more on Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Steve Crocker <steve () stevecrocker com>
Date: May 23, 2005 4:07:30 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web


This is an excellent article.  I looked thsi area a few years ago to  
understand the dynamics.  This article covers the elements very well.  
Let me add some emphasis to a particular part of the cycle.  The  
tenure review process plays a subtle but critical role in retarding  
the creation and rise of new peer-reviewed journals that might  
operate on an entirely different business model.  Tenure (and other  
academic advancement) committees are strongly geared toward name  
brand recognition when examining a professor's publication list.   
Young professors thus tend to prefer the established journals even if  
there is substantial delay in getting published and higher cost to  
the potential readers.

Figure out how to give equal credit to an excellent article published  
in an online journal as an equivalent one published in an established  
journal and I think the dynamics will shift fairly rapidly.

Steve




David Farber wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
> From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
> Date: May 23, 2005 2:03:51 PM EDT
> To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
> Cc: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
> Subject: Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
>  From the Wall Street Journal -- http://online.wsj.com/article/  
> 0,,SB111680539102640247,00.html?mod=technology%5Ffeatured%5Fstories% 
> 5Fhs
> Peer Pressure
> Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web
> More Research Is Free Online Amid Spurt of Start-Ups;
> Publishers' Profits at Risk
> A Revolt on UC's Campuses
> By BERNARD WYSOCKI JR.
> BERKELEY, Calif. -- From a stool at Yali's caf, near the  
> University  of California campus, Michael Eisen is loudly trashing  
> the big  players in academic publishing. Hefty subscription fees  
> for journals  are blocking scientific progress, he says, and  
> academics who think  they have full access to timely literature are  
> kidding themselves.  "They're just wrong," Dr. Eisen says. He  
> suggests scholarly journals  be free and accessible to everyone on  
> the Web.
> This may sound like the ranting of a campus radical, but Dr. Eisen  
> is  a well known computational biologist at a nearby national  
> laboratory  and a Berkeley faculty member. He is also a co-founder  
> of a nonprofit  startup called the Public Library of Science, which  
> produces its own  scholarly journals, in competition with  
> established publishers,  distributed free online.
> It's a campus twist on a raging Internet-era debate about who  
> should  control information and what it should cost. For decades,  
> traditional  scholarly journals have held an exalted and lucrative  
> position as  arbiters of academic excellence, controlling what's  
> published and  made available to the wider community. These days,  
> research is  increasingly available on free university Web sites  
> and through start- up outfits. Scholarly journals are finding their  
> privileged position  under attack.
> The 10-campus University of California system has emerged as a  
> hotbed  of insurgency against this $5 billion global market.  
> Faculty members  are competing against publishers with free or  
> inexpensive journals of  their own. Two UC scientists organized a  
> world-wide boycott against a  unit of Reed Elsevier -- the Anglo- 
> Dutch giant that publishes 1,800  periodicals -- protesting its  
> fees. The UC administration itself has  jumped into the fray. It's  
> urging scholars to deposit working papers  and monographs into a  
> free database in addition to submitting them  for publication  
> elsewhere. It has also battled with publishers,  including  
> nonprofits, to lower prices.
> "We have to take back control from the publishers," says Daniel   
> Greenstein, associate vice provost for the UC system, which spends   
> $30 million a year on scholarly periodicals.
> The clash between academics and publishers was exacerbated last  
> year  when the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health  
> proposed that  articles resulting from NIH grants be made available  
> free online.  That prompted protests from Reed Elsevier, John Wiley  
> & Sons Inc. and  several nonprofit publishers such as the American  
> Diabetes  Association, which argued such a move would hurt their  
> businesses.
> The NIH retreated and in February made the program voluntary. It  
> now  asks authors to post on an NIH Web site any articles based on  
> NIH  grants within 12 months of publication.
> The debate comes at a time when it's easier than ever to find   
> scholarly articles by using simple Internet tools such as Google.  
> In  late 2004, Google Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., launched  
> Google  Scholar, a free service that can search for peer-reviewed  
> articles as  well as theses, abstracts and other scholarly  
> material, much of it in  scientific fields.
> Traditional publishers argue that the expensive process of  
> selecting  and editing journals is a necessary filter to help  
> scholars sift  through vast amounts of research. The nonprofit  
> publisher of the  prestigious Science magazine makes content  
> available free after 12  months. Other publishers note that with a  
> combination of free  abstracts, free distribution to the developing  
> world and public- library subscriptions, much of the globe already  
> has access to what  they produce.
