[IP] Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
Begin forwarded message:
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 23, 2005 2:03:51 PM EDT
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
From the Wall Street Journal -- http://online.wsj.com/article/
0,,SB111680539102640247,00.html?mod=technology%5Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs
Peer Pressure
Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
More Research Is Free Online Amid Spurt of Start-Ups;
Publishers' Profits at Risk
A Revolt on UC's Campuses
By BERNARD WYSOCKI JR.
BERKELEY, Calif. -- From a stool at Yali's caf, near the University
of California campus, Michael Eisen is loudly trashing the big
players in academic publishing. Hefty subscription fees for journals
are blocking scientific progress, he says, and academics who think
they have full access to timely literature are kidding themselves.
"They're just wrong," Dr. Eisen says. He suggests scholarly journals
be free and accessible to everyone on the Web.
This may sound like the ranting of a campus radical, but Dr. Eisen is
a well known computational biologist at a nearby national laboratory
and a Berkeley faculty member. He is also a co-founder of a nonprofit
startup called the Public Library of Science, which produces its own
scholarly journals, in competition with established publishers,
distributed free online.
It's a campus twist on a raging Internet-era debate about who should
control information and what it should cost. For decades, traditional
scholarly journals have held an exalted and lucrative position as
arbiters of academic excellence, controlling what's published and
made available to the wider community. These days, research is
increasingly available on free university Web sites and through start-
up outfits. Scholarly journals are finding their privileged position
under attack.
The 10-campus University of California system has emerged as a hotbed
of insurgency against this $5 billion global market. Faculty members
are competing against publishers with free or inexpensive journals of
their own. Two UC scientists organized a world-wide boycott against a
unit of Reed Elsevier -- the Anglo-Dutch giant that publishes 1,800
periodicals -- protesting its fees. The UC administration itself has
jumped into the fray. It's urging scholars to deposit working papers
and monographs into a free database in addition to submitting them
for publication elsewhere. It has also battled with publishers,
including nonprofits, to lower prices.
"We have to take back control from the publishers," says Daniel
Greenstein, associate vice provost for the UC system, which spends
$30 million a year on scholarly periodicals.
The clash between academics and publishers was exacerbated last year
when the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health proposed that
articles resulting from NIH grants be made available free online.
That prompted protests from Reed Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc. and
several nonprofit publishers such as the American Diabetes
Association, which argued such a move would hurt their businesses.
The NIH retreated and in February made the program voluntary. It now
asks authors to post on an NIH Web site any articles based on NIH
grants within 12 months of publication.
The debate comes at a time when it's easier than ever to find
scholarly articles by using simple Internet tools such as Google. In
late 2004, Google Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., launched Google
Scholar, a free service that can search for peer-reviewed articles as
well as theses, abstracts and other scholarly material, much of it in
scientific fields.
Traditional publishers argue that the expensive process of selecting
and editing journals is a necessary filter to help scholars sift
through vast amounts of research. The nonprofit publisher of the
prestigious Science magazine makes content available free after 12
months. Other publishers note that with a combination of free
abstracts, free distribution to the developing world and public-
library subscriptions, much of the globe already has access to what
they produce.
"The vast majority -- 90% of researchers in the world -- have access
online to our material," says Karen Hunter, senior vice president at
Elsevier, the science and medical division of Reed Elsevier that
publishes the company's journals. Elsevier's scholarly journals bring
in about $1.6 billion in annual revenue with an operating-profit
margin of about 30%.
Publishers have been entrenched in academia for decades. One big
concern, the U.K.'s Taylor & Francis Group, now part of T&F Informa
PLC, was founded in the 18th century. The venerable nonprofit Science
was founded in the 1880s by Thomas Edison. The industry became firmly
established in the 1950s and 1960s in the wake of the Soviet space
program, whose success spurred a wave of scientific publishing.
Although learned societies such as the American Physical Society hold
sway at the top of the prestige pyramid, commercial publishers have
created a second tier, producing thousands of niche periodicals from
Addictive Behaviors to Zoology, both Elsevier titles. Scholars are
generally grateful that publishers take the risk of starting new
titles, which often take years to break even.
The publishers' prestige derives from the rigorous system of peer
review, in which a journal's editorial board will select experts in a
field to vet articles. At some top scholarly journals, less than 10%
of submitted articles make it into a publication. In turn, the peer-
review system lends authority to a scholar's work, and has long been
a springboard to academic advancement.
Aaron Edlin, a UC Berkeley professor of law and economics, is a co-
founder of Berkeley Electronic Press, publisher of 25 online
scholarly journals. His playbook is simple: undercut giant rivals
with lower prices -- around $300 -- faster turnaround and Internet-
only distribution. Yet when Dr. Edlin helped write a paper on game
theory recently, he submitted it to the competition, the Journal of
Economic Theory, published by Elsevier.
The reason: Professor Edlin's co-author on the paper is striving to
win tenure at the California Institute of Technology and needs
exposure in big-name journals. "He thought it was important. I
respected his decision," says Prof. Edlin.
The peer-review system has many defenders. "There's too much stuff
out there, and we are all way too busy," says Lee Miller, a retired
professor of ecology at Cornell University and editor emeritus of the
nonprofit journal Ecology, published by the Ecological Society of
America. "Anything that saves you time and leads you to the most
important work is helpful."
In the 1990s, the commercial industry consolidated. The biggest
publishers began buying or building new journals and raising prices.
That edifice only began to be challenged with the rise of the
Internet, which cut distribution costs and triggered a wave of
experimentation in what is called "open access" publishing.
