E-Journals

By Alison Buckholtz

The high price of commercial journals threatens scientific communications. A coalition of universities, libraries, and learned societies is using electronic publishing to reverse that trend.

In the beginning, curious scientists conducted research on the heaven and the earth. On the first day, these scientists banded together to form communities of interest. These communities became known as professional societies. And it was good.

On the second day, others expressed interest in the scientists’ findings. And it was very good.

On the third day, societies published their findings in journals. These journals reached the widest possible audience through affordable subscriptions to individuals and libraries. Subscription fees were reinvested in science, and discipline-specific communities flourished. The future seemed bright indeed.

On the fourth day, commercial publishers bought scientific journals.

On the fifth day, publishers merged, acquired smaller firms, and achieved sky-high profits by raising journal subscription rates. Libraries cut scores of monographs and journals in the humanities and social sciences to maintain subscriptions to the expensive journals their science faculty demanded. A black cloud settled over scholarly communications.

On the sixth day, scientists, professional societies, librarians, and academic administrators began to discuss solutions.

On the seventh day, they approached their university colleagues and asked for support.

The expulsion of scientific journals from the Edenic world of scholarly-society publishing comes as no surprise to those who have tracked the commercialization of research during the past few decades. Science is big business. In this brave new world where market forces, not fellowships, drive research, the emergence of the scientific journal as profit maker is one of publishing’s best-kept secrets. And that development is holding back the march of science.

Since the university professors for whom journals are written have no occasion to view--or pay--the subscription bills, most fail to understand the extent of the problem created by escalating journal costs. When libraries cut back on subscriptions because of high journal prices, the journals that remain in circulation make up for the falling subscriptions by raising their rates. Faculty suffer from reduced availability of research materials. Members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) subscribe to 7 percent fewer journals today than they did in 1986--but they’re spending 152 percent more to subscribe. And when libraries cut subscriptions to journals published by scholarly societies, the subscription fees these societies usually reinvest in science also disappear.

Science for scientists has become an endangered concept. Although journals are produced through the labor of researchers who contribute their time and skill for the benefit of their professional community, the net effect is a contribution to commercial publishers’ high profits. But research libraries are under intense pressure to subscribe to journals in which their science faculty publish, regardless of the expense.

Profit or Perish

For a few years, according to Mary Case, director of scholarly communications at the ARL, the price of science journals rose so high that librarians had no choice but to cut acquisition of monographs in the humanities and social sciences. "The sciences depend on timely information in a way that other fields do not," Case explains. "Besides that, science researchers are perceived as bringing in enormous amounts of grant money."

The rates for sciences journals are hefty. An annual institutional subscription to Brain Research will put a library budget back $15,203, and a year of one nuclear physics title costs almost $11,500. A pharmacology journal considered to fall on the midpoint of the price scale runs almost $7,000.

Publishers plead the high cost of paper. But many do not pay the editors or referees of a journal. Nor do they pay for any overhead expenses, such as lab fees. And they certainly do not pay for the research behind the articles or the grants that support the research. Universities and government agencies pay these expenses--and then they pay handsomely again to buy back the research.

Scientific journal publishing is a profitable business if you’re on the right side: the top publisher of scientific journals nets over 40 percent more than its operating costs for its titles. It seduces university administrators with promises of endowed chairs and courts the editorial boards of journals it wants to acquire with the lure of international attention. Then, once it acquires journals, it raises their price tags: 35 percent in the first year after acquisition and 56 percent over the first three years after an acquisition, according to one case study.

Mergers and acquisitions call attention to price increases. But the rising price of scientific journals generally deserves just as much scrutiny. According to Library Journal’s 1999 periodical price survey, scientific journals in the United States and abroad now cost 11 percent more than they did in 1998, and 54 percent more than they did in 1995. In the October 1998 issue of the ARL newsletter, Brendan J. Wyly of Cornell University identified publishers Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier, John Wiley and Sons, and Plenum Publishing as the publicly traded companies with the most extensive scholarly publishing operations in the sciences. (Wolters Kluwer later acquired Plenum.)

In analyzing these companies and the price hikes they have imposed, Wyly suggests that the absence of competition allows their profit margins to rise above the industry standard for periodicals. He believes the introduction of electronic publications could jolt the industry: "New publishing channels that include technological or structurally innovative features, reach broad audiences, and offer prestige early in the life-cycle might lure authors away from established channels," he argues. "We must innovate to produce competitive communication systems over time or continue suffering under a system of shrinking access due to the lack of competition in the present system."

Wolfgang Sadee, vice chair of the Department of Biopharmaceutical Science at the University of California, San Francisco, believes so strongly in the need for electronic journals that he resigned from Pharmaceutical Research, the Wolters Kluwer publication he founded and edited, to edit a new electronic journal, PharmSci. Sadee stepped down because he was distressed over the ever-rising institutional subscription rates of his own and other journals. "The electronic medium will be the key to our [new journal’s] future success," he says. "It brings with it the ability to distribute information on a much broader scale, with greatly expanded technical capabilities, at a lower cost."

