Slashdot Mirror
Harvard: Journals Too Expensive, Switch To Open Access
New submitter microcars writes "Harvard recently sent a memo to faculty saying, 'We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called "providers") to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.' The memo goes on to describe the situation in more detail and suggests options to faculty and students for the future that includes submitting articles to open-access journals. If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?"
Wow, and I thought I'd never see major universities become reasonable and do this in another decade.
Good news indeed. It's not just money that is at stake, but the integrity of the scientific community.
If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?
As soon as an on-line open-access journal gets the same impact factor as the traditional Elsevier or IEEE journals, the old ones are dead.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
At a minimum publicly funded research should be available to the public for free. Ideally journals themselves would be replaced with a decentralized Web based system where anyone can publish and peers can freely review all the articles. Academic journals should be replaced with something akin to blogs much as newspapers have.
Harvard, with it's massive endowment, pretends that it cannot afford this? That is utter BS.
To be fair, Elsevier and their kin are somewhat evil money-grubbing publishers. They often try tricks like charging authors for "privilege" of color images to "recoup costs", when the content they're getting is already free.
An analogy: A newspaper has lots and lots of writers on staff, gets their work for free (i.e. no paycheck), turns around and sells the newspaper at exorbitant prices to libraries, and then come back to the authors and say.. we want to charge you. This would be insane in any environment outside of academia or the government. Academia, lucky for them, is funded largely by government bureaucrats who are slow to change and demand open-access publishing (the NIH is moving in the right direction here).
Isn't one of the primary functions of a journal to facilitate the peer review process?
I seem to remember it goes something like this: Paper is submitted, editors evaluate, if it's not complete garbage, they send it to other scientists in that field, they provide feedback, decision to publish is made.
The Climategate emails showed a concerted effort to gain control of this process or at least influence the editors to not proceed with the review process in some instances. Will open source journals be more or less susceptible to that?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Please do give Elsevier and others the finger for the good of humanity!
This make knowledge finally accessible to all AND most importantly would greatly reduce the incentives to write bunk "scientific" papers
If major Universities required their faculty to publish facsimiles of any papers they submit to various journals on a _free_access_ "academic papers repository" section of the University's webpage, then we'd have the best of worlds. Those willing to pay for academic journals could still do so. Those hunting for a particular academic paper, not knowing in advance whether its contents are actually useful or not, could simply look it up on the University's _free_access_ academic papers section. Problem solved.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Seriously? Harvard is calling out others? This from a school with several professors who sell their own books that are required and no substitutes are allowed ... the books are good only for the one class, are different ever year so they can't be sold and so the professor can sell you a new copy, of course the argument is always some bullshit about how they have to change it to prevent cheating ... which only happens because they reuse the same content year after year and then pretend they spend countless hours coming up with new ideas.
Its good to call out rip offs, but no one is going to give two shits about what Harvard says as they doing the exact same thing every day.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Whilst I would like to see the day where our work (I am a scientist) is all in open access journals, there is still a cost. The author pays the journal instead of the library. The difficulty for authors is that we typically don't have funding for that. Maybe what we need is for our institution libraries to be paying that cost, but then the library doesn't save any money...
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
After all education is (I was told yesterday) the primary goal of a university, regardless of the cost. Unversities should not be allowed to cut CS departments or library purchases of scholarly journals.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Can they start suing everyone for downloading Journals . . . ? Their business model is being challenged, just like the music industry.
Hmmm . . . how can they claim intellectual property on papers that haven't been written yet . . . ? It will be interesting to see what their lawyers will come up with . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Forget restriction on academia, etc. Science functions best with as many participants as possible sharing as much information as possible. These journals used to only charge a modest fee to cover distribution -- their function in that regard ended in the mid 80s with the introduction of mass communication becoming available to the individual at low cost, and a decade later the internet became a viable method of distribution.
These journals are counter-productive today; They're causing work duplication on a mass scale because research (that thing where you look up what other people have done about the problem, also known as 'step 2') has become so cost prohibitive it's cheaper (and faster, thanks to a lack of standardization regarding searching) to just move forward with doing it over again. If I were Queen of the establishment of science, I'd send the military in and charge the owners of those businesses with crimes against science and sentence them to 10 years hard labor as assistants to (cough)... undergraduates.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There's a very simple solution. Harvard can set standards that journals must meet in order for publications in those journals to be considered for tenure. If there's one thing that professors care about, it's having a good case for getting tenure.
