<nettime> Revolt of authors for science journals

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

     [via <tbyfield@panix.com>]

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4193292,00.html>

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

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net