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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.
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.
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...
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
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...