How long before "providers" attempt to adopt a very-high-by-today's-standards "published" subscription rate but give substantial discounts to institutions who have supplied content in the last 12 months?
A followup question:
How long, measured in nanoseconds after its announcement, before such a policy is widely considered an Epic Fail? Feel free to use a smaller unit of time in your response.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Lessig spoke about journals, and access to scholarly works, at the Open Rights Group's recent conference, and made what I thought were excellent points:
Junior academics seeking tenure (more a US thing, I think) or else recognition in their fields may still need to publish in non-open journals. Movements towards open access should not necessarily mean eliminating junior academics' chances of promotion or recognition, but that academics already with tenure may be in a different position. It's not necessarily the case that everyone can move at once, but that those than can, should.
The problem of access to information in journals is often not felt by academics, given their university's licences to such material. Information, for many academics, is effectively free — I can access all sorts of wonderful materials by virtue of my academic life that I could not access so easily beforehand. As a result, currently, pretty much any article *is* freely available to me. But many are not so fortunate — particularly where universities cannot afford to pay access fees, but more so for those who are not affiliated to universities, and who would have to pay considerable fees for access to even individual articles.
(I may have misunderstood, of course — these are just my recollections of quite a fast-paced lecture.)
I'm not a fan of locked-up knowledge, and, if there is a way for someone to operate a successful publishing model, with good academic standards, then great — for those interested in open source legal issues, I'd point you towards the open access International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.
In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.
Libraries are necessarily nonprofit organizations, and their budgets are funded through taxes and tuition. The current journal publication business model treats library budgets as little more than a vehicle to launder money that was taken from Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer.You pay to support Elsevier, ThomsonReuters, et al, in the form of taxes and tuition. Journal publishers seem to perceive library budgets the way that petroleum companies perceive oil fields. In case you think this is hyperbole, consider:
An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100.
http://www.economist.com/node/21552574 Given these kinds of costs, it would be cheaper for a library to fly the most prominent publishing mathematicians out for a visit and have them lecture on the topics of their latest publications.
Applying a profiteering mentality to scholarly work has predictable resulted in a systematic degradation of the quality of academic output itself. The results are demonstrable.http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/20/220201/studies-suggest-massive-increase-in-scientific-fraud
Charge enormous sums of money for subscriptions to the journals, charge the scientists providing the content money for putting in figures (instead of the traditional paying-the-content-provider model), and the editors work for free.
The NIH already requires that all papers published with their grants are available freely. Why the NSF can't do that, I don't know. It's a huge problem not only in academia but also in government. Government workers, such as ones at NOAA or USGS, often have little to no journal access. I'm sure it's the same in industry. This impacts everybody.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Note that nothing in the linked article says that *scientific* journals are the only problem.
A much more inviting target for cost savings would be the many specialized humanities journals that publish a steady stream of papers that nobody ever cites or even reads. We'd probably be better off if nobody bothered with them anyway - maybe then the philosophy and literature faculty can get back to doing something useful - like *teaching*
... there are some journal publishers who should be supported, such as CUP.
(Just for anyone who doesn't know ... I'm currently without paid employment, and my wife works for CUP (although not in the journals division), so we need the money!)
These publishers get a lot the work done for free. Here is how the process goes as I understand it.
1) Author submits his paper
2) Editor (working for free) checks it over and passes it to several reviewers.
3) The reviewers (working for free) accepts with corrections/clarifications for publication (or rejects it).
4) The author turns in the revised version and PAYS the publisher to publish it.
5) Libraries and people then PAY the publisher for their copies and/or online access.
The publishers do have some overhead cost of overseeing the process, the cost of materials, and the publishing the articles. It does not look to be that expensive with most of the time consuming work being done for free, yet the journals are quite expensive. So where does all the money go?
It's a sensible move, and I hope others will follow. However, as mentioned previously it won't change a lot, at least not in physics, which is what I know. When someone publishes something of interest, I know about it and have looked up the pre-print on arxiv long (sometimes half a year) before it is scheduled to appear in one journal or another. The only role journals play in my opinion is that something that they provide prestige, like an ongoing competition for that stamp of quality they call "Nature" or "Physical Review" or whatever. Although even that doesn't guarantees the quality of a paper.