Sadee is not alone in his belief that electronic publishing will protect the future of scientific communications. During the past two years, several initiatives, including that of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), were launched to transform scientific journal publishing into a viable, market-aware, fiscally responsible enterprise. Electronic publishing is at the heart of each of these initiatives. Proponents contend that electronic publication of scientific journals can reinvigorate scholarly communications and in the end achieve nothing less than the restoration of science to scientists.

Revolution in Bits--and Bytes

The Web has forced a fundamental, ongoing reevaluation of communications methods. Anyone can create a Web site; questions of credibility and quality follow later, if at all. But for Web-based journals in the sciences--and scientific communication on the Web in general--credibility is critical. Faulty research that has not been screened out through peer review can threaten people’s health. The consensus is that peer-reviewed articles published on the Web are as solid, scholarly speaking, as peer-reviewed articles in print journals.

Electronic journals in the sciences are opening up a new chapter in the epic of scholarly communications pricing. Most electronic journals cost a fraction of the price of print journals, and they allow readers great flexibility and ease in finding articles. They also shorten the time between submission of an article and its publication. Authors used to waiting a year or more for their research to appear in print journals dreamed of the day when the turnaround time for publication would be as short as a month. That day has come with some electronic journals.

Readers appreciate the convenience of journals they can access from their home computers or university desktop. According to John Webb, assistant director of collections and systems at Washington State University, faculty are "happy as can be" to dial into a university’s subscription from their office, and students "almost always prefer to read an electronic journal." Students will stand in line for the terminal rather than walk up one flight of stairs to get the paper copy, he said.

Publishers of electronic journals are trying to make their offerings even more attractive to users by embracing cutting-edge technology, such as animation. And publishers are working together with libraries to set standards for archiving, linking, and licensing.

Affordable Alternatives

Librarians were the first to recognize the serious implications of high journal prices for scholarship in the sciences. SPARC was born when ARL directors concluded that lack of competition in the marketplace for scientific journals could eventually translate into the collapse of scientific communications. In developing SPARC, the ARL tapped into theories first articulated in 1994 by the Association of American Universities (AAU). The AAU called for academe to "introduce more competition and cost-based pricing into the market-place for [scientific communications] by encouraging a mix of commercial and not-for-profit organizations to engage in electronic publication of the results of scientific research."

That’s exactly what SPARC does: facilitates market competition by nurturing the creation of high-quality, low-priced peer-reviewed science, technical, and medical research publication outlets. Formally launched in 1998, SPARC reduces the risk to publisher-partners of entering markets in which prices are highest and competition is needed most. At the same time, it provides faculty with prestigious and responsible alternatives to other publishing vehicles. SPARC-endorsed publications provide libraries and scientists with choices that allow them to decide where their limited funds are best spent.

SPARC’s members and affiliates include universities, research libraries, and academic associations in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. They support SPARC’s goals on their campuses through subscriptions to SPARC-endorsed journals. Members also speak out on the crisis in serials pricing and point faculty members toward opportunities to publish in top-quality, library-friendly publications.

The American Chemical Society (ACS), the largest scientific society in the world, was the first organization to join in a partnership with SPARC. Organic Letters, the SPARC-endorsed journal (available in print and electronic format) that emerged from that collaboration, debuted in May–June 1999. The journal distributes the results of peer-reviewed research in organic chemistry faster and at much less cost than competing journals. For example, an annual subscription to Organic Letters costs about $2,300, compared with $8,602 for a subscription to Tetrahedron Letters, a competing publication.

The Royal Society of Chemistry, the ACS’s counterpart in the United Kingdom, publishes the SPARC-endorsed electronic journal PhysChemComm, which disseminates research on all aspects of chemical physics and physical chemistry. The journal boasts a turnaround time of thirty-three days from when an article is received to when it’s published. According to Mike Hannant, electronic journals publisher for the Royal Society of Chemistry, PhysChemComm offers other benefits in addition to speed of publication. For example, the journal can use three-dimensional, full-color interactive figures to present complicated molecular data, such as crystal-structure diagrams. Doing so allows readers to manipulate the data themselves. PhysChemComm is available for $353 a year, compared with a similar publication that cost libraries $8,060 in 1998.

University of Arizona biologist Mike Rosenzweig created Evolutionary Ecology Research, another SPARC journal partner. Before collaborating with SPARC, Rosenzweig founded Evolutionary Ecology, published by Wolters Kluwer, which he edited for most of the 1990s. During that time, the journal was sold twice, landing at the feet of a large publishing conglomerate that raised the journal’s annual price from $95 to nearly $800.

Rosenzweig was never consulted about the changes in ownership, marketing decisions, or price increases; nor was he paid for his efforts as editor. He watched library subscription numbers drop and individual subscriptions dry up completely. Fed up with what he saw as "intellectual slavery," Rosenzweig quit, and his entire editorial board followed suit. They regrouped to create Evolutionary Ecology Research, which Rosenzweig and his wife, