October 3rd, 2003

Newsletter Archives

Rethinking Scholarly Communication

Richard Wood

I wish to address the "formal" or traditional system of scholarly communication that is best characterized as the peer-reviewed journal subscription model. Although it remains the primary process by which scholars create, evaluate, and disseminate their works, advances in technology make it possible to solve what many critics see as a crisis in scholarly communication. The problems are as follows:

1. The number of scholarly and scientific journal titles published continues to increase annually and now totals roughly 30,000. No academic library, however, can keep up with either the demand for new titles or with their inflationary cost that, for decades, has been at least two times the consumer price index (CPI).
2. Library subscription costs severely limit access, especially to expensive titles critical to the research of faculty. The journal publishing industry is dominated by a few large international conglomerates such as Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer of Amsterdam, BertelsmannSpringer of Germany, and Blackwell Publishing of England. Their stranglehold on academic libraries results in obscene subscription costs whereby one title can cost a library thousands of dollars. One subscription (Brain Research) exceeds $20,000. These publishers claim the reason is the high cost of peer review, editing, mailing, and book reviews to name a few.
3. Journal publishers also use the Internet to increase profits by selling both electronic full-text (article level) access and print subscriptions. Licensing terms usually require libraries to maintain the print subscriptions (or equivalent cost) and pay a surcharge for Internet access by students and faculty. The costliest titles and databases—frequently the least used scholarly titles—are normally the first to be considered for cuts when libraries face significant budget reductions. The cost of both electronic database licenses and print subscriptions, however, increases annually at a rate that exceeds the CPI, or net library materials budget increase.
4. Libraries licensing full-text databases to satisfy demand for remote access may find their costs so high that they must also be cut. Because Alabama is experiencing a statewide budget deficit, Alabama academic library directors foresee the need to cut low demand databases, as well as journal subscriptions. Low use, high dollar databases are likely targets.
   
5. Publishers limit Internet access by means of licensing and permission terms, as well as technology. Publishers can use password protection software, new operating systems, and restrictions on the number of simultaneous users, annual maintenance fees, new digital formats, and other means to limit access to their content. If publishers or providers fail to upgrade their Internet servers to accommodate increased demand, response time (access) suffers. Libraries and users are at the mercy of the providers.
   

It is clear that the traditional model of journal publishing is not working for either libraries or scholars. This model seems to be particularly unfair because taxpayers who often fund the research of authors (faculty/scholars working in public institutions of higher education) have to pay again to obtain copies of the research. Because most publishers have little incentive to change the peer reviewed journal model, faculty/scholars must be willing to accept new models.

Several successful initiatives do offer hope that academia can buy into recent efforts to an "open access" model for digital articles. The speed of publishing an open-access journal can be reduced from over a year in the traditional model to a little over one-month from submission. Libraries do not pay for subscriptions because readers have free access through the Internet to the research their taxes helped to fund. "Issues" and "volumes" are, moreover, vestiges of the print model and are not essential to digital publications.

Successful models include the following:

• The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and SPARC Europe are partnerships among hundreds of research universities and libraries whose goal is to produce high-quality, peer-reviewed journals on an open access basis within the worldwide academic community itself. SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc) costs are reduced significantly by using advances in computer and telecommunication technologies to produce, review, archive, and disseminate articles online among authors, reviewers, and readers.
• The National Library of Medicine publishes medical articles from the thousands of professionally recognized and peer-reviewed journals and makes them easily available for free through PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/).
• The Public Library of Science, or PloS, (http://publiclibraryofscience.org ) uses a new business model that regards the cost of publication as part of the cost of research.
• D-Space (http://dspace.org) is for the output of MIT’s faculty and researchers.
• BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent publisher of peer-reviewed journals in biology and medicine. The titles are archived and also published in PubMed. BMC imposes a processing charge for submitted articles in return for immediate, open, and permanent free access.

If enough scholars across the world use such electronic alternatives to traditional peer reviewed journals, I believe that the competition will result in fewer, more affordable print subscriptions for libraries to acquire, as well as far greater scholarly communication. Acceptance by faculty may be slow, I realize, because these new models change the peer review process and may shift more of the onus for peer review to the local university promotions and tenure committees. Nonetheless, faculty support for PloS, BMC, D-Space, SPARC and similar initiatives will be appreciated.