With the insight of some of the comments here I can definitely see how stopping the subscription makes financial sense.
If those journals become obsolete though, academics will have to seriously re-think the stuff the way they structure CVs, which currently really is a list of publications.
On the note of publicly funded research should be free to the public: Exactly that was on the agenda of Germany's Pirate Party a little while ago (who pointed out that we pay three times: once to fund the research, once to subsidise the journal, once for the subscription), although oddly not many people seemed to pick up on it. Maybe the general electorate just doesn't care enough about academic publishing?
The big journals are big because of their review process. I'm guessing that an open publication of research will go something like this:
Black Holes: Not the Center of MY Galaxy
Authors: Grad Student Smith, Grad Student Jones, Prof. Haggis
Stephen Hawking and 27 others Likes this
Tony Tyson says The very thought that Black Holes constitute Dark Matter is an egregious error in their hypothesis.
And you know...this probably wouldn't be a terrible way of doing things if you can somehow set your reputation level based on your education/experience/PhD/etc, ignore non-relevant posts and likes....All probably less hassle than trying to convince faculty to spend time on peer reviews every week.
For well over a decade, faculty throughout the U.S. (and the Federal government itself) have been pushing the use of open access journals (and free public access to government research).
If Harvard is leading in anything, it's in the loss of endowment funds during the Great Recession.
... As a result, currently, pretty much any article *is* freely available to me. But many are not so fortunate — particularly where universities cannot afford to pay access fees, but more so for those who are not affiliated to universities, and who would have to pay considerable fees for access to even individual articles...
You are paying (at least your university is paying, leaving less money for the university to spend on other things). Often people forget this. So when you are reading through your "free" papers perhaps you might also notice if one of your collegues didn't get a matching grant for their research or that the janitor that doesn't come around to clean your office very much anymore, or there's one less TA for that class... There's always a cost, even if you you aren't paying a cost yourself. The cost may look small when spread out over many folks, but it's isn't zero. On the other hand, dropping a subscription to a journal by a large university to "save" money will cost something on the other side (people employed by the jounal will get fewer raises or lose their jobs). Realistically, journal access is really a fringe benefit to you (not unlike free coffee in a breakroom), but when the cash crunch comes, the fringe benefits are often the first to go.
What we can hope for is a more equitable system for reviewing, publishing and sharing knowledge, but there's bound to be chaos during any transition, however if our economy turns to a knowledge based (rather than manufacturing based), you might actually see more limits, rather than fewer limits on knowledge distribution going forward (as knowledge becomes more valued as a commodity like raw materials in a manufacturing based economy).
Harvard, despite their $32 billion dollar endowment, can't afford library fees? On top of the the 70+% overhead rate they charged my grants? Oh please. This is about many things, but a lack of money isn't it.
For those not familiar with the subscription process, PLoS (and PhysX, etc.) have free access to the articles because the author has to pay for every article published. I check their website, the rate currently varies from $1300 to $$2900 per article, depending on which journal it's submitted to. Traditional journals, at least in physics (which is where I've published), normally don't have page charges for electronic submissions because they typesetting costs go way down with LaTeX submissions.
What's really going on is that Harvard is shifting the costs from their libraries on to their researchers. They already have one of the highest grant overheads in the country (did you know that for every $1.00 in grant money a researcher receives, Harvard receives more than $0.70, to pay for things like electricity and library journal subscriptions?), but apparently a $32 billion dollar endowment just isn't good enough...
It would be a good thing for academia to move away from predatory publishers like Elsevier and Wiley, and conduct all future publication through open access journals. However, even if this wonderful thing happens, those publishers remain a problem. Let's say that Elsevier goes out of business when researchers stop publishing with them and libraries stop ordering their materials. The citation chain still goes through a large number of already existing Elsevier publications. If Elsevier disappears, our heavily limiting copyright laws leave no mechanism to obtain these older papers. Some libraries gave up on paper versions of journals in recent years, so even they have neither duplicates nor access to the papers.
