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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