[IP] more on Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
Even though it is often a big fight djf
Begin forwarded message:
From: Mary Shaw <mary.shaw@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 23, 2005 4:39:12 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is
Diluted by Web
Reply-To: Mary Shaw <mary.shaw@xxxxxxxxx>
Dave,
Computer Science research has taken a significant step in this
direction. A number of years ago, many computer science departments,
including many of the top ones, were able to establish with their
universitites that highly-selective conferences provide a level of
review comparable to archival journals and that the proceedings of
these conferences are effective -- and sometimes the principal --
means of transmitting the ideas.
These conferences are, for the most part, sponsored by the technical
societies, and they are less expensive than commercial journals.
Electronic copies are available online for prices that mortals can
afford, and universities can afford institutional sponsorships or
memberships that provide online access for the campus.
This doesn't solve the whole problem, but it is an indication that
the business model can change.
Mary
On 5/23/05, David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Begin forwarded message:
From: Steve Crocker <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
Date: May 23, 2005 4:07:30 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
This is an excellent article. I looked thsi area a few years ago to
understand the dynamics. This article covers the elements very well.
Let me add some emphasis to a particular part of the cycle. The
tenure review process plays a subtle but critical role in retarding
the creation and rise of new peer-reviewed journals that might
operate on an entirely different business model. Tenure (and other
academic advancement) committees are strongly geared toward name
brand recognition when examining a professor's publication list.
Young professors thus tend to prefer the established journals even if
there is substantial delay in getting published and higher cost to
the potential readers.
Figure out how to give equal credit to an excellent article published
in an online journal as an equivalent one published in an established
journal and I think the dynamics will shift fairly rapidly.
Steve
David Farber wrote:
> 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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