Universities are reconsidering whether to pay the soaring subscription costs charged by publishers for electronic access to their traditional journals, or instead to explore the growth of new types of online scholarly publishing.
That was the message delivered Nov. 18 when Beverlee French from the California Digital Library spoke to faculty members at UC Davis' Shields Library. More than 80 researchers gathered for the discussion led by French, the deputy university librarian for the California Digital Library, which supports all the UC system libraries.
"The costs have become outrageous," said Marilyn Sharrow, the university librarian for UC Davis, in introducing French. "We have to change this."
French explained that in some cases libraries are spending five times what they used to for the same amount of journal content. The crisis is especially severe in the sciences and engineering, which saw journal prices tripling and quadrupling between 1998 and 2002, a time when the Consumer Price Index rose only 10 percent.
"The way we create, publish and consume research information has become very expensive," French said.
The good news, however, she said, is that the UC has leverage in its vast size and that publishing alternatives are beginning to emerge. The university is currently negotiating subscription costs with Elsevier, one of the largest journal publishers in the world. French said the Netherlands-based company enjoyed a 43 percent profit increase last year, based largely on its journal market.
"We have some bargaining clout by acting together as a system," said French, who noted that the UC system, and not individual campuses, could present a united front in dealing with Elsevier contract issues. "We have offered less money than Elsevier is used to taking."
She said that Elsevier's initial offer would be a 37 percent cumulative increase over journal costs in the last five years. The university now pays about $8 million a year for Elsevier's ScienceDirect online database, which represents more than 1,100 journals. In October, two UC San Francisco professors urged researchers to boycott -- due to these increased costs -- several Elsevier journals in molecular biology.
To save money, French said, UC libraries have historically pooled UC's considerable resources -- "deep resource sharing" -- and allowed the California Digital Library to help acquire digital information on a system-wide basis. Another strategy has been the use of multi-year contracts and annual- price-increase caps with publishers.
Also, French said librarians are seeking feedback from faculty members on developing and supporting new models of scholarly publishing that cut the costs of distributing and retrieving information.
"We may be in a transition period," she said. "There may be many other alternatives."
She noted that eScholarship Editions, a California Digital Library program, has completed a project to electronically publish nearly 1,400 UC Press books, making it the world's largest collection of university press electronic books.
French suggested that researchers should strive to manage their intellectual property and decide which publishing organizations they will review, edit and write for. When signing a publishing contract, she noted, a faculty member can choose whether to assign the publisher copyright or decide to hold on to the right to distribute their research in electronic form.
Bruce Madewell, professor and chair of the Academic Senate at UC Davis, said library collections are essential for teaching and research, and that the unusually high costs of the Elsevier journals are difficult to manage even without a state and university budget shortfall.
Faculty members are interested in changes, he added.
"There is some sentiment that the Elsevier contract, and perhaps those from other major publishers, should be reconsidered to allow purchase of only the important journals within the costly bundles, omitting some of the less popular subscriptions," Madewell said.
Kyaw Tha Paw U, professor and secretary of the Academic Senate, suggests some bold reforms in the review process of scholarship publishing might be worth discussing.
"A radical but very unpopular system would be to dispense with peer review entirely, but then the concepts of quality control would abound. So although this would be almost instant dissemination with zero delay, most scientists would be too conservative to consider this seriously," Paw U said.
Faculty members often submit their research and articles very inexpensively, or often for free, to scholarly journals, but libraries must buy access to these journals at four- or five-digit prices.