Re: journal boycott

Re: journal boycott

[Bob Rosebrugh]

[Note from moderator: Michael Barr suggested that his contribution to the
Newsletter on Serials Pricing be circulated.]


						ISSN: 1046-3410

		NEWSLETTER ON SERIALS PRICING ISSUES

			NO 229 - July 13, 1999
			 Editor: Marcia Tuttle


				CONTENTS

	     229.1 WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? Michael Barr


229.1 WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?
      Michael Barr, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill 
      University, barr@barrs.org

I have been reading the prices newsletter for a year and a half and 
I would like to make some comments, especially to refute some of 
the more outrageous claims made by publishers.

I believe that I have an unusually broad perspective on the 
publishing business, having witnessed it from several angles. First 
and foremost, I have been an active researcher (in mathematics), 
having been author (or occasionally coauthor) of some 70 articles 
and coauthor of two books, one of which is about to go into its 
third edition. Second, I have been member and chair of the Canadian 
Mathematical Society (CMS) publications committee and have a clear 
idea of what its publishing costs actually are. Third, I am an 
editor or associate editor of two print journals, one published by 
a commercial publisher and one by a university press, as well as 
editor of two electronic journals, both distributed free. Finally, 
my daughter worked for two years around 1990 in the journals 
department of an academic publisher and I have had extensive 
discussions with her about her experiences and those of people she 
knows who are still in the field.

The CMS journals are not the cheapest journals published by a 
society but still beat any commercial journal by a factor of 2 to 
5, according to the figures collected by Ron Kirby. There used to 
be page charges, but only about 30% of the authors paid them and 
they were eventually abandoned as more trouble than they were 
worth. Despite this, the CMS has a clear profit of perhaps 
$100,000/year, and this is a major source of income for the society 
(which has maybe 1000 members). This is real, not paper profit. 
What expenses do we skip by not being commercial? We have some 
typesetting costs but most of the articles now come already set in 
the mathematical typesetting system TeX that has rapidly become the 
standard for mathematical publication. But this is also true for 
the commercial journals. As a result, publishing costs have dropped 
substantially in recent years, although not as much as we were led 
to believe. Incidentally, twenty and thirty years ago, publishers 
claimed that the reason mathematics was so expensive to publish was 
the typesetting costs. Now that most manuscripts come in already 
typeset, they claim that typesetting was a negligible part of the 
cost. We have to pay for copy editing costs, printing, binding, 
mailing, etc. We do little advertising, but advertising is not a 
major item for established journals in any case. Once upon a time 
we got free office space, telephone and mailing privileges and even 
some secretarial services from the university where the editors 
were, but as university budgets have tightened, we have had to 
start paying for these just like any commercial journal. The one 
expense we clearly do not have is a stipend paid the editor-in-
chief. I do not know how much that is, but it cannot be significant 
for a journal that costs $3000 a year and has a subscription base 
of 1000.

So where does all the money go? One answer was supplied by my 
daughter who informs me that her publisher had five levels of 
administrators who had no day-to-day contact with the actual 
publishing, but make decisions increasingly removed from reality 
and draw six or even seven figure salaries. No doubt, the higher 
executives travel first class, or perhaps by corporate jet. By 
contrast, the CMS journals are overseen by a publication committee, 
the executive committee and board of directors of the society and, 
ultimately, the membership, all of whom exercise a very light hand 
and operate gratis. Of course, if societies were to undertake to 
publish dozens of journals, this structure would no longer work. So 
one answer is surely that in academic journal publishing, there are 
few, if any, economies of scale and very serious diseconomies. In 
that case, the fact that publishing is falling into fewer and fewer 
hands is even more disturbing.

The electronic journal I help edit, _Theory and Applications of
Categories_, is free and available to everyone with an internet
connection. We have published only about a dozen papers a year, but 
that's ok; we want to establish a reputation and have it there if 
the other journals fold. I have announced publicly that I will 
neither referee for nor submit papers to high priced commercial 
journals. I quite recently refused to become an editor for a new 
journal that was to have been published by, I think, Birkhaeuser. 
Partly for that reason, the to-be editor decided to make it 
electronic instead. I should add that not all commercial publishers 
are high priced. There are a couple of small publishers that are 
publishing good journals at reasonable prices.

