Following is a letter that I sent to SCIENCE, including my annotated reference list, responding to comments on journal economics and copyrights.
Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY <70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com>
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Letters Science 8 January 19991200 New York Ave NW
Dear Letters Editor:
The preoccupation with "price-per-article," in letters (283:33; 282:1643) following David Malakoff's coverage of the SPARC publishing project (282:853-854), does not help understand the crisis in dissemination. I offer more basic and disturbing facts:
o Universities contained the growth of their libraries at half the
increase of academic R&D and its production of journal articles over the last 30 years.
o The shrunken ability of those libraries to absorb and disseminate
the output of research (A) created a bottleneck that handicaps effective research and education; (B) propelled nearly all publishers' prices upward; and (C) devastated formal dissemination in all arts and sciences.
o 236 universities, representing only seven percent of all academic
libraries, control half of academic library spending and half of their current subscriptions.
o Impoverishment of this market discourages new ventures and compels
commercial mergers.
o Universities benefit from over $12 billion Federal research grants
based on trust that they maintain adequate dissemination resources.
o Universities reported $3 billion surplus revenue in 1992-3.
o Their combined endowments exceed $100 billion.
Rather than face responsibility for inducing the journals crisis, universities complain. They have transposed their priorities, becoming financial organizations that grudgingly produce research and education. I find outrageous CalTech's (283:33) demand, while hoarding last year's surplus revenue of $100 million, that Elsevier institute page charges to reduce the price of Tetrahedron Letters by a thousand dollars or so. Page charges are a relic of New Deal largess! The assault by Bachrach et al. (285:1459-1460) and others on the copyrights that secure publishers' investments confirms my belief that universities' interests have moved far afield. Their managers can sustain only the most primitive theories of formal dissemination, theories contrived to support selfish administrative interests.
We should take pause at suggestions that faculty publishing agreements be diluted or subjected to the administrative authority of the university. In fact, I would say that the concept of "academic freedom," which was invented to protect scholarship from religious and political patrons, should be refitted to address interference by university managers.
Sincerely,
OTHER REFERENCES To Publish and Perish. Policy Perspectives. 7,4. March, 1998. Unsigned article co-sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, The Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable. 12 pages. Published by Institute for Research on Higher Education, 4200 Pine St. 5A, Philadelphia PA 19104-4090. 1-800-437-9799. http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/pp/pp-main.html
Proposes, "Get a handle on property rights... Invest in electronic forms of scholarly communication.... Decouple publication and faculty evaluation for the purposes of promotion and tenure."
Bush, Vannevar. 1945. Science -- The Endless Frontier. Washington DC: National Science Foundation. Reprint 1990. NSF 90-8.
Bush expressed a general understanding when he wrote that universities, "... are charged with the responsibility of conserving the knowledge accumulated by the past, imparting that knowledge to students, and contributing new knowledge of all kinds."(19)
Guernsey, Lisa. 1998, Sept. 18. A provost challenges his faculty to keep copyright on journal articles. Chronicle of Higher Education. 45(4).
Steven E. Koonin, provost of the California Institute of Technology proposed that faculty authors not transfer copyrights to publishers. Discussion will take place on CalTech's HyperForum, a closed online system. Yale librarian Scott Bennett proposed that Yale encourage researchers to retain their copyrights. U.Kansas provost David E. Shulenburger asked board of regents to consider a similar plan.
Henderson, Albert. 1998. Science in the twilight zone; or, are
science libraries related to science? Issues in Science & Technology
Librarianship. No. 20, Fall. Also rebuttal to articles by Rob Kirby
(A scenario for publishing mathematics in the future), David Flaxbart
(A response to Albert Henderson), and Emily R. Mobley
(Ruminations on the Sci-Tech Serials Crisis). Rebuttal includes table
of revenue and expenditure reported by private universities to the
IRS. Electronic journal published by the Association of College &
Research Libraries can be found at
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/98-fall/
Shulenburger, David E. 1998. Moving with dispatch to resolve the scholarly communication crisis: from here to NEAR. Association of Research Libraries. ARL Proceedings of 133rd annual meeting Oct. 14-16, 1998.
Shulenberger feels that association publishers' prices and profits are nearly as objectionable as their commercial counterparts'.
"THE PROPOSAL: My proposal is simple: We must find a way of requiring that when a manuscript prepared by a U.S. faculty member is accepted for publication by a scholarly journal, a portion of the copyright of that manuscript must be retained for inclusion in a single, publicly accessible repository, after a lag following publication in the journal."
Walker, Thomas J. 1998. Free Internet access to traditional journals.
American Scientist. 86(5):
http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walter.html
U. S. Dept. of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. 1997. Status of Academic Libraries in the United States. NCES 97-413. Gov't Printing Office. Received on Mon Jan 18 1999 - 12:46:21 GMT
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