• background reading
• the Open Access movement - statements of support
• projects supporting access to scholarly information
• proposed copyright law change
• consolidation of ownership of publishers and other media outlets

The changing nature of scholarly communication, consolidation in the publishing industries, and pressure on funding sources is making it difficult for libraries to meet the needs of the scholars they serve - and consequently, for scholars to access the research they produce. These factors have an impact on our library and its budget.

• Our agreement with Minitex, the state library consortium that provides Interlibrary Loan services, is that we our library will provide for 95% of our local needs; we should rely on other libraries for only 5% of our needs.
  
• Our library is only allowed to request five articles published within the last five years within a single calendar year. If we request more, we must pay a copyright fee for each article. The impact of this "5/5" rule in the sciences is particularly pressing because a science journal publishes far more articles each year than other scholarly journals, they are more central to research, and the copyright feels are substantially higher than in the humanities or social sciences. For many scholarly journals, the copyright fee to obtain one copy of a single article amounts to the average price of a book. Though the library will subsidize these costs in the interests of supporing faculty research, and believes such support is essential, the impact on our budget can't be ignored.
  
• Journals are expensive and the annual rate of increase is more than twice that than for books. A large percentage of scientific, technical, and medical journals are published by a small number of multinational corporations such as Reed Elsevier and Kluwer.
  
• Libraries are charged higher subscriptions than individuals - a sort of print equivalent of the "site license" concept. In some cases, the rate is sixteen times that of the individual subscription rate.
  
• Most scholarly journal publishers secure the copyright to the articles they publish. The creators of their content get no direct financial benefit and have no control over its use. Many journals rely on unpaid reviewers and even unpaid editors to ensure quality. Authors in many disciplines subisize publication with page charges. Not surprisingly, profit margins are much higher than in segments of publishing in which authors receive royalties. Some for-profit publishers have thirty percent profit margins - extremely high for the publishing industries.
  
• Availability of journals in electronic format does not make subscriptions cheaper for libraries. With few exceptions, the costs associated with developing electronic editions are added to subscription pricing, making journals with an electronic analog frequently more expensive than those only in print. Thus far, in most cases the savings accruing from electronic distribution, if there are any, are not being passed along to the consumer.
• Though these issues are most pressing in the sciences, the impact on our library affects all disciplines. In the larger landscape of scholarly publishing, the pressure on library budgets is contributing to the closing of some unversity presses, whose funding is being cut and while sales to their primary market - academic libraries - are declining. In 1941, as the nation entered the Second World War, an editorial in Publisher's Weekly commented "The country needs to know, through books, more about what it means to be in a world in crisis. . . we ought to know about a score of countries whose affairs are now vital to us." After 9/11, we learned the books people needed most had been published by univeristy presses. (See Books for Understanding for further examples of unversity press books that addressed topical issues in depth before they hit the news.) The recent closure of yet another unversity press is a troubling sign. The long-term cultural consequences of books that won't be published because libraries aren't buying them remains to be seen.

Because of the high cost of scholarly journals, many solutions are being proposed to encourage models of publishing that will make scholarly information more readily available. This list of links covers some of the issues and outcomes of the movement to change access to scholarly information.

background reading

Edwards, Richard and David Schulenburger "The High Cost of Scholarly Journals (And What to Do About It)" Change (Nov/Dec 2003) 10-19. (requires Adobe Acrobat; Gustavus community only)

Esposito, Joseph J. "The Devil You Don't Know: The Unexpected Future of Open Access Publishing." First Monday 9.8 (August 2004). A former publishing executive offers a contrarian perspective; he believes the costs will be higher and land on authors and their proxies.

Open Access News - a blog edited by Peter Suber, excellent for keeping up with developments.

Suber, Peter. 2004. "Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access." Presented at the Workshop on Scholarly Communication as a Commons, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, March 31-April 2, 2004.

Against the Grain published a special issue on peer review that included articles on open access by Peter Suber, Gerry McKiernan, and Barbara Fister. Drafts of these papers have been self-archived online.

the Open Access movement - statements of support

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) - urging a move toward making scholarly information freely available on the Internet. The signatories - museums, libraries, scholarly societies, and researchers, recognize that "moving to open access changes the dissemination of knowledge with respect to legal and financial aspects. Our organizations aim to find solutions that support further development of the existing legal and financial frameworks in order to facilitate optimal use and access."

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003)- "The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community on how to proceed, as rapidly as possible, to the widely held goal of providing open access to the primary scientific literature." Includes organizations from biomedical research organizations, libraries, publishers, and scientists supporting methods of making current research freely available.

Budapest Open Access Initiative - sponsored by the Open Society Initiative; advocates for self-archiving of scholarly materials and the creation of new open-access journals that would make their publications freely available, subsidizing . The target material for this initiative is "The literature that should be freely accessible online is that which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment," which is commonly the case with peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication Association of College and Research Libraries (2003) - describes the crisis in scholarly communications and outlines 18 strategies for dealing with the problem. More about the Initiative can be found on the ACRL Web site.

University Actions Against High Journal Prices Compiled by Peter Suber of Earlham College; more about this list is included in SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #72.

Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science (2004) - signed by many not-for-profit science publishers. Opposes publishing supported by author fees and supports free access to journal contents "either immediately or within months of publication, depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements"

World Summit on the Information Society - a United Nations initiative to consider the global implications of the digital divide and the challenges of making information available on a more equal basis.

The cost of scientific publications has also recently been a subject of inquiry by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology committee. Testimony from hearings held March 1st and March 8th are now available in the form of uncorrected transcripts.

projects supporting access to scholarly information

Directory of Open Access Journals - journals that publish on an open-access model arranged by discipline.

Public Library of Science (PLoS) - an initiative to make science information quickly and freely available; the organization is launching journals that will be subsidized not by subscribers but by contributors.

SPARC - a coalition of libraries and scholarly organizations to "stimulate competition in the market by nurturing high-quality, low-cost journals published by researchers, societies or publishers with scientist -- and library-friendly values and practices.

These sites list journals that offer free content within 6-24 months of publication

• Free Medical Journals links to over 1,200 journals with free content
  
• Highwire Press includes free access to back issues of many of its journals
  
• PubMedCentral an archive of life science journals maintained by the National Library of Medicine
  

proposed copyright law change

Public Access to Science Act (2003) - a bill introduced by Martin Sabo into the House of Representatives that would remove copyright protection from works arising out of federally funded research. Not surprisingly, there is substantial opposition to this bill, which has been referred to committee.

Trowsow, Samuel E. Copyright Protection for Federally Funded Research: Necessary Incentive or Double Subsidy? (Draft 7 Sept. 2003) - a thorough legal analysis of the Public Access to Science Act that analyses the issue and various approaches taken by scholars, publishers, and libraries, and concludes that the Act "works resulting from extramural research that has been substantially subsidized by the Federal Government should enter the public domain in the same manner as works resulting from intramural government research undertaken by federal employees. The Sabo Bill provides a straightforward mechanism for assuring that this result is reached, thereby promoting the progress of science; which is, after all, the reason why we have copyright laws in the first place."

consolidation of ownership of publishers and other media outlets

Mary H. Munroe. The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition (2004) - includes timelines and background on multinatinal corporations that own scholarly book and journal publications.

Who Owns What - Columbia Journalism Review's directory of media ownership.

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