As an author, I am beginning to feel ill-used. I spend the time 
doing the research, writing it up and so on and the journals end up 
owning it. The quid pro quo is forty or fifty "free" reprints? They 
tell us that copyright acts are there to protect intellectual 
property, but they certainly don't protect mine. My interests are 
served by distribution as wide as possible and the publishers' by 
restricting distribution to the few that can still pay for it. For 
the last two papers published in a commercial journal, I altered 
the copyright form to retain the right to post electronically. The 
publisher accepted it, but would they if a large number of authors 
did it? I do know that one colleague of mine got a letter from a 
publisher's lawyer ordering him to remove one of his papers from 
his electronic archive. Actually, it is only in the last 15 or 20 
years that I have been even asked to sign copyright documents; 
perhaps since the 1976 US copyright act. Before that, the issue 
never arose. The CMS journals and the electronic journal I edit ask 
only for a one-time licence.

When you ask what a publisher adds to a publication, there is copy
editing, printing, binding, mailing, subscription servicing and 
maybe a tiny bit of publicity (once the journal is established). I 
think they also add an enormous amount of often useless overhead. 
When published electronically, only the copy-editing remains. Since 
our journal is published free, this is not done in any systematic 
way. It is left to the author and I, on one occasion, returned a 
paper to the author for serious TeX deficiencies. He had to hire 
someone to repair it since he refused to learn enough TeX to do it 
himself. That is unfortunate and I sympathize with him, but think 
of it as a form of page charge. As an editor, I do for free exactly 
what I do for the other two journals for free. The editor-in-chief 
(actually called managing editor) of the electronic journal does 
more. He spends 3-6 hours on each paper and, so long as we have 
only a dozen a year, he does not mind. But he and the other editors 
are aware that there is a serious problem brewing here and we do 
not know what to do about it. The obvious thing would be for the 
universities to take some part of their serials budget and simply 
subsidize these activities that have the potential of enormous 
savings in the long run. But how do you get there from here?

Although this would sap the library's budget, it should not result 
in loss of jobs in the library since exactly the same (or more) 
tasks of storage, archival and retrieval would exist. It would only 
sap the journal acquisitions budget. But what I don't see is how 
the universities could be made to share these costs in an equitable 
fashion. Some would subsidize these electronic journals and others 
would be tempted to sponge off those. This is a problem, but not I 
think an insuperable one.

Why do we publish in journals at all?  In fact, all my papers in 
the last ten years have been distributed electronically and are old 
hat by the time they are published. We all know the answer. For 
promotions and tenure (no longer an issue for me) and research 
grants (I still have a good one and would like to keep it). Thus 
the only real problem is that of certification. And acceptance of 
electronic publication is growing. Note that we did not name our 
journal "Electronic journal .." We decided it would be like naming 
it "The A4 journal of.." In the end, I think there will be good and 
poor electronic journals just as there are good and poor print 
journals. For the time being, however, I am not recommending 
electronic publication for young researchers.

A recent writer to this newsletter made the fatuous suggestion that 
free electronic journals might be violating the anti-trust laws. An 
elephant cannot sue a mouse for anti-trust violations. The anti-
trust laws are not there to guarantee a business success; they are 
there to protect consumers from price gouging by a monopolist. If 
an airline is sued over low prices, it is not the low prices that 
are the ultimate problem but the likelihood that, once the 
competitor is driven out of the market, the price will be raised to 
a much higher level. The history of People's Air shows that this is 
not just a theory. Much as I would like to see some of the 
commercial publishers driven out of business, I know this is not 
likely to happen. Even if did, the publishers of electronic 
journals could not raise prices the way paper journals have since 
the barriers to starting new ones are so low.

Since anti-trust was mentioned, it is a wonder to me that some 
state attorneys-general haven't decided that the journals are 
running a monopolistic business and are engaged in price gouging. 
After all, a significant part of the state universities' budgets 
are going to these publishers. The fact that, as recently pointed 
out in these pages, a few private universities can still afford 
these journals is irrelevant.