Part of solving the academic publishing problem needs to include changes to copyright law. Authors should be permitted to provide access to papers that their publisher no longer makes available. Libraries should be allowed to provide access to academic publications whose copyright holders have vanished. There needs to be some mechanism along these lines, or else Elsevier and their ilk will gouge the academic libraries even more severely.
Libraries have a mission to disseminate knowledge, and a budget for this purpose (i.e. they are already paying the $40,000 for the journal subscription). They also have a lot of the infrastructure needed for online publishing (high speed network connections, servers, computer programmers). They should cut out the middleman and run competing journals themselves.
turning the HBR publications such as Harvard Business Review and the many other journals they publish into open access journals? I'd like that, because it means the articles I've written for them I could no give away for free rather than pay a copying fee for each one.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I was just at the meeting where we were talking about this the other day. Harvard does put out some journals but the point is really to convince the ones we don't put out to move to open online access versus just print. Part of the problem is our library budgets are getting slashes and it's one of the hot button issues here. Most of the libraries are restructuring. I'm just a student worker so I'm not sure how exactly we will leverage them to do this apart from asking nicely, since,this is Harvard after all, we will get the journal. Asking nicely does work sometimes...
They need to get away from peer reviewed journals entirely and switch to a slashdot-style moderation system.
Then papers will be acknowledged or disregarded solely based on their abstracts, with no one actually reading TFA, as they should be.
Or how exactly will a journal block a scientist from publishing elsewhere?
I'd guess it'd be along the lines of contractually requiring, as a condition of publication, that the article be an unpublished work. Copyright law defines publication as "the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending" (17 USC 101).
Yes, it was an Elsevier journal, but this is not specific to them, others do this as well.
Researchers get stuck between a rock and hard place - we have to publish in high impact journals (otherwise our funding is cut, low impact factor publications don't count), but ideally open access (few high impact journals are Open Access) to save expenses for the library and you can bet that nobody will give me the 3k to pay that extortionist fee above, especially not if I am to publish at least twice a year in such journal. So what am I to do?
Honestly, this does suck. Wearing my engineering hat, it is next to impossible to pay all the IEEE, ACM, what-not subscriptions I would need to access papers in my field as a private company - that's why there is so much reinventing the wheel and patenting the obvious. We had the ACM and IEEE membership and there was always a journal or a conf that was not covered. With outfits like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis etc. it gets even worse, because the subscriptions are per journal. It is completely impossible situation for a small company to deal with.
Uh no. It's not the University that pays. The University libraries pay for the journals, but the professor's grant pays the price of publishing the paper. As grants get tighter I suspect that places that don't charge you to publish will become more popular.
What I suspect Harvard is saying is that publishing in more open forums will count as much as publishing in closed journals. For many academics, I suspect that the only reason they publish in closed journals is that it affects their promotion.
... I see Harvard's owm publications, like, for instance, the Harvard Business review, become OpenAccess too...
You see, those are real cash cows, and probably cost the Harvard library nothing, so, most harvard authors will keep publishing there, costing other universities a bundle.... So much for Open Access.
Don't get me wrong, I hope this becomes true, and helps, but I have become a tad jaded...
Just my two cents.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
In other news, students stop going to Harvard because its rates compared to other institutions (much less "DIY education") are just too damn expensive, and because no one will pay a free market value for the fruits of their labor after graduation because everyone just expects everything for free.
One thing you might consider is that this whole scientific publishing business might go the way of the music business in a few years. Right now musicians can often make more money touring than releasing records (publishing). So many old musicans have gone to treating "publishing" as a side-line publicity mechanisms for their day job (touring). Unfortunatly, newer mucisians don't have the historical publicity to ride on, so they are still forced into the old system. What this has done is create a discontinuity where the influence of older music is growing and sometime overshadowing the newer music making it harder to break into the system increasing the influence of the music cartel on newer artists and creating a sea of overproduced music. Sure, there's the occasional Justin Beiber (not that I find his music very listenable, but he seems to be a popular reference for this) that breaks out, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
If it ever gets to the point where top researchers eventually find they get more impact by visiting, rather than publishing in wide access journals which are dilluted by crap, you may find that libraries become warehouses for un-impactful, un-referenced derivative papers, and all the cutting edge stuff being unpublished work done by visiting researchers at instituitions publishing in in-house journals or side channel (e.g., non-peer reviewd university press releases). Not sure that would be great if the primary interest was in public access to quality information. Finding and evaluating stuff in a bunch of in-house journals will basically be taking ourselves back to the early days of academia (when researchers disseminated primarily by visiting and publication never reached very far and researchers often unknowingly spent careers duplicating work done by others).