> "The vast majority -- 90% of researchers in the world -- have  
> access  online to our material," says Karen Hunter, senior vice  
> president at  Elsevier, the science and medical division of Reed  
> Elsevier that  publishes the company's journals. Elsevier's  
> scholarly journals bring  in about $1.6 billion in annual revenue  
> with an operating-profit  margin of about 30%.
> Publishers have been entrenched in academia for decades. One big   
> concern, the U.K.'s Taylor & Francis Group, now part of T&F  
> Informa  PLC, was founded in the 18th century. The venerable  
> nonprofit Science  was founded in the 1880s by Thomas Edison. The  
> industry became firmly  established in the 1950s and 1960s in the  
> wake of the Soviet space  program, whose success spurred a wave of  
> scientific publishing.
> Although learned societies such as the American Physical Society  
> hold  sway at the top of the prestige pyramid, commercial  
> publishers have  created a second tier, producing thousands of  
> niche periodicals from  Addictive Behaviors to Zoology, both  
> Elsevier titles. Scholars are  generally grateful that publishers  
> take the risk of starting new  titles, which often take years to  
> break even.
> The publishers' prestige derives from the rigorous system of peer   
> review, in which a journal's editorial board will select experts in  
> a  field to vet articles. At some top scholarly journals, less than  
> 10%  of submitted articles make it into a publication. In turn, the  
> peer- review system lends authority to a scholar's work, and has  
> long been  a springboard to academic advancement.
> Aaron Edlin, a UC Berkeley professor of law and economics, is a co-  
> founder of Berkeley Electronic Press, publisher of 25 online   
> scholarly journals. His playbook is simple: undercut giant rivals   
> with lower prices -- around $300 -- faster turnaround and Internet-  
> only distribution. Yet when Dr. Edlin helped write a paper on game   
> theory recently, he submitted it to the competition, the Journal  
> of  Economic Theory, published by Elsevier.
> The reason: Professor Edlin's co-author on the paper is striving  
> to  win tenure at the California Institute of Technology and needs   
> exposure in big-name journals. "He thought it was important. I   
> respected his decision," says Prof. Edlin.
> The peer-review system has many defenders. "There's too much stuff   
> out there, and we are all way too busy," says Lee Miller, a  
> retired  professor of ecology at Cornell University and editor  
> emeritus of the  nonprofit journal Ecology, published by the  
> Ecological Society of  America. "Anything that saves you time and  
> leads you to the most  important work is helpful."
> In the 1990s, the commercial industry consolidated. The biggest   
> publishers began buying or building new journals and raising  
> prices.  That edifice only began to be challenged with the rise of  
> the  Internet, which cut distribution costs and triggered a wave  
> of  experimentation in what is called "open access" publishing.
> In London, a for-profit startup called BioMed Central publishes  
> more  than 100 scholarly journals available free to the public via  
> the  Internet. BioMed Central charges individual authors a  
> processing  charge of about $850 but doesn't charge it for authors  
> affiliated  with member institutions. BioMed Central says it has  
> 527  institutional members, including British and American  
> universities,  which pay between $1,700 and $8,600 a year to belong.
> In the U.S. a powerful open-access advocate has been Harold Varmus,  
> a  Nobel laureate, former UC scholar and former NIH director. He's  
> now  head of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He  
> co- founded Public Library of Science with Berkeley's Dr. Eisen,  
> backed  by a $9 million grant from a private foundation. Charging  
> authors a  fee of $1,500, the group launched its first peer- 
> reviewed journal,  PLoS Biology, in 2003, and also distributes its  
> contents free on the  Internet.
> In the late 1990s, Dr. Eisen was studying the yeast genome, a  
> booming  field that has a large overlap with the human genome and  
> 200 journals  publishing related research. He wanted all these  
> journal articles  freely available at his fingertips, an impossible  
> request because  many are behind subscription barriers.
> Some scholars think publishing should operate like the Linux  
> computer  operating system, where programmers build on each other's  
> work in an  ongoing, collaborative project. In the scholarly realm,  
> a database  called arXiv -- pronounced "archive," as if the "x"  
> were the Greek  letter "chi" -- has become a repository of  
> scholarship in the physics  field. It's owned and operated by  
> Cornell University and partially  supported by the National Science  
> Foundation. If the UC  administration has its way, something like  
> that would be the norm  throughout academia.