In London, a for-profit startup called BioMed Central publishes more
than 100 scholarly journals available free to the public via the
Internet. BioMed Central charges individual authors a processing
charge of about $850 but doesn't charge it for authors affiliated
with member institutions. BioMed Central says it has 527
institutional members, including British and American universities,
which pay between $1,700 and $8,600 a year to belong.
In the U.S. a powerful open-access advocate has been Harold Varmus, a
Nobel laureate, former UC scholar and former NIH director. He's now
head of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He co-
founded Public Library of Science with Berkeley's Dr. Eisen, backed
by a $9 million grant from a private foundation. Charging authors a
fee of $1,500, the group launched its first peer-reviewed journal,
PLoS Biology, in 2003, and also distributes its contents free on the
Internet.
In the late 1990s, Dr. Eisen was studying the yeast genome, a booming
field that has a large overlap with the human genome and 200 journals
publishing related research. He wanted all these journal articles
freely available at his fingertips, an impossible request because
many are behind subscription barriers.
Some scholars think publishing should operate like the Linux computer
operating system, where programmers build on each other's work in an
ongoing, collaborative project. In the scholarly realm, a database
called arXiv -- pronounced "archive," as if the "x" were the Greek
letter "chi" -- has become a repository of scholarship in the physics
field. It's owned and operated by Cornell University and partially
supported by the National Science Foundation. If the UC
administration has its way, something like that would be the norm
throughout academia.
To experienced publishers, much of the open-access talk seems naive.
"A lot of this is self-righteous talk," says Alan Leshner, executive
publisher of Science and chief executive of its nonprofit parent, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. He says giving
away content isn't a viable business model because of the tremendous
costs of putting out reputable journals.
He notes that Science gets 12,000 submissions and publishes 800
articles a year on a $10 million editorial budget. That averages more
than $10,000 per published article, a high number because of the
costs associated with handling the unusually large number of
submissions the journal receives. Industry experts say typical per-
article costs are between $3,000 and $4,000.
If open access takes off, information will flow faster, but
publishers will make less money. Among those who would be hurt is
Reed Elsevier. Sami Kassab, analyst at investment house Exane BNP
Paribas in London, estimates that such a movement could sharply cut
the company's profit margin on periodicals to between 10% and 15% of
revenue, from the current 30% or more.
Currently, the open-access movement makes up between 1% and 2% of the
market, experts say. While that number seems small, the concept is
assuming an important role channeling academic discontent.
"There's a lot of sentiment that work is being taken advantage of by
the commercial publishers," says Alessandro Lizzeri, associate
professor of economics at New York University and editor of
Elsevier's Journal of Economic Theory. He says that while editors get
little compensation for their work, authors and reviewers -- aside
from prestige -- usually get nothing or just a nominal fee.
Prof. Lizzeri says that two of the 40 members of his editorial board
resigned recently because the journal isn't free to readers. "If half
the board resigns I'm in trouble," he says.
These rumblings hit the University of California early on. In October
2003, faculty members made a rare display of solidarity with the
university administration. Two scientists at the University of
California at San Francisco staged a protest over a $91,000 bill from
Elsevier's Cell Press unit for one year's access to six biology
journals. The two professors called for a world-wide boycott, urging
fellow scholars at UC and beyond to refuse to serve as authors,
editors or peer reviewers at the six periodicals in question.
Their timing couldn't have been better for the university
administration, which was just about to begin negotiations with the
Reed Elsevier unit over a new contract. In the late 1990s, all UC
campuses had banded together into a single buying consortium. In
2002, the university hired Dr. Greenstein, a history professor turned
expert on digital libraries. With the state of California's budget
crisis forcing him to trim library spending to $62 million a year,
Dr. Greenstein wanted to take a hard line.
"It was the opening shot, really, in struggling head-on with this
world of scientific publishing," says Keith Yamamoto, executive vice
dean at UCSF medical school and one of the boycott's leaders.
The university was paying Elsevier $10.3 million a year for print and
online subscriptions to most of its 1,800 journals. The university
demanded a 25% reduction and at one point threatened to walk away
from the table.
As the negotiations grew tense, faculty at other UC campuses started
to chime in sympathetically. The UC Santa Cruz faculty senate passed
a resolution urging faculty to boycott Elsevier journals by refusing
to submit articles or to serve on periodical boards.
"That alarmed us," says a Reed Elsevier spokeswoman in Amsterdam.
More than 100 UC faculty members serve as senior editors of Elsevier
journals and about 1,000 serve on editorial boards. The publisher
fanned out across the campuses, drumming up support among friendly
faculty with breakfasts and other meetings. The spokeswoman says the
company concluded that most UC faculty members didn't know about the
boycott call or didn't support it.
The negotiations dragged on for two months and grew testy. In late
2003, the university won a 25% price reduction to $7.7 million a year
for 1,200 Elsevier periodicals. Elsevier agreed to throw the six
biology journals into the deal.
"They got a very, very good deal," acknowledges Reed Elsevier's Ms.
Hunter. She says the company got some concessions, too. UC gave up
access to several hundred periodicals, for example. UC says Elsevier
unilaterally added the titles into the arrangement before
negotiations started and says it doesn't care about their removal.
Suddenly, the UC negotiation was the buzz of the academic library
world and an inspiration for others to follow suit. One UC librarian,
Catherine Candee, says a university negotiator elsewhere "called us
up and said, 'Thank you, you saved us $1 million.' "
Write to Bernard Wysocki Jr. at bernie.wysocki@xxxxxxx
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