There's probably some way to do this that works out for the general good, but this is a problem that the current music industry faces too and I haven't seen anyone come up with a workable long term system yet. However, in the shorter term, are libraries similar to the music store in this analogy? Is there a iTunes or Amazon like competitor/entity in the future for university libraries? Could such an entity destroy the concept of a journal (kind of like Amazon and iTunes destroyed the music album)? Could they eventually flatten the pricing model (any subject: peer reviewed papers 99c, unreviewed 10c)?
If you are a librarian, these seem to be important things to consider.
Unless you go to something like PLoS, where *everything* is published, you're still going to end up with duplication of effort.
Just think of how many GradStudent-Years of work would be saved for every 'I tried (x) and it didn't work' paper, as we won't have 20 more researchers trying to do it.
I don't know that the Open Notebook concept works in all fields (remember the Haumea controversy?), but we need to be moving in that direction.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I have a record of speaking out against closed journals (although, maybe not on here), and I've stirred the pot up on a couple of mailing lists.
But there's one problem that people need to remember -- Elsevier and these others hold the copyright to large amounts of reference materials. If we cut them off entirely, and they don't change quickly enough, then they go backrupt ... and someone needs to be able to buy up that material so that it can be served to the public.
Yes, we need to open things up going forward -- but we don't want to create a mini-dark age at the same time.
(and if you want to read lots of the publisher's claims at why they need to keep things locked up, which is mostly 'because that's our business model', see http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/30/your-comments-access-federally-funded-scientific-research-results . And there's lots of great reasons from other people and groups about why it's such a dumb idea.)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Not the same paper. The journal will get quite ticked off with you if you try to do that.
Not the same paper. Your research could generate multiple reports/papers off your main research (each hopefully unique***), and these can be published in different journals. However, each paper must be published in only one journal.
*** I say hopefully unique because some academic professors (not all thank God) hash and re-hash the same topics with very little deviation (and ergo very little cumulative value), sending them en-mass to multiple journals and conferences. Think academic spamming - flying shit to walls in a drive-by-shooting example, hoping (or actually counting on the laws of probabilities) that some of them turds will stick.)
You can recognize this when you begin to see an academic source forking papers year after year whose titles can be trivially parsed with a regex: Semantic Representations of Jujubees, Representational Semantics of Jujubees, A Representation of Jujubee Semantics, A Case for Semantic Representation of Jujubees, Worst-Case Scenario on Parsing Semantic Representation of Jujubees, Representing Jujubee Semantics with XML (I mean, you got to put XML on that shit so that it's sexy), OWL Representation of Jujubee Semantics for Web Services.... and so on and so on. I'm not making shit up. I've seen this.
Making research science more open and more accessible is important to me as a young scientist. I work in a field that is often criticized/dismissed by the public (evolution), and I see open access research as both a shield against creationists/science deniers as well as a simple public good. The taxpayers are my ultimate bosses, and to convince them that I'm worth supporting financially, I need to show them what I'm doing (in addition to educating their sons and daughters). Paywalled research facilitates neither of these goals. Politics, costs, and other points have already been raised, but I haven't seen any comments about transparency of impact. Impact factor is a convenient metric that might work with deans and bureaucrats, but it does not work with fellow researchers. What matters to us is exposure, citation count, and who's citing your work. PLoS ONE (I've published there) has transparent metrics on views, downloads, Tweets, Facebook/G+ shares, and citations. Paywalled articles have citations - that's it. Having people talk about your research on blogs, in the electronic press, and on social networks is valuable, especially to younger researchers. As of now, I can show any potential employer that my PLoS ONE paper has > 3,500 views (which is good for my small field), four citations, and it was discussed by scores of folks on social networking sites. This transparency is simply not available from the paywall publishers.
