These factors all make a lot of sense. The academy, as I have personally witnessed it, pushes publication to an extreme degree. I have a husband, a sister, and parents who are involved, either as students or professors, in the world of academia, and they all feel that pressure to push out materials and break up their research into many articles in order to get as many articles out of it as possible. And this pressure to publish would lead to publishers getting tons of submissions and realizing that they have the material for lots of journals, so they might as well make a lot of journals. Due to the way that free market economics tend to work, the big publishers rise to the top, buy up lots of journals, and have the most resource to put towards their journals. This results in their journals becoming the most prestigious and everyone trying to publish in them, causing them to be able to make more money due to their essential nature, and the cycle repeats.
This phenomena, of the journals that are top in the field being "essential" to have and owned by big commercial presses in my opinion is what led to the big deal, defined by Kenneth Frazier as when "libraries agree to buy electronic access to all of a commercial publisher's journals for a price based on current payments to that publisher, plus some increment." (Frazier "The Librarian's Dilemma"). There has been a lot of discussion about this topic in the literature of librarianship, some in support and some against. Those in favor, as Rick Best mentions in his article "Is the 'Big Deal' Dead" tend to mention the benefit to small colleges, who now can afford to have the breadth in their journal collection that they always wanted, but never could. Others, like Ken Frazier, say that the big deal takes away the libraries ability to select, therefore burdening patrons with lots of useless material through which to wade It also takes away any ability to discontinue journals that are not being used and reduce prices correspondingly. I think both are right, and that the Big Deal, and indeed the increase of journal pricing is far more complex than "do away with it entirely or buy every big deal ever". A balance between the desire for full text that many patrons now expect and prices that are unsustainable, between breadth and quality control must be found. Quite a few suggestions have been made about how to go about this, but I want to focus on two that I believe have the most potential to grant libraries more control and also bring down prices.
First solution:
Best mentions that OhioLink, a large consortium, made a deal to allow them to drop journals with low usage statistics from a big deal and get a corresponding reduction in price. This requires licensing expertise and often the power of numbers a consortium represents, but I believe it is a huge step in the correct direction. Libraries need to realize that it would be very easy for most of these large publishers to actually serve different content to every academic library in the United States, at least technologically. I talked to my husband, a computer science PhD student at Madison, and he explained that all one would need to would be to set up a schoolID table and a journalID table in a relational database, and then do a join of the two tables to create a unique plan ID connecting the school to numerous journals. Assuming something like ScienceDirect, which has 1,000 journals and a separate plan for each academic library in the United States (lets guess something big like 50,000 different libraries), for an average database, this additional table would take up about 4 megabytes of disk space for the publishers servers. This is based on the fact that every entry in a standard database takes about 4 bytes, and so joining the two would be 8 bytes: 1,000 journal entries x 50,000 libraries x 8 bytes= 4,000,000 bytes=4 mb. This is tiny. It will take more licensing overhead, but these individual plans, or at least consortia plans, will provide the selection, the ability to reduce price, and the ability to control the libraries own purchasing destiny. It will also allow libraries to keep the savings bundled packages provide over buying each journal individually.Second Solution:
Librarians need to get faculty on their side and together explore alternative means of publication. I was fascinated to read in Hamaker and Astle's article that in the late 20's and 30's librarians were dealing with similar issues of high journal costs, stemming from the prestigious publishers in Germany publishing lots of new journals and content. While the price gouging was a bit more obvious in this case (it was clear the prices were being artificially raised to help the struggling post World War I economy) than it is now, librarians eventually rose up and brought down the price. The way they did it? They got agreements from faculty that they would no longer purchase or support these journals in their own professional organizations. They built up enough power through a coalition that they could afford to stand up to these prestigious publishers. And they did it by getting the academy on their side.Libraries now have even more to offer scholars. In the 1930s, if the journals were cancelled there was no alternative method of publication. Now, as Ken Frazier and Rick Best point out, there are other means of publication. Frazier, back in 2001, mentioned new open source journals by non profits that offer more rights to authors, are peer reviewed, and if they can get the community behind them, are capable of undermining the big commercial publishers. Some libraries already have reached out to the faculty and caused change. The University of California system partnered with faculty to protest and indeed threaten to cancel the Nature Publishing Group's big deal if they do not lower the price. Cornell's faculty senate, according to Best, "called among other things for faculty to become familiar with the pricing policies of journals in their specialties and to cease supporting publishers who engage in exorbitant pricing by not submitting papers to, or refereeing for, the journals sold by those publishers" (354). To me, this is the direction more libraries serious about bringing commercial publishers into line need to go. The root of all of this is the academic cycle of trying to publish the most in the "important" journals. If the academy continues to support these types of journals, it will continue to make them indispensable, and they will continue to hold libraries hostage. Only through educating the faculty about these practices, the nature of the publishers, and trying to introduce the idea of alternate methods of both scholarly communication and even scholarly worth, can we begin to really turn this pricing crisis around. We also need to look outside our field to others who are calling for reform for the way the academic system is run and partner with them, to get the change and message we want. This solution is not easy, its taking on a giant entrenched feeling of worth in academia. But I really think it is the only way we can build enough support to possibly challenge the prestigious, monopoly like journal publishers and create serious alternate methods of publication.
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