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The staggering price of world's best research
(From the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, March 28, 2004)

Bay Area universities leading charge against publishers, arguing the knowledge in academic journals must be kept within reach

Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer

An alarm bell is ringing in the ivory tower. Something's gone terribly wrong, frustrated scholars say, when scientific journals cost as much as new cars and diamond rings.

Critics are complaining with growing intensity that the most important advances in human knowledge -- the new research and discoveries of top universities -- have been in effect seized and are being held for ransom by commercial publishers.

The companion journals Nuclear Physics A & B cost the same as a 2004 Toyota Camry sedan -- $23,820, according to a "sticker shock" calculator from UC Berkeley. The calculator is "our way of raising hell," university librarian Thomas Leonard said. Theoretical Computer Science goes for $5,619 a year, enough to buy an 18-diamond gold ring from Tiffany's, according to a similar calculator from Cornell University.

An academic rebellion simmering for half a dozen years has begun to boil over, with much of the heat generated in the Bay Area and California.

"It is ironic," said a Stanford faculty resolution passed last month, "that many Stanford scholars -- like scholars throughout higher education-- volunteer their articles and labor in the production, review and editing of journal content, only to have the final product sold back to Stanford, sometimes at exorbitant prices."

University libraries are suffering from journal price increases in recent years that have far outstripped inflation while library budgets starve. They've been forced to slash book and periodical purchases so much that they say the quality of their collections has become compromised.

The public also is cheated, many critics say, because much of the research is funded by government grants, yet taxpayers -- say, breast cancer patients seeking the latest treatment breakthroughs -- "cannot freely access the published results of research financed by their own tax dollars," Stanford biochemistry Professor Patrick Brown wrote in a March 2 statement released by the campus.

A recent letter from UC officials called the present system "incontrovertibly unsustainable." The university cut book purchases 26 percent and journal purchases 6 percent from 1986 to 1999.

The 10-campus UC system claimed a temporary victory in January when it used its combined clout to win something virtually unheard of a reduction in the price it pays to the publishing giant of scientific and medical journals, the Elsevier arm of the British-Dutch conglomerate Reed Elsevier.

Elsevier has about 1,800 titles, or about 20 to 22 percent of the most expensive segment of the market -- science, technical and medical journals. Its titles include Nuclear Physics A & B and Theoretical Computer Science, and its prices range from the $105-a-year Nurse Leader to Brain Research for $21, 269, with the average last year being $525, according to company data.

Harvard, Columbia and a consortium of North Carolina universities have recently balked at Elsevier prices and threatened to curtail purchases. The Stanford resolution singled out Elsevier and called for a boycott of pricey journals, while the UC Santa Cruz faculty called for a boycott of Elsevier in October.

"There is no serials crisis," said Elsevier spokesman Eric Merkel-Sobotta. "What there is, is a library funding crisis." Library budgets fell from about 4 percent of university spending in 1982 to about 3 percent in 2000, he said.

He acknowledged that the company makes a "healthy" profit but added that production costs are rising with increased research spending, highly specialized editing and peer-review responsibilities, as well as the technology needed to keep pace with the growing online use of the journals.

Over the past 16 years, according to UC Riverside chemistry Professor Christopher Reed, the average price of Elsevier journals has increased at three times the rate of the Consumer Price Index. "Elsevier profits were up 26 percent in 2002," he wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

UC is Elsevier's second-largest customer, UC officials say, and last year, the university paid the company about $10 million for about 1,400 journals in one "bundle," a method of purchasing that has replaced individual journal subscriptions at many universities.

With growing reliance on online subscriptions, many libraries also have had to reduce or eliminate paper copies to save money. Under its new Elsevier contract, UC will receive only one print copy of each journal, to be kept in a central repository for use by all campuses. Half of UC's online budget has gone to Elsevier, even though its titles account for only 25 percent of the use of such journals, according to UC data.

Academic journals are published both by commercial firms and by scholarly nonprofit societies like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which sponsors the journal Science.

Though most of the criticism is focused on firms like Elsevier, complaints are directed also at the nonprofit scientific societies. The societies, whose journals generally cost less than commercially published ones, say they have to charge more than publishing costs in order to pay for other activities.

Leading the attack on the current system is the "open access" movement, which seeks to publish top-quality, peer-reviewed articles free on the Internet. An influential example is the San Francisco-based Public Library of Science (PLoS), which launched its first journal, PLoS Biology, amid fanfare in October.

Under the PLoS model, the article's author pays a $1,500 fee, ideally paid by the writer's university or a grant, while the rest of the publishing costs come from other sources, such as private foundations or federal education dollars now siphoned off to offset high-priced subscriptions to commercial publishers.

Merkel-Sobotta of Elsevier said open access is "dangerous" because it depends precariously on charity and cannot muster the resources needed for rigorous scientific review and long-term survival.

Some scientists also question the viability of open access and the sustainability of such journals' archives. In a statement earlier this month, former Stanford President Donald Kennedy, now editor of Science, said open access deserves support as an experiment that should coexist with nonprofit journals but that it faces the sustainability problem.

One of the toughest barriers to changing the current approach, many scholars say, is the publish-or-perish mandate that keeps professors -- especially those seeking tenure or promotion -- aiming for highly prestigious journals controlled by commercial publishers.

Open access was challenged March 16 in a joint statement issued in Washington, D.C., by leading U.S. science and medical societies. The statement, representing 48 nonprofit publishers and more than 600,000 scientists and clinicians, called for "free access" to research through "many publishing models" and opposed a system where the publishing costs are "borne solely by researchers and their funding institutions."

The issue is stirring heated debate also in Europe, where a Parliament committee in the United Kingdom is investigating scientific publications. "Whether or not open access ultimately gains ground as an alternative," reported Outsell Inc., an information industry research firm, "it's clear that the current model is breaking up."

Elsevier disagrees. Merkel-Sobotta said the firm and similar publishers show robust growth and "take their guardianship of the intellectual heritage very, very seriously."