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The Economics of Scholarly Communication
A Scholarly Communication Issues & Outreach ToolkitAUDIENCE: Provided by the UC Libraries Scholarly Communication Officers Group for librarians who want to provide information to faculty authors on the economics of scholarly communication.
PURPOSE: a) To deepen the reader's understanding of the economics of scholarly communication; b) for use and adaptation in outreach and education efforts.
See sections below:
Talking Points for Discussion with Faculty
WHY: Why should faculty care about the economics of scholarly publishing?
- Egregious and rising prices of scholarly journals place a barrier between faculty work and their potential readers, putting research and teaching at risk.
- Reasonable and sustainable pricing makes faculty research and scholarship affordable to readers and libraries alike, maximizing their work's potential reach and thereby maximizing its impact. (More readers, more impact.)
- Unsustainable economics in scholarly communication impacts all disciplines. High serials inflation rate for STM publications negatively impacts the overall acquisition of monographs and other serials to meet the teaching and research needs of campuses.
- Sustainable pricing in the publishing marketplace supports the free flow of ideas leading to the greater good within the academic community and society.
- Libraries have addressed these economic issues and attained efficiencies (e.g. duplicate format serials projects), yet face continuing journal cancellations unless further steps and actions can be taken to create an economically sustainable environment.
WHAT: What factors cause economic unsustainability?
- The cost of scholarly publications is (and has been) rising at rates that are several times higher than inflation.
- Print materials that used to be one-time costs are now available online, but often as recurring costs that inflate every year.
- Significant price increases in journals every year decrease the purchasing power of libraries overall.
- The number of new journals published every year is increasing.
- Mergers and acquisitions between various companies have contributed to market dominance and inflation on serials prices.
Taking and Supporting Action: Suggestions for Faculty
| ACTION | TOOL(S) TO HELP |
|---|
| Boycott unreasonably expensive journals: Examine the pricing and licensing agreements of journals you contribute to as an author, reviewer, or editor. We help you do that with price and use data about many journals in our publisher and journal profiles. If possible, refuse to contribute to or edit for journals from publishers who practice "predatory pricing. |
Publisher and journal profiles |
| Contribute to journals with reasonable business models: Support open access publishers and reasonably priced non-profit publishers by submitting papers to them instead of to costly commercial journals. If you are an editor of an expensive journal, consider moving your journal to a different publisher. | Directory of Open Access Journals: | | Talk about publishing issues with your society: Encourage your scholarly society to maintain reasonable prices for its journals. If your association contracts its publications to commercial publishers, suggest alternatives such as moving to a non-profit publisher. Discuss ways to support society activities from creative sources other than escalating subscription prices, which become unsustainable for library budgets |
UC Libraries' Scholarly Communication Officer's Group on The Role of Scholarly Societies in Scholarly Communication
Create Change: Sample Letters for faculty to send to journals
Open access policies by learned societies and professional associations |
| Use, promote, and cite journals that commit to reasonable pricing practices: Consult a list of publishers committed to fair pricing and copyright policies at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) web site. |
SPARC web site |
| Examine the ideas and experiments in open access: Open access can be a confusing term, referring to both a goal (achieving unfettered access to scholarship regardless of the underlying means to support publishing and access) and, in some cases, a business model that achieves unfettered access (moving the source of supporting revenues from subscriptions to read the publications to charges levied for publishing). The SPARC open access newsletter, compiled by Peter Suber of Earlham College, includes a well-written overview of open access. |
SPARC open access newsletter
Open Access overview |
| Use open access repositories: Thousands of articles are available, and more than 200 UC departments and research units already participate in UC's eScholarship Repository. eScholarship is only one of a rapidly expanding set of institutional and disciplinary repositories. The contents of these repositories are made available through library databases and web services such as Google and OAIster. | eScholarship Repository
Google
OAIster |
References
Readings
- Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California. Reshaping Scholarly Communication [HTML]
- Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries [HTML]
- Graph of Monograph and Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries, 1986-2004 [PDF]
- ARL Scholarly Communication - Libraries in the Marketplace [HTML]
- Bergstrom, Ted and Preston McAfee: Journal Cost Effectiveness Statistics [HTML]
- Library Journal. Periodical Price Survey [HTML]
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Collection. About SPARC [HTML]
- Wellcome Trust. Economic Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing [HTML]
Reusable Handouts & Brochures
- UCSF - Reshaping Scholarly Communication brochure [PDF]
- Create Change Brochure [PDF]
- Sticker Shock: The Price of Library Resources (UCSF) [HTML]
- Sticker Shock: The Rising Costs of Scientific Journals (Cornell) [HTML]
Faculty resolutions about unsustainable economics
- University of California Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC). Resolution I: The University's Role in Fostering Positive Change in Scholarly Communication [HTML]
- Suber, Peter: University actions for open access or against high journal prices [HTML]
People
The following scholars are among those who have thought deeply and written about the economics of scholarly communication, and their publications serve as additional resource materials:
- Ted Bergstrom, Professor of Economics, UC Santa Barbara
- R. Preston McAfee, J. Stanley Johnson Professor
of Business Economics and Management, California Institute of Technology
- Dr. Mark J. McCabe, Assistant Professor, School of Economics
Georgia Institute of Technology
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