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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.
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.
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
Harvard, with it's massive endowment, pretends that it cannot afford this? That is utter BS.
Harvard's Libraries say that they can't afford this(and given the relatively thin slice of the cash that the libraries see, is quite possibly true. Universities aren't unified entities. If anything, they are rather more compartmentalized than corporations(who, for accounting purposes if nothing else, have all sorts of internal distinctions of their own). The Endowment is practically an in-house investment fund, not a petty cash jar that the libraries can get access to easily. There are probably all manner of horribly complex distinctions(some largely accounting fictions, some fairly real(a professor in something biomed who maintains his lab and underlings on grants, say, is practically a tenant rather than an employee)).
Plus(in a happy confluence of self-interest and altruism) paying for these journals because they can afford it would be a losing choice for Harvard and just about all the other schools:
Why? Since Harvard is made of money, they really don't want to face the classic "How much does it cost?" "Well, how much do you have in your pockets?" chat with the sales rep. That's an express ticket to paying 50% more per year. Poorer schools don't want to end up paying 'industry standard' rates dictated by what richer schools can afford; but their faculty are also less likely to have the clout to just say "Dear Elsevier, fuck you." without damaging their careers.
Harvard has the cash and prestige to afford it(if they would just cut their libraries a slightly larger slice, from what my friends associated with the system tell me, the libraries are surprisingly starved given their reputation); but this also means that they have the best chance to draw a line and end the practice, instead...
It isn't clear that there will be a significant difference in editorial control:
With closed access journals, researcher submits paper hoping to improve his CV(sometimes even surrenders copyright). Peers in the field review paper, usually for free/status associated with being a reviewer for a serious journal, Journal turns around and sells the finished work back to the libraries.
Under the most common 'open' model, the costs of publishing are most commonly moved from the library end to the research end, by having a submission fee for papers that is one part of the cost of research, rather than having library/journal subscription fees as one part of the cost of research. That's the major economic change.
I'm sure that, in practice, the shakeups surrounding moves from one model to the other will sometimes be accompanied by moves toward tyrannical editorial control or toward broader transparency; but those will really be orthogonal to the funding model.
With closed access journals, researcher submits paper hoping to improve his CV(sometimes even surrenders copyright). Peers in the field review paper, usually for free/status associated with being a reviewer for a serious journal, Journal turns around and sells the finished work back to the libraries.
There isn't any status associated with being a reviewer for one of the big journals. By and large, no one outside of the publisher even knows that you do it and it's not really something worth bragging about on a CV. People who legitimately care about their field view it as (a mildly annoying) part of their duty.
... 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.
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.