly Communication website from the
Denise K. Magner, Academics and Industry Issue
Pact to Guide the Evolution of Scholarly Publishing, Chronicle of Higher Education (16 June 2000): A16.
Although Waters and the group of
academics and librarians who were signatories to Principles for Emerging
Systems of Scholarly Publishing, formulated at a meeting in Tempe, Arizona,
in March 2000, respectively endorsed promoting quality as the criterion for
evaluation over quantity, each proposed a solution that further undermined the
current system. Waters suggested that rather than books as the measure of
proficiency in the humanities, reliance should be placed on well-crafted
articles, published in journals, as a more appropriate vehicle for nuggets of
insights that do not merit full book-length treatment. The problem is that the
proliferation and cost of journals are what have been breaking the budgets of
most libraries. The
Principles for Emerging
Systems of Scholarly Publishing, as mentioned above, was sponsored by both
the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research
Libraries. Principle #8 - To assure
quality and reduce proliferation of publications, the evaluation of faculty
should place a greater emphasis on quality of publications and a reduced
emphasis on quantity. Many of the other
principles have been acted upon and had much published about them. Altering promotion & tenure guidelines to
focus on quality instead of quantity appears to have become somewhat lost in
the crowd of other issues.
Frazier, Kenneth. The Librarians'
Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the "Big Deal." D-Lib Magazine, vol. 7 (3), March 2001.
Gatten, Jeffrey N., and Tom
Sanville. An Orderly
Retreat from the Big Deal: Is It
Possible for Consortia? D-Lib Magazine, vol. 10 (10), October
2004.
Change & You describes ways in which faculty can take an active role in
creating their future offerings.
New Modes describes the benefits of open
access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists & also
describes many other blossoming changes in the scholarly communication process.
For addition information, consult the Association of
Research Libraries, Office of Scholarly
Communication web page.
Cartoon taken from:
Journal of Irreproducible Results,
v. 32, #2, Nov/Dec 1988, page 24.
Page created: April 27, 2004
Last updated: August 1, 2007
Links last checked: June 15, 2007
©2007, Lorrie Pellack - Send questions or comments about this page
