[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: This is a memo from our Provost about the rising cost of electronic journals.

[Jan Turbill]

You can add Wiley to this lot too. The trouble is these publishers have us over a barrel, particularly in Australia. While I no longer worry about publishing in journals any more, our academics must. Not only must they care, they need to publish in what we refer to here as A stared journals - most of which are now punished by these publishers. This past week I attended one the Faculty of Business’s school meeting. The Head of School, made it very clear to staff that if they want promotion at any level, they need to publish their research in A journals. The Faculty’s publishing rates are down on last year, and this too is a black mark or the Faculty. So the push for publish or perish is even stronger than ever, and the ranking level of the journal matters.

Many of the journals published by professional associations do not make the rankings at all!!

Language Arts for instance is one such journal. It may be read by many teachers and have impact but not a journal ranking.

Publishers are aware of these requirements I dare say, so they figure the more they charge, the higher they will be ranked. Now I may not have this totally correct, however it certainly something I have seen happening slowly and surely in Australia.

Jan

On 9 Feb 2018, at 6:23 am, Colin Harrison <Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Colin.Harrison at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:

Amen, David.

I used to chair my university’s Library Committee, and even many years ago our spending on journals far outstripped that on books.

Do universities have the clout to take on Elvesier (which has a higher profit margin than Apple) and the other publishing giants (who are now often owned by investment companies, not people in publishing)?

Well, in the Netherlands they tried it in 2015:  “At the moment, the Netherlands, the whole country, has said to Elsevier that we want all of our researchers to be able to publish open access in your journals at the same rates we would pay for a subscription last year and if you can’t do that we’re going to cancel every one of your journals, for all of our universities nationwide,” says Eve. “They have a few days left to resolve this, and it looks like they are going to cancel all the Elsevier journals.” [https://tinyurl.com/yczzx2t8]

If universities, particularly the big hitters, act together, my guess is that they can make an impact. And if universities decide to set up independent mirror-journals, and the editorial boards all resign and work on the new journals, the costs (yes- the real, total costs, including staff time and servers, etc) can be 50% less [https://tinyurl.com/yczzx2t8].

¡A las barricadas!

Best regards

Colin

p.s.  The idea that a Legal Deposit Library (such as the Library of Congress, or the Bodleian at Oxford) holds all knowledge can no longer be sustained, because of the proliferation of open access journals (10,000+), not to mention the 2400+ fake ‘pay -to–publish’ journals that our poor students keep stumbling over [see my blog post on 'Un-publication: ‘Fake journals’ and the dark side of open-access publication (for the desperate, for crackpots and for the naïve)’ at http://colinharrison83.tumblr.com/].



From: <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>> on behalf of P Pearson <ppearson at berkeley.edu<mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu>>
Date: Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 18:13
To: "reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>" <reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] This is a memo from our Provost about the rising cost of electronic journals.

I think that this development within the publishing industry--and we see it with Sage, Elvesier, Taylor and Francis in our own field--will eventually drive academia into some sort of low cost electronic publishing enterprise of its own. After all, we do the research, write the manuscripts, edit the journals, and assign the readings.  And the publishers are capitalizing on a lot of free labor only to charge us, the producers, exorbitant rates that far exceed production costs.

Note that the more journals we start (in order to accommodate more publications by ourselves) the more we contribute to the problem. It is little wonder then that many faculty and students try to beat the system with bootleg distribution of articles.  But then again, that just motivates publishers to jack up the prices even more.

Whoever said that academics were not naive?
****************
From our UCB provost:

Colleagues,

The University Library is undertaking a $1 million reduction in expenditures to purchase or license scholarly resources.  We would like to explain why, and then seek your participation in the process.

For many years, market power in the scholarly publishing industry has been increasing.  As a consequence, the price of scholarly resources has been increasing faster than general inflation: in recent years, journal and monograph prices at a rate of 3-5% per year.  In addition, journal publishers are proliferating the number of journals published, many of inferior quality.  The combined effect is a persistent and rapid increase in the cost of scholarly resources.  We cannot spend an ever increasing share of campus funds on journals and books unless we are willing to spend less in other areas (such as faculty compensation).  Harvard University described this as an “untenable situation” and “fiscally unsustainable” in 2012.  Berkeley is in no better position.  Thus, we continuously review, and necessarily reduce our licensing of journals and acquisition of books.

To complicate matters, in the past year, like all units across campus, the Library faced a sizable cut in campus funds.

The $1 million reduction in licensing and acquisitions is a necessary response to the combination of the ongoing exploitation by publishers, and the current year’s permanent reduction in campus funding.

A call for comment, issued by the University Library, encourages all interested parties to carefully review a list of proposed serial cancellations and to share comments and recommendations. (For more information see the Library’s guide<http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/c.php?g=706910&p=5020003> and savings proposal<http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarly-resources/proposed-savings>.) The proposed cancellations were identified after careful evidence-based balancing of needs and costs. The comment per iod is open through Friday, April 6. We invite you to submit comments via email to scholarly-resources at lists.berkeley.edu<mailto:scholarly-resources at lists.berkeley.edu> or directly with your subject librarian<http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/help/subject-specialists>.

The Library regrets that it must implement this reduction. Providing access to scholarly resources is one of the Library’s core services, but the sequence of recent budget cuts and cost increases have necessitated reductions in all of its core services. The Library will continue to serve campus as a public good that benefits the entire Berkeley community — connecting researchers with an impressive breadth and depth of materials.

--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
P. David Pearson
Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Professor of Instructional Science
and Professor of the Graduate School
Graduate School of Education
5645 Tolman Hall #1670
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Jan Turbill PhD
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