But let us engage in some speculation by supposing that it is 
illegal to do work gratis. Then the most guilty are the researchers 
who do the work in the first place and give it away to the 
publishers. Perhaps the publishers ought to be required to pay 
serious money for the rights to publish. It was one thing when the 
major journals were non-profit and were performing a service to the 
profession just by existing. But now it is a big business; why 
should they not pay for their raw materials. Then there is the free 
editorial work. I believe the editors-in-chief do get a significant 
"honorarium." But the remaining editors do not usually get so much 
as a postage stamp. At least, I never have. The authors and editors 
at least get some recognition for their work. What about the 
anonymous referees? Honest refereeing is hard work and there is no 
payoff, either in money or honor. Yet without it the whole system 
would come crashing down. It was done free for the good of the 
profession in the old days, since the journals themselves were non-
profit. When commercial journals came along (which started, at 
least in a big way, in the 1960s), we just went along with free 
refereeing since, it was what we were accustomed to. What would 
have happened if the referees had insisted on being paid? I, for 
one, have just made a personal decision to do no more unpaid 
refereeing for commercially published journals. No decision I have 
ever made in my professional career has been less painful. If more 
of us adopted such a policy, the whole enterprise would collapse. 
Moreover, it would cost us individually nothing since only the 
editors would know. As an editor, I will still ask people to 
referee papers, but if they all refuse, the journal will disappear.

One new feature on the publishing scene is that several of the old 
line journals that used to be published by mathematical societies, 
especially in Europe, have been taken over by commercial houses. I 
assume that the societies sell them for a tidy sum. The price 
usually stays low for a few years and then starts rising often to 
stratospheric heights. My department is likely to stop subscribing 
to the oldest mathematical journal in the world, of which we have a 
complete set. It will be a painful decision, but the journal is 
very expensive and no longer of much importance.

I have not mentioned the actual disparity of costs. I recently
calculated the cost per page, for each of the nearly one hundred
journals we had a paid subscription to in 1996 (we also have a
substantial number of exchange subscriptions, all non-commercial).  
I realize that this is a crude measure, since not all pages are the 
same size. But at least it is better than just looking at 
subscription cost. The costs per page ranged from $.04 to $4.86. If 
you remove the top and bottom ten, the range is $.18 to $1.37, a 
factor of over 7. The journal at $.18 happens to be on anybody's 
list of the top 5 mathematics journals in the world. So does the 
eighth most expensive, which costs $1.51. There is no correlation 
between price and quality. There was one commercial journal at $.38 
and one society published journal at $.75 and they were the 
respective extremes. But every journal that cost more than $.75 (a 
couple of Russian translations excepted) was commercially published 
and everyone below $.38 was published by a society or a university. 
The figures show that some of the top journals in the world are 
among the cheapest. Unfortunately, a couple of the top journals are 
among the most expensive and this will be our most difficult 
decision as we have to cut about 10% from our budget, while prices 
are estimated to rise 13% besides (part of that due to exchange 
rate fluctuations).


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About a journal policy: "Cahiers de Top. et Geom. Diff. Categoriques"

[Andree Ehresmann]

As the publisher of the non-commercial category-theoretic Journal

"Cahiers de Topologie et Geometrie Differentielle Categoriques" 

I have read with interest Michael Barr's Newsletter on Serials Pricing and
the following postings on the subject. I would like to add some information
on the "effective" cost of publishing, and also answer a question of Tom
Leinster which could be of interest to the authors who have published or
want to publish in the "Cahiers".

The "Cahiers" have been created by Charles Ehresmann about 40 years ago.
>From 1967 to 1972, they were printed and distributed by the commercial
editor Dunod. When Dunod merged with Bordas, he refused to go on because
there was no "profit".

At that time Charles and I decided to undertake the publication ourselves,
and since the death of my husband in 1979, I assume this job alone. I have
no support nor material help whatsoever from any institution. If the
address is at the Faculte de Mathematique of the Universite de Picardie, it
is just because it is my own professional address. 

As many people of this category list know, to avoid typesetting problems,
after the papers have been refereed and accepted, authors are required to
send me laser printed copies of the papers in a specific format, to which I
add the title, name of authors, headings and page numbers. 
I give the so prepared volume to a (commercial) printer who prints and
binds it. The mailing of the issues as well as the handling of
subscriptions is done by myself.

The only resources come from the subscriptions (almost all from foreign
universities, of which about 100 in the USA). For this year, the price is
460 Francs for 320 pages; thus, depending on the dollar rate, it amounts to
less than 0.20 $ for a page. This price is fixed so that if just covers the
printing and mailing costs, and a small part of the material costs (printer
ink, computer,...). 

The "Cahiers" have some exchange with "TAC" since each year "TAC" contents
are published in the second issue of the "Cahiers" volume, while "Cahiers"
contents are mailed to this category list.

Now an answer to Tom Leinster who asks:
> What I'd like to find is that it is actually possible to publish in
respected
>journals while keeping my papers free to whoever wants them.  
>So my first question is: which journals have enlightened policies?  

