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The convergence of two central forces - widespread dissatisfaction over high journal pricing and development of online publishing technology - is fundamentally changing the system for scholarly publishing. Publishers, whether commercial or not-for-profit, are being challenged by authors, readers and librarians to answer "where do you add value?" and "how can you make this process more cost-effective?". The outcome illustrated here is that the market now sees clearly how it is possible to take more control.
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 Journal Info was launched in summer 2007 and sets out to be a tool for researchers in selecting a journal to publish in using a Lund University derived ‘merging’ of a broad range of criteria including scope, quality, and also reader availability and library cost. If any journal does not ‘score’ well on the last two criteria, then the site includes recommendations for alternative journals where access and cost are better. This is an interesting site to scout around in, it covers many of the major journals and more information is being added continuously.
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www.journalprices.com for a database (now in beta stage) on journal cost-effectiveness arranged by subject, and by publisher and with the costs per article and citation information for a large number of journals in science, medicine, technology, law and social science. It is well worth trying this out to see how your journal(s) rank.
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The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has recently announced that author fees will increase from $1,500 per article after July 1st 2006. Fees for articles published in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine will each increase to $2,500 and fees for the PLoS community journals will increase to $2,000. A news story about the financial performance of PLoS states that income covered just 35% of expenses in 2005 and that the original Moore Foundation grant money is running out fast.
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Bergstrom and McAfee have conducted an exhaustive review of journal pricing across all the major disciplines using a range of analytical methods to assess cost-effectiveness. Their site also includes an open letter to university administrators making the case powerfully that the symbiotic relationship between faculty and publishers, where each benefits from the other, has broken down completely, especially citing evidence that commercial publishers are the worst offenders.
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SPARC the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, supports Open Access initiatives on a variety of fronts including Peter Suber’s SPARC Open Access newsletter which is a rich resource of the latest OA news.
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Software such as Paracite enables researchers to preferentially retrieve free copies of information.
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In the UK JISC and the Open Society Institute commissioned a survey of journal authors about Open Access publishing which is now completed and the report by Key Perspectives Ltd, is available from the JISC site.
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“With apparently immaculate timing, in July 2004, we saw both a US Senate appropriations committee and a UK House of Commons Select committee that both published proposals and reports that may have a profound impact on scholarly publishing most especially in biomedical fields. Each group proposed full open access to research articles, funded by tax payers, either through posting on the NIH Pub Med Central service in the US or on appropriate, and in most cases, yet to be built institutional repositories in the UK.
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A recent article provides current data on the effect of Open Access and author self-archiving on citation measures; “Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals” . The data shows clearly that in physics, more access equals more citations. Other disciplines are under investigation.
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Figure 1 shows the total number of journal articles in physics indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information from 1992-2001 (gray), the percentage of these that have been made open-access (OA) by author self-archiving (green), and the ratio of the citation counts for the OA articles to the citation counts for the non-OA articles (red). (Analyses are by Brody et al. (2004) and are based on the ®ISI CD-ROM* citation database metadata and references from 14,000,000 articles in 7,000 leading journals from 1991 to 2001 licensed to the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies http://www.ost.qc.ca and from the 260,000 articles self-archived iin http://www.arxiv.org.)
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In a strong rebuttal of the “Open Access is for everyone” movement, some 48 not-for-profit publishers – all published online by High Wire Press - have released the DC principles for Free Access.
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The economics of scholarly journal publishing is a clear and careful analysis by the Bergstroms (one an economist and one an ecologist). Most compelling are the cross-field comparisons of ecology, economics, mathematics, atmospheric science, neurobiology and physics – achieved through cumulative plots of citations versus cost.
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In January 2005 The Public Library of Science announced a program of institutional membership similar to BioMed Central. Institutions pay an annual “Member Fee” which can be from $2,000 to $100,000, and in return corresponding authors in their institution are entitled to a discount on PLoS publication charges of from 10% to 75%.
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The Information Access Alliance, a coalition of six leading library organizations in North America has launched a web site containing information on the impact of publisher mergers on the market for STM journals. There are links to a White Paper on the topic.
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A full frontal attack on the high cost of some scientific journal subscriptions with a list of the top 100 'culprits' and an advocacy kit for librarians and faculty.
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