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PRICEY PILE: Keller examines
recent issues of about one-fourth of Stanford’s
Reed Elsevier subscriptions. The University pays
about $1.2 million annually for 400 titles from
the publishing giant.
Linda Cicero |
Biochemistry professor
Doug Brutlag carries his file cabinets with him wherever
he goes, easily storing 15 years’ worth of scientific
papers on his Apple PowerBook. “I’ve downloaded
PDF versions of papers from online journals, and I can
read them anytime, and cut and paste them—things
I could never do with a hard copy.”
Stanley Falkow, a professor of microbiology and immunology
and of medicine, says his graduate students and postdocs
take the same approach. This new generation of researchers
is “attuned to electronic access to journals,
and they want it immediately,” Falkow says. “And
that’s where a lot of pressure comes from at the
institution.”
Falkow and Brutlag, PhD ’72, are keen observers
of what has come to be known on campuses nationwide
as the “serials crisis.” These ultraspecialized
publications, which go by such titles as the Journal
of Applied Polymer Science and the Journal
of Comparative Neurology, are the lifeblood of
the academy. Having a paper published in one counts
heavily in promotion and tenure decisions. “Our
survival, our progress—everything on which we’re
evaluated—comes from our publications,”
says biological sciences professor Robert Simoni.
As students and faculty have traded library forays
for digitized articles in recent years, for-profit publishers
have raised the prices they charge universities for
online subscriptions. The publishers “bundle”
print and electronic subscriptions together and require
institutions to pay what Simoni calls a “very
substantial surcharge” for the online versions.
Some publishers also bundle lesser-known journals with
their most prestigious title, forcing libraries to buy
a passel of periodicals they don’t necessarily
want.
“The thing that pains me most is that when we
first started talking about electronic publishing, the
notion was to save money,” Simoni adds. “But
it ended up being an opportunity for many publishers—maybe
most—to enhance their revenues.”
The leading biomedical journal, Cell, for
example, costs an individual $159 annually. But in December
2002, the University was quoted a price of $47,000 for
a Cell “package” that would have
included both print and online subscriptions to the
biweekly Cell and to eight other journals published
by Reed Elsevier, which dominates the “STM”—science,
technical and medical—journal market. Stanford
Libraries turned down the offer. Lane Medical Library
does subscribe to a group of five journals that includes
Cell, but cannot disclose the cost.
By contrast, professional nonprofit societies of, say,
chemists and computer scientists, publish scholarly
journals at significantly lower, break-even costs. An
annual subscription to print and electronic versions
of the American Journal of Botany, one of the
most highly cited journals in its field, costs $395—with
no bundles attached.
A spokesperson for Elsevier says the company “wants
our customers to be happy” and has asked for a
meeting with officials at Stanford. Eric Merkel-Sobotta,
director of corporate relations, says Elsevier “loathes”
the claim that the company bundles journals, “because
we don’t do it.” Like many scientific journals,
he adds, “Cell started off as one physical
magazine, and over the years split into several, all
of which are related.” Merkel-Sobotta compares
subscriptions to multiple, related publications to a
popular Sunday supplement. “No matter how much
you like the New York Times Magazine, you cannot
subscribe to it separately [from the newspaper].”
At a time when their budget is being reduced by two
or three percent each year, and the cost of many journals
is rising by 10 percent annually, University librarians
are trying to weed out titles that get little use. Last
year, the science and technology libraries cancelled
489 titles for a savings of $504,000; cancellations
over the previous three years netted $854,000 in savings.
“Stanford has a very lean list of serial subscriptions,
and every cancellation now is painful,” says University
librarian Michael Keller.
Given Elsevier’s prominence in the sciences,
Stanford continues to subscribe to 400 of the 1,700
journals the company publishes, at a cost of about $1.2
million per year. The periodicals account for less than
2 percent of the libraries’ 28,000 subscriptions,
but represent roughly 20 percent of the annual journal
budget of about $6 million. A handful of universities—the
University of California system, Cornell, Duke, Harvard,
MIT and North Carolina State—have begun to resist
the company’s pricing strategies by canceling
subscriptions and renegotiating contracts with Elsevier.
In February, Stanford took the fight in a new direction.
The Faculty Senate approved a resolution that encourages
faculty and University libraries to support “affordable”
scholarly journals. It calls on the libraries to refuse
bundled subscription plans and to scrutinize the pricing
of for-profit journals in general, and “those
published by Elsevier in particular.” Finally,
the four-part resolution encourages senior faculty to
stop writing for or reviewing articles in journals that
“engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing.”
Some senior faculty have already taken action on their
own. Falkow, a former president of the 40,000-member
American Society for Microbiology, stopped reviewing
articles for a journal that was acquired by Elsevier
four years ago. “Their response [was] to imply
that I am senile!” he told the Faculty Senate.
Donald Knuth, a professor emeritus of computer science,
says he and the entire editorial board of the Journal
of Algorithms voted to resign from that Elsevier
publication because “we came to the unanimous
conclusion that it was wrong to continue the way we
were going.” He will help launch a new scholarly
journal, ACM Transactions on Algorithms, within
the next few months.
Elsevier’s Merkel-Sobotta says there are still
“quite a number of editorial board members at
Stanford.” He adds, “I understand that a
lot of people who, for political reasons, were not very
active in the Faculty Senate meeting [when the resolution
was approved] are quite horrified.” STANFORD
e-mailed the 32 senate members in science, technology
and medicine. Of the 27 who replied, only two reported
any qualms with the resolution. Professor of medicine
Andrew Hoffman, who serves on the editorial board of
Elsevier’s American Journal of Medicine,
says he has reservations about the portion that calls
on senior faculty not to work on high-priced journals,
but did not attend the senate meeting when the resolution
was approved. Statistics professor David Siegmund says
he “would have preferred a resolution that did
not single out Elsevier, since they are only the largest
and most visible, but by no means the only, culprit.”
Resistance is being waged on another front by proponents
of “open access” publishing, which eschews
subscription fees and instead charges authors for the
cost of producing their articles—typically around
$1,500. Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and fellow
scientists Harold Varmus and Mike Eisen believe that
published work should be freely available online (Farm
Report, January/February 2003). Last October, their
nonprofit Public Library of Science launched the first
issue of PLoS Biology. On the day it debuted,
the website had 500,000 hits.
Although Keller argues that traditional publishing
may be threatened by the open-access movement, he agrees
that the marketplace is “now tingling with challenges
and possibilities.” As he reads the typographical
tea leaves, he’s got his hands full. “Stanford’s
research interests are constantly changing,” he
says. “And we have to provide information before
the scientists and other scholars here know they need
it. We’re trying to work in anticipation, but
it gets harder and harder.”
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