Academic publishers enjoy huge profits
We all know what sort of the challenge digital age brought to a publishing industry. Print media has literally gone out of business. The remaining few are struggling for their very survival. This is not, however, the case for academic publishers.
Online journal publication and dissemination led to the elimination of various costs. Meanwhile, for the past two decades, academic journal subscription fees have increased 5 to 10 percent on an annual basis. The combination of these two facts resulted undeniably in publishers’ soaring profit. The digital age, in effect, brought windfall profits to the academic publishers.
Digital technology, widely used by publishers, has immensely cut publishing and dissemination costs attributed to journals. Nonetheless, the publishers increase subscription fees at a rate which ranges from 5 to 10 percent on annual basis, according to the CBC report.
The challenges libraries are facing is not limited to paying high subscription fees. Often, they are systematically coerced into paying for less interesting journals just to get their hands on the essential ones. The publishers call this approach ‘bundle subscription’. This way libraries around the world end up paying millions for journal subscriptions annually. The CBS report shows that the University of Montreal spends $7 million on journal subscriptions alone each year. These huge and ever increasing subscription payments have dire consequences for universities: they have forced quite a number of them to shut down some of their libraries.
The industry of scientific journal publishing is dominated by a handful of companies. The CBC report shows that the top five publishing companies are responsible for publishing 53% of all scientific journals in the field of natural and medical sciences. The figure goes even higher in the field of social sciences: 70% of all scholarly output comes from top five publishers. This dominance has, expectedly, led to astonishing profits: scholarly journal publishers enjoy a 40% profit margin.
Industry dominant publishers have been facing challenges over their practices and subscriptions fees. They are being constantly challenged by the open access movements which advocate strongly for unlimited and warranted free access to all research out puts; largely to those funded by the tax payers’ money. United Academics is one of those open access advocates that work to ensure the society gets free access to scholarly output.
Stanford has got a grant to establish an open access repository of Bioinformatics on autism . This repository, according to Dennis Wall (PhD) who leads the project, is going to be the biggest ever built of its kind. This project, beyond contributing towards finding a breakthrough in autism research, also adds momentum to an open access movement.
The repository, once it is built, is expected to provide autism researchers a centralized database from which pertinent research output and data can be fetched. The project will be funded by The Hartwell Autism Research and Technology Initiative (iHART). To realize this the iHART has allocated $9 million for the project. The iHART is a charitable organization whose primary mission is to support early stage biomedical research projects.
The researchers and the iHART Foundation anticipate that the repository will enhance collaboration and data sharing. It could be also a platform from which researchers dig deeper into large quantities of autism related research data.
American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) commits itself to make its highly valued journals readily available to public on open access platforms. The ASCO does so because it believes making scientific research out puts help advance its goal of curing cancer. To make this a reality, the ASCO, will make its publications such as Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), Journal of Oncology Practice (JOP), and Journal of Global Oncology (JGO) widely available to all interested readers and researchers. The ASCO has already revised its open access policy to better serve its mission and accommodate the need of authors.
For the time being ASCO puts embargo on its journals. That means readers are allowed to get full access to those journals/articles once embargo period is lifted. The embargo period, in most of the cases, runs for 12 months from the date of publication. As far as the papers are under the embargo period, access to those papers is limited.
Moreover, in order to accommodate the need and the reality in developing countries, ASCO has a plan in place. According to ASCO’s plan, resource constrained countries can access its journals either free of change or by paying minimal subscription fees. To make this work, ASCO works in collaboration with HINARI- World Health Organization research portal.
All ASCO papers funded by the National Institutes of Health are deposited to PubMed Central once the embargo period is expired.
Source ASCO
Knowledge institutions and organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy recently adopted by publisher Elsevier. Their concern: the policy undermines open-access policies at learning institutions and also prevents authors from sharing publicly their work.
Elsevier, which publishes thousands of journals, introduced the policy last month. It aims to strike a balance between making sharing “simple and seamless” and “being consistent with access and usage rights associated with journal articles,” the publisher said in a blog post.
Many librarians and open-access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately “with a colleague or with an invitation-only online group.” Availability through the repositories is subject to journals’ embargo periods, which in some cases last for several years.
There is mounting pressure on Elsevier to reconsider its policy. Open access organizations, libraries and Creative Commons from countries such as the U.S., Canada, China, Australia, Brazil and the U.K. released joint statement asking Elsevier to adopt more open access friendly policy.
Those organizations criticize Elsevier’s open access policy from the view point that ‘it creates unnecessary barriers for Elsevier-published authors.’ according to them Elsevier’s policy hinders the dissemination and use of research knowledge. Moreover, those organizations blame Elsevier for formulating this policy without even thoroughly studying how immediate sharing of articles impact publishers’ revenue.
In a statement, Elsevier made clear that it was surprised by the reaction its open access policy received. Nevertheless, it still believes that its new policy is ‘more liberal’ which aims at facilitating the dissemination and consumption of research output.
“At each stage of the publication process authors can share their research: before submission, from acceptance, upon publication and post publication,” said Elsevier’s director of access and policy Alicia Wise. She added, “For authors who want free immediate access to their articles, we continue to give all authors a choice to publish gold open access with a wide number of open-access journals and over 1,600 hybrid titles.”
For open-access advocates this policy is an attack against open access. It’s primarily designed, they suspect, to undermine institutional repositories. They argue, in 2012, Elsevier put a restrictive policy in place which discourages authors’ from depositing their research manuscripts in institutional repositories.
‘The latest policy update is an attempt to slow down the spread of open-access policies,’ said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or SPARC.
Wise said the policy is not “intended to suddenly embargo and make inaccessible content currently available to readers.” She added that Elsevier is “happy to have a dialogue to discuss these, or any other, issues further.”
Source: Inside Higher ED
There have been numerous ongoing efforts to bring open access repository networks from around the world closer. This also includes major efforts to align ever expanding repository networks. Recently Confederation of Open access Repositories (COAR), taking the lead, has organized a meeting which was held on April 16, 2015. The meeting was held in Port, Portugal. This meeting was held for the second time in a row. Representatives from all corners of the world attended the meeting. The meeting’s main area of focus was on finding sustainable ways of implementing open access and research infrastructure.
Research is an output of strong collaboration. There is also increasing international dimension in it. Repositories are intended to facilitate and speed up research output’s dissemination and consumption. This makes the need to align repository networks imperative. Repositories can collaborate around major issues such as open access polices, standards and services.
Participants of the meeting shared about their experiences and local networks. What had been made clear, out of the meeting, was that repositories have progressed over the years. And now they are in a better position to enter deep international collaboration. Meeting participants reviewed the progress has been made since their previous meeting. They looked into details as what has been changed, particularly, in the areas of open access elements and metadata harmonization and improving repository networks global visibility.
Out of the meeting came a resolution to further align repository networks. In order to realize these objectives different kinds of activities will be carried out. Those activities, by in large, include enhancing collaboration around developing tools and guidelines. To improve global visibility of repositories more work will be done with policy makers and other stakeholders.
Sorce: COAR