> To experienced publishers, much of the open-access talk seems  
> naive.  "A lot of this is self-righteous talk," says Alan Leshner,  
> executive  publisher of Science and chief executive of its  
> nonprofit parent, the  American Association for the Advancement of  
> Science. He says giving  away content isn't a viable business model  
> because of the tremendous  costs of putting out reputable journals.
> He notes that Science gets 12,000 submissions and publishes 800   
> articles a year on a $10 million editorial budget. That averages  
> more  than $10,000 per published article, a high number because of  
> the  costs associated with handling the unusually large number of   
> submissions the journal receives. Industry experts say typical per-  
> article costs are between $3,000 and $4,000.
> If open access takes off, information will flow faster, but   
> publishers will make less money. Among those who would be hurt is   
> Reed Elsevier. Sami Kassab, analyst at investment house Exane BNP   
> Paribas in London, estimates that such a movement could sharply  
> cut  the company's profit margin on periodicals to between 10% and  
> 15% of  revenue, from the current 30% or more.
> Currently, the open-access movement makes up between 1% and 2% of  
> the  market, experts say. While that number seems small, the  
> concept is  assuming an important role channeling academic discontent.
> "There's a lot of sentiment that work is being taken advantage of  
> by  the commercial publishers," says Alessandro Lizzeri, associate   
> professor of economics at New York University and editor of   
> Elsevier's Journal of Economic Theory. He says that while editors  
> get  little compensation for their work, authors and reviewers --  
> aside  from prestige -- usually get nothing or just a nominal fee.
> Prof. Lizzeri says that two of the 40 members of his editorial  
> board  resigned recently because the journal isn't free to readers.  
> "If half  the board resigns I'm in trouble," he says.
> These rumblings hit the University of California early on. In  
> October  2003, faculty members made a rare display of solidarity  
> with the  university administration. Two scientists at the  
> University of  California at San Francisco staged a protest over a  
> $91,000 bill from  Elsevier's Cell Press unit for one year's access  
> to six biology  journals. The two professors called for a world- 
> wide boycott, urging  fellow scholars at UC and beyond to refuse to  
> serve as authors,  editors or peer reviewers at the six periodicals  
> in question.
> Their timing couldn't have been better for the university   
> administration, which was just about to begin negotiations with  
> the  Reed Elsevier unit over a new contract. In the late 1990s, all  
> UC  campuses had banded together into a single buying consortium.  
> In  2002, the university hired Dr. Greenstein, a history professor  
> turned  expert on digital libraries. With the state of California's  
> budget  crisis forcing him to trim library spending to $62 million  
> a year,  Dr. Greenstein wanted to take a hard line.
> "It was the opening shot, really, in struggling head-on with this   
> world of scientific publishing," says Keith Yamamoto, executive  
> vice  dean at UCSF medical school and one of the boycott's leaders.
> The university was paying Elsevier $10.3 million a year for print  
> and  online subscriptions to most of its 1,800 journals. The  
> university  demanded a 25% reduction and at one point threatened to  
> walk away  from the table.
> As the negotiations grew tense, faculty at other UC campuses  
> started  to chime in sympathetically. The UC Santa Cruz faculty  
> senate passed  a resolution urging faculty to boycott Elsevier  
> journals by refusing  to submit articles or to serve on periodical  
> boards.
> "That alarmed us," says a Reed Elsevier spokeswoman in Amsterdam.   
> More than 100 UC faculty members serve as senior editors of  
> Elsevier  journals and about 1,000 serve on editorial boards. The  
> publisher  fanned out across the campuses, drumming up support  
> among friendly  faculty with breakfasts and other meetings. The  
> spokeswoman says the  company concluded that most UC faculty  
> members didn't know about the  boycott call or didn't support it.
> The negotiations dragged on for two months and grew testy. In late   
> 2003, the university won a 25% price reduction to $7.7 million a  
> year  for 1,200 Elsevier periodicals. Elsevier agreed to throw the  
> six  biology journals into the deal.
> "They got a very, very good deal," acknowledges Reed Elsevier's  
> Ms.  Hunter. She says the company got some concessions, too. UC  
> gave up  access to several hundred periodicals, for example. UC  
> says Elsevier  unilaterally added the titles into the arrangement  
> before  negotiations started and says it doesn't care about their  
> removal.
> Suddenly, the UC negotiation was the buzz of the academic library   
> world and an inspiration for others to follow suit. One UC  
> librarian,  Catherine Candee, says a university negotiator  
> elsewhere "called us  up and said, 'Thank you, you saved us $1  
> million.' "
> Write to Bernard Wysocki Jr. at bernie.wysocki () wsj com
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