Journal boycott

[Peter Freyd <pjf@saul.cis.upenn.edu>]

[Note from moderator:  The article Peter forwards mentions the
Public Library of Science whose web site is at 

http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

where support is being sought.]


Science world in revolt at power of the journal owners 

James Meek, science correspondent
Guardian

Saturday May 26, 2001

Scientists around the world are in revolt against moves by a powerful
group of private corporations to lock decades of publicly funded
western scientific research into expensive, subscription-only
electronic databases.

At stake in the dispute is nothing less than control over the fruits
of scientific discovery - millions of pages of scientific information
which may hold the secrets of a cure for Aids, cheap space travel or
the workings of the human mind.

More than 800 British researchers have joined 22,000 others from 161
countries in a campaign to boycott publishers of scientific journals
who refuse to make research papers freely available on the internet
after six months.

"Science depends on knowledge and technology being in the public
domain," said Michael Ashburner, professor of biology at Cambridge
University and one of the leading British signatories of the campaign,
the Public Library of Science (PLS).

"In that sense, science belongs to the people, and the fruits of
science shouldn't be owned or even transferred by publishers for huge
profits. The fruits of our research - which is, overwhelmingly,
publicly paid for - should be made available as widely and as
economically as possible."

Anger has been simmering for more than a decade in the research
libraries of Europe and the US at the massive increase in the cost of
subscriptions to scientific journals, which collectively make up the
sum of the world's scientific research.

As the power of the internet to mine electronically archived journals
for data grows, scientists have become increasingly frustrated at the
journal publishers' plans to keep tight, lucrative control over
decades of their work.

Last year the most powerful journal publisher, the Anglo-Dutch firm
Reed Elsevier, made a profit of #252m on a turnover of #693m in its
science and medical business.

Elsevier Science and other journal publishers effectively benefit from
the public purse twice: once when taxpayer-funded scientists submit
their work to the journals for free, and again when taxpayer-funded
libraries buy the information back from them in the form of
subscriptions.

In Britain, the government is so concerned about the power of Reed
Elsevier that it has blocked its #3.2bn takeover of another big
journal publisher, Harcourt, while complaints about its market
dominance are investigated.

Derk Haank, the head of Elsevier Science, protested at the singling
out of his company, and portrayed the boycott group as naive
idealists. "Everybody would like to have everything available, all the
time, and preferably for free," he said.

"That's a general human trait, but I'm not sure the business model is
realistic. I'm not ashamed to make a profit. I would only be ashamed
if people were saying I was delivering a lousy service."

He added: "Research is publicly funded, but the cost of publishing it
isn't. If the funding authorities were to decide to pay for
publication I would provide it for free."

You won't find copies of most of Reed Elsevier's 1,100 journals on
newsagents' shelves. With titles like Thin Walled Structures, Urban
Water, Journal of Supercritical Fluids and Trends in Parasitology,
their publications don't have the allure of Elle or FHM but the price
of a year's subscription would make mass market publishers drool with
envy.

A year's subscription to Alcohol - nine issues - comes in at about
#100 an issue. One Elsevier journal, Brain Research, costs more than
#9,000 a year. Another, Preventative Veterinary Medicine, is now #713
a year, an increase of more than 300% over its 1991 price of #171.

Elsevier justifies the increases on the grounds that the number of
articles being submitted increases each year, adding to the firm's
costs. Each article must be peer-reviewed by fellow scientists to see
if it is worthy of publication.

Mr Haank added that his firm's price increases forced libraries to cut
subscriptions, which in turn cut Elsevier's income, forcing them to
increase prices still more.

Elsevier wanted to get out of this vicious circle, he said, and was
trying to get universities to sign up for electronically archived
versions of its journals. The firm has taken on 1,500 people to put
its entire journal archive - going back to 19th century editions of
The Lancet - on computer databases. But he said the price of
subscription to the electronic database would still be tightly linked
to the ever rising cost of the paper journals.

"Our plan is to make everything available in the academic or
professional environment, not just in six months, but on day one," he
said. "Somebody has to pay for the cost of the system."

Scientific research is not considered real unless it has been
published in a recognised journal, and scientists' status and
promotion is tied to publication.

As a rule, neither the scientists who write the papers, nor their
colleagues who peer review them, nor the editorial boards who vet
them, are paid. The publishers' costs are printing, the tiny full-time
staff on each journal - typically two people - marketing, and
distribution.

While the feud over the price of journals was between libraries and
publishers, the scientists stood aside, but the advent of the internet
has changed everything.

Powerful search engines trawling computer databases make it possible
for scientists to discover groundbreaking links between different
research results which would previously have taken years of trawling
through a jungle of indexes.

The prospect of this incredible new tool being controlled by large
private corporations has jerked scientists into action.

"The major commercial publishers have every reason to feel
threatened," Prof Ashburner said. "They charge very high prices, and
they are very insistent on copyright transfer. We are not paid for
publication, and we see no reason whatsoever why we should hand over
copyright to a commercial publisher, having done the work, both the
science and the writing.

"The costs these publishers are charg ing are such that even in the
wealthy countries we can't always afford to buy the information back,
and it's off-limits totally for the developing world."

In a letter to the competition commission in March, Clive Field,
librarian at Birmingham University and head of the Consortium of
University Research Libraries said that the Elsevier-Harcourt merger
would give one company control over journals representing 42% of a
typical university's spend in that area.

He said Elsevier and Harcourt were already trying to drive too tough a
deal with their electronic archive. "Neither publisher has yet offered
a deal which is recognised to be fair and equitable," he wrote. "It is
not unnaturally feared that a merged publisher, operating in a market
where the buyer is weak, would be even less subject to the price
checks and balances that a more open market would offer."

A nice little earner
Title Brain Research 
Publisher Elsevier 
Annual subscription 1991 #3,713 
Annual subscription 2001 #9,148 
Increase 146% 

Title Journal of Virological Methods 
Publisher Elsevier 
Subscription 1991 #527 
Subscription 2001 #1,555 
Increase 195% 

Title Neuroscience Letters 
Publisher Elsevier 
Subscription 1991 #1,125 
Subscription 2001 #2,805 
Increase 149% 

Title Preventative Veterinary Medicine 
Publisher Elsevier 
Subscription 1991 #171 
Subscription 2001 #713 
Increase 317% 

Title Biochemical Journal 
Publisher Biochemical Society (not-for-profit body) 
Subscription 1991 #793 
Subscription 2001 #1,334 
Increase 68% 

Source: Consortium of University Research Libraries