I don't know if the "Cahiers" are "respected". But I can assert that my
policy is to allow the authors to keep their papers free to whoever wants
them. Indeed, the papers can be freely posted in any electronic archive
(with  reference to the volume where they are published) and/or
photocopied, if the 50 reprints I send free are not sufficient. 

Any suggestion to make the "Cahiers" more useful to the category community
will be appreciated.

			Andree C. Ehresmann

Re: About a journal policy: "Cahiers de Top. et Geom. Diff. Categoriques"

[Eduardo Dubuc]

   I take this opportunity to thank Andree C. Ehresmann for all she has
done and is still doing in order to keep the "Cahiers" going and in good
health. The contribution of the cahiers to the category theory community
is inmense, and even more was so during all those years when there was not
electronic printing. We all in this community have a great debt to Mme
Andree, and I feel we should let her know explicitly how important her
work has been and still is.
   Personally, every time I have to reference a good article, I never
remember in which journal it was published, except if it was the
cahiers. It may be that the cahiers is close to my heart. 
   Good job Andree, and keep going ...
                                              Eduardo J. Dubuc

Re: journal boycott

[Paul Taylor]

I completely agree with the views about commercial journals in
 - Mike Barr's article in the "Newsletter on serials pricing issues" (29 May),
 - Peter Johnstone's resignation letter as an editor of JPAA         (15 Jan),
 - James Meek's article ("Guardian", 26 May) on the cost of journals (28 May).
                                   (The dates refer to "categories" postings.)

As Mike Barr pointed out, but James Meek seems not to know, the
journals no longer do the work of typesetting papers, so in the Web
age the commercial publishers do NOTHING AT ALL.

Without meaning to diminish my agreement that we should stop giving
our research and our institutions' money to the commercial publishers,
I would like to be "advocatus diaboli" on an issue of management.

My question is this:
      Is a commercial (or university) publisher, being outside the
      academic community, better able to deal with complaints against
      editors than an academic managing editor can be?  An academic 
      editor is subject to other pressures, which may be summed up as "not
      falling out with colleagues", whereas a commercial manager can be
       more ruthless in enforcing the rules.

I am thinking of complaints of a management rather than intellectual
nature, of course. For example, failing to pass papers from authors to
referees and the referees' reports back again within a reasonable time.

(This has been a real issue for me, but I have no intention of naming
names.   I would like to see a discussion of professional standards
of editing and refereeing sometime, but not on THIS occasion.)

The kind of answer that I'm looking for would be an (anonymised) 
account of some incident where a commercial publisher has dealt with
a complaint better or worse than an academic managing editor would.

Paul

Re: Journal boycott

[Tom Leinster]

[Note from moderator: This and one further posting address the issue in
the subject heading. The items from Peter Freyd and Michael Barr were
posted for information, but the subject is not directly relevant.  Please
send replies for T. Leinster and P. Taylor directly to them rather than
the list.]

I'm writing to seek suggestions. 

I'd very much like to sign the boycott letter mentioned in the article
forwarded by Peter Freyd (relevant bits quoted below).  More generally, I'd
prefer to avoid perpetuating the more exploitative aspects of commercial
publication.

But I'm not going to sign the letter just yet.  This is because it seems that
if I commit myself to only publishing in "enlightened" journals then my
options will be severely restricted, to the extent that it might harm my
future job prospects.  Unfortunately, it's a sacrifice I'm not quite willing
to make.

What I'd like to find is that it is actually possible to publish in respected
journals while keeping my papers free to whoever wants them.  So my first
question is: which journals have enlightened policies?  I know about TAC, and
I've seen the list (http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/journals) of journals which
accept submission direct from the electronic archive (and so, presumably, are
happy for the papers they publish to be freely available).  What other
enlightened publications - especially category-theoretic - are there?

Mike Barr's article also mentioned copyright agreements, and I'd be
interested to know of other people's experiences with this.  Which journals
are happy for you to retain copyright of your papers, or for you to modify
the agreement so that you at least retain the right to make your own work
electronically available?  And how exactly do you make these modifications
(e.g. wording)?  Is it perhaps easier just to sign the agreement but post it
electronically anyway, and hope no-one notices?  (I would have imagined
this perfectly safe except for a certain experience of a colleague.)

Well, I'm eager to hear of positive experiences...

Thanks,

Tom Leinster


> Science world in revolt at power of the journal owners 

[...]

> 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.

[see http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org ]

Journal boycott

[Peter Freyd]

[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