Issues in Scholarly Communication is a newsletter produced by Paula Kaufman, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, for the Illinois community. Entries from 2001-2005 newsletter are available.
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By Peter Suber
Cati Vanden Breul, "U libraries confront higher journal costs", Minnesota Daily, April 20, 2005. Excerpt: 'In order to provide students and faculty with access to published research, the University subscribes to thousands of scholarly journals, some of which cost up to $20,000 a year per subscription. Because of the increasing cost of these journals, the University has been forced to cancel approximately 2,000 subscriptions in the last two years alone, said Wendy Lougee, director of the University Libraries....Part of the problem, Lougee said, is that publishers are making large profits by charging authors thousands of dollars to print their research and then making the public pay an additional fee to read it....Taxpayers also lose out, because their money funds the research in the first place, but most cannot afford to read the results, Lougee said. For this reason, the National Institutes of Health have encouraged researchers who receive funding through the institutes to make their research accessible to the public online for free in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, Lougee said....But publishing online presents a problem for some researchers, because to receive tenure, professors need to be published in prestigious journals, [Stephen] Ekker [professor of genetics] said. "The reality is that when you are a researcher or an educational scholar, your scientific credentials are largely judged by what kind of publications you generate," he said. Ekker said he hopes open-access publications, those freely available to the public, will soon be seen as more credible. Charlotte Tschider, a University of Minnesota graduate student, said researchers should not have to pay journals to print their work. "I don’t think that’s fair," Tschider said.'
(PS: Quick response from Peter Suber to Stephen Ekker: You can publish in any prestigious journal that will accept your work and still have OA. If the journal is not itself OA, then you can deposit a copy of your article in an OA repository. Quick response to Charlotte Tschider: You've been hearing the misinformation that OA journals use an "author pays" model. When OA journals charge author-side fees, they are usually paid by the author's funding agency or employer, or waived, not paid by the author out of pocket. And most OA journals don't charge author-side fees at all.)
Posted by at June 22, 2005 6:21 PM
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