Just Say No to Overpriced Journals 2010 June 10
I read an interesting piece om the Chronicle today about University of of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs. There are some interesting stats, but the big one that jumps out is that Nature wants to charge an average of over $17K per journal (for each of their 67 journals). Really, the only way to get a handle on the exorbitant cost of journals is for libraries to just say no to paying for them, and more importantly, faculty to just say no: Say no to publishing in them, and say no to requiring (or “highly recommending them”) publications. I hope the University of California system does put pressure and call for a faculty boycott of these journals.
I know publishers will argue that there are costs to publish, and I agree. Even though I support Open Access, I understand commercial (even if some of them don’t call themselves commercial) publishers wanting to recoup costs. But if there costs are so hight, that they need to charge so much, they need to rethink there publishing model. I am not saying that the journal I am involved with, the Code4Lib Journal, is in the same category as the Nature journals, but do you know what we charge? Zero. More importantly, do you know what are expenses are? Zero. If Nature needs to charge $17K a journal, they need to see where all that overhead is, and make some changes and get the costs down to a much more reasonable amount.
Well, I might offer the Code4Lib Journal costs are near zero. Server, storage and bandwidth isn’t free; it is getting subsidized by North Carolina through ibiblio. Your point, though, that it is done through mostly volunteer time — time from authors and reviewers that is arguably also donated to for-profit journals — is important.
Of course, I (and I think you) also tend to think along the lines of cost-plus pricing schemes: what are the costs to produce the widget plus a little bit of profit. Part of the business world also believe in a pricing model that charges what the market will bear, regardless of what it actually costs to make the widget. I put most commercial academic publishers in that part of the world.
@Peter: Good point about the cost of Code4Lib journal being near zero and not actually zero. It is zero for the people directly involved with the journal itself (assuming you don’t count time), but that is only because ibiblio.org generously provides the hosting service to us.
Also good point about the pricing models. In order to get what I would consider a more reasonable price, consumers (mostly libraries in this case) need to reject the current pricing model.