In a letter circulated last month that made headlines in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Scientist, the San Francisco Chronicle and beyond, UC San Francisco scientists Keith Yamamoto and Peter Walter urged researchers to essentially boycott some of the most prestigious journals in molecular biology.
The exposure has caused a rippling effect across UC. And though Yamamoto's and Walter's letter directly targeted a small group of online journals, the action has helped catalyze an awareness about a larger issue -- how escalating journal subscription prices are threatening access to research information.
The issue comes to campus Nov. 18 when Director of the California Digital Library Daniel Greenstein talks at Shields Library. The CDL negotiates journal contracts for UC, and Greenstein has been visiting UC campuses to talk about access to electronic journals in an era when budgets are decreasing and the prices charged by journal publishers are on the rise.
Ironically, the journals wouldn't exist without university researchers' assistance.
Yamamoto and Walter have asked colleagues to stop submitting articles, to refuse to review manuscripts and to resign from editorial boards of journals that make up Cell Press -- including Cell, Molecular Cell, Developmental Cell, Cancer Cell, Immunity and Neuron. British-Dutch conglomerate Reed Elsevier is charging exorbitant fees for online access, the UC scientists say.
"Cell Press is breaking an unwritten contract with the scientific community: being a publisher of our research carries the responsibility to make our contributions publicly available at reasonable rates," Yamamoto and Walter wrote. "As an academic community, it is time that we reassert our values. We can all think of better ways to spend our time than providing free services to support a publisher that values profit above its academic mission."
Currently the California Digital Library is involved with two separate negotiations with Reed Elsevier -- one of which is regarding Cell Press, for which the publisher is asking more than $90,000 annually. But that negotiation has been put on the back-burner, says Greenstein, until a separate negotiation with Elsevier for ScienceDirect -- a package of 1,200 online journals including premier titles like The Lancet, Brain Research and Nuclear Physics B -- can be agreed upon.
The university now pays about $8 million a year for ScienceDirect access. Elsevier has announced that its average pricing increase for its journals for 2004 is 6.5 percent.
"The hope is that Elsevier will ultimately take the offer we've made for a five-year contract and the security it represents, rather than the insecurity and the unknown of dealing independently with the campuses for print," Greenstein said. "It's not a good situation. It's not a happy situation. But it is the situation," he recently told an audience at UCLA during what began as an Academic Senate Committee on Library meeting. The topic generated so much interest that Senate Chair Clifford Brunk opened the Oct. 14 talk to all faculty.
Similarly, at UC Santa Cruz, the senate's library committee has passed a resolution urging tenured faculty to sever ties with Elsevier if the publisher cannot work with the university to reach an acceptable agreement regarding ScienceDirect online.
The matter also has gone to the UC Council of Chancellors, which has agreed not to negotiate individually with Elsevier as long as the company fails to come to terms on a systemwide agreement.
As the situation resonates at campus levels, it has generated "vigorous discussion" and "an enormous amount of interest, outrage and e-mail," Greenstein said. "We're into the period where we're recognizing the dimension of the problem," he said. "The key, to me, is that faculty are beginning to engage."
Libraries can play "a very supportive role" in negotiating pricing and in promoting the structures to provide access, Greenstein said. But faculty awareness is essential. "In the short term, libraries have to continue to get access to titles. But we're kind of a middleman in this. In the longer term, we need faculty to recognize that faculty are the key to the solution."
'An impossible situation even in good times'
The high cost is not just a problem because of California's slumped economy, Greenstein said, though rapid inflation of serial costs can, of course, be more easily absorbed in more robust times. Ultimately, though, there is a growing crisis at hand that will continue even after the economy improves -- unless there is a shift, Greenstein said.
"This would be an impossible situation even in good times," he said.
UC libraries devote about a third, or $20 million, of their UC library materials expenditures to publisher journal packages. To save money, UC libraries historically have used two strategies. The first, deep resource sharing, involves pooling UC's resources and buying power. This has meant designating the CDL to help UC libraries act together to acquire digital information.
Also, by pursuing multi-year contracts and securing annual price increase caps, UC has saved millions of dollars and has been successful in increasing digital information access, said Lawrence Pitts, chair of the Academic Council of the UC Academic Senate, in an Oct. 15 letter he penned and circulated with the support of UC's librarians.
The letter outlined ways campus scholars can help.
"Many of you are editors of journals from these and other publishers that may be affected. We're asking you, if the opportunity arises, to discuss these broader issues of fair and reasonable pricing for electronic access with your personal contacts at publishing companies. With a unified voice, we are hopeful of maintaining content at affordable cost."
"Should any of these systemwide publisher contracts not be renewed, each campus library will have to negotiate its own electronic and print subscriptions, thus reverting to circumstances dependent entirely on campus collection budgets," Pitts also noted. While this would allow more campus flexibility to meet local needs under current budgets, in many cases the result will be a reduction in overall journal access, he said.
An expanding assortment of alternatives also may help ease the problem and force a new standard of "open public access" to research, much of which is funded by taxpayer dollars.
For instance, last month a nonprofit venture called the Public Library of Science launched the Public Library of Science Biology. It's the first of two new peer-reviewed journals that will be made freely available online. The second, Public Library of Science Medicine, is expected to become available next year. Print versions of both will be available for a subscription fee.
During his Nov. 18 talk, Greenstein also will discuss UC's eScholarship Repository, a self-archiving resource being used by faculty to share and deposit digital research results.
The talk will start at 2 p.m. in the Nelle Branch Room on the library's second floor. For more details about journal access, see http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly/ or http:// libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/negotiations.html.