I've been working in academia for 15 years, and the free journal movement was around when I started. Like many ideas that make sense, implementing them when opposed by established interests isn't easy. Harvard getting on board should be huge. Overdue, no doubt, but that's how these things usually go. I didn't think it would take this long back then, but after seeing how the system works (or doesn't), I'm not all that surprised now.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One thing that should definitely not be done is someone starting a website for publishing of papers copyrighted by journals. That would allow free access by anyone and make the journals lose profits. Then how many hookers could the corporations running the journals get?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I know academic journals are stored and used by academics to do research (learn from the past), to create new developments. When the journals themselves are overly expensive, unsearchable, or proprietary, they become inaccessible (their value to the scholar decreases). Technical papers have been published in PDF for a long time. Publishing in an open, electronic format can make a researchers job much easier and less expensive. They can also be archived and stored to disk more easily, searched more easily, copied more easily, and can reach more researchers more quickly than traditional styles of publication (read: dead tree). They *must* be published in an open format, so that in 2 years or 5 years or 50 years the content is still accessible. Publishing in a proprietary format is like not publishing at all: if its unreadable in 5 years, its useless.
When you publish in an academic journal it's very usual for them to demand some level of copyright. This varies country to country and publisher to publisher but generally speaking once you've published in one journal you can't re-present your work in another journal. Often you'll be required to confirm that a certain percentage of the work you're presenting is novel before they will consider it for publishing.
The power journals hold over the academic community is immense. They know your career depends on getting published, and they hold the access.
You can't even re-publish the work yourself on your own website. Last year I was published in one journal and I also wanted to present the article on my university's open access resources (so people interested in my work could view the article instantly, for free, without having to purchase a subscription to that journal) - and I was refused by the journal - I have to wait 18 months after publication before being allowed to put a copy of my own writing on line. This might not seem long, but I am a junior postdoc in a fast moving field: from the original thinking of the ideas to research and then the publication process is a few years, and also my fixed term contracts tend to be only a year or two years long. So getting my work out quickly to the world is crucial to keep me in work. But I need the publishers probably more than they need me, so I have to follow their terms and conditions...
Publishers like Elsevier won't allow material to be put online once you've agreed to publish with them: I've had an article published with a major publisher recently and wanted to put it online in my university's open access resource system (free online repository) - I got told I have to wait 18 months before I can put it up there. The journal wants people to have to buy a subscription to their journal to see my article, doesn't want them to see my research for free.
You crazy radical individualists might argue: "why don't you just tell them to get lost and put it online anyway?" - well, I work for a university, and if the publisher decides they are unhappy, their easy option is to tell the university to get my work offline or they will ban the university from access to their journals. My university is not going to get all their senior professors banned from access to reading or publishing in top journals just to make one little rebellious young postdoc happy. They'd rather delete stuff from my website or terminate my employment with them. In this power equation, I know where I sit.
.
Harvard's current endowment is approximately $32B. This is approximately the amount of equity in Kraft Foods or in Coca-Cola or in Oracle.
Harvard is an enormously profitable corporation with a small side business involving handing out diplomas. For Harvard's libraries (underfunded though the department may be) to complain about the cost of anything, given the college's $38,415 undergraduate tuition this year, constitutes the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
Class of '91, gentlemen.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
One of my clients is a large "traditional" academic journal publisher. They are responding to the pressure from open access journals by becoming more flexible and rolling out new features/products that make them more attractive.
Some examples:
1. Giving authors the option to pay their manuscript's publication costs, which would make their work available to the public, free of charge. This is the model of the open-access journals.
2. Creating smaller bundles of journals for libraries that don't need to subscribe to all of them.
3. Creating subscriptions that are good for X number of individual manuscript downloads, as opposed to subscribing to an entire journal. This wasn't really possible back in the print days, and that is certainly my client's history, but there is no reason not to offer this now.
I'm not sure how they would litigate away competition from open access journals. It's not like the traditional publishers have some sort of right to academic research that is published in other publications!
Disclaimer: I can't speak for the academic journal industry as a whole, or even for my client (hence the anonymous coward), but I can tell you that all I see around me is sincere effort to keep up with the changing needs of their customers.
Publishers do what any commercial company does: maximize their profits. Stop whining, and change the research business. Here is how:
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/annealing-library.html
Universities have been whining about this for years, but not done anything substantive. Publishers do what every commercial entity does: maximize profits. If you do not like the product, do not buy it. Here's how to start changing the scholarly communication business: http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/annealing-library.html