As academic journal costs soar, Tisch looks at other options

Corporate publishers continue to raise the already high costs for producing and publishing academic journals, according to a new study.

The University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University released data equating the cost of two nuclear physics journal costs to that of a brand-new Toyota, according to a San Francisco Chronicle article.

While Tufts does not spend that much on its journals, costs have increased.

"Journal prices tend to inflate at ten percent each year, so we need an increase in funding to [maintain the] status quo," Director of Tisch Library Jo-Ann Michalak said.

Michalak said that the library annually spends approximately $1.8 million for print journals and $800,000 for electronic database journals. The overall materials budget for Tisch, which includes books and periodicals, is $1.5 million. Additional funding for these purchases comes from donations and gifts to the Tisch Library Fund.

One of the leading corporate publishers is the British-Dutch company Reed-Elsvier, which has gained a reputation for charging high prices for its journals. In light of increasing prices, many of its clients, Tufts included, are beginning to rethink their commitment to the company.

"We are not very happy with them," Michalak said. Tisch currently pays Elsvier $500,000 per year for journal subscriptions, which covers the cost of 500 different journal subscriptions.

This is not the first time that Tufts has suffered at the hands of large academic journal distributors. Last February, RoweCom, a provider Tufts used for various subscriptions, filed for bankruptcy after Tufts had prepaid $689,523 for subscriptions.

The University of California (UC), Elsvier's second-largest client, spent approximately $10 million on 1,400 journals in 2003, according to the Chronicle.

Due to this increase in costs over the last eighteen years, the UC system has slashed book purchases by 26 percent and journal subscriptions by six percent. Stanford has boycotted Elsvier, and other west coast universities are threatening to do so as well.

London-based Elsvier corporate media spokeswoman Catharine May said that these universities do not understand the reason why prices must increase each year. "Today, the cost of research and publishing has reached all-time record highs, and we simply must continue to raise our fees and costs to keep up with that," May said.

May added that a second reason why universities may be seeing their library funding squeezed is that they are under-funded in the first place.

The Berkley/Stanford study showed, however, that overall national funding for university libraries has only fallen one percent over the last 20 years.

Though electronic journals currently make up the minority of Tisch's journal subscriptions, Michalak said that this may change in the future.

"We anticipated that electronic journals were going to become more popular, and because of that, we and the faculty of the University have decided to gradually cancel some of our subscriptions to the print journals," she said.

Facing the forthcoming drop in print journal subscriptions, some faculty members have encouraged Tisch to continue subscriptions to some humanities print journals, because these materials may not yet be available online, Michalak said.

Tisch Library is also a member of the Boston Library Consortium, a group of eighteen area colleges that have agreed to share databases and subscriptions for a certain membership fee. Other members of the Consortium include M.I.T, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis University, and the University of Massachusetts.

One of the benefits Tisch has gained from its membership with the Consortium is open access to 300 other journals, raising Tisch's journal subscriptions to 800.

Schools who are boycotting Elsvier are instead proposing a scholarly journal alternative. The schools hope to develop a place for researchers to publish articles themselves online. The writers would pay a fee of $1,500 -- a tab expected to be picked up by university grants, private foundations, and federal education budgets -- to have the articles published. These articles would then be accessible for free to the public. Universities would not have to pay high prices for electronic or print journals each year, but would instead spend less by covering the publishing fees for faculty who submit articles.

"It's a nice idea, but I don't think it will work out too well," May said. "It really puts a cap on the range and degree of research one can conduct. If you're not going to be compensated for your work, why would you do this?"

Tisch is currently looking into this new program. Michalak intends to propose to Arts and Sciences faculty that Tufts obtain a subscription to the Public Library of Science -- one of the online databases that is working within the Open-Access boundaries -- and perhaps some others in the future.

Tisch recently became a member of BioMed Central, an independent publishing house that allows Tufts faculty to publish their journals for free after paying the membership fee.

"The world of academic publishing is changing so much these days, it's so complex. Publishers are changing what they want and we're all trying to cooperate and work with the faculty to do what we can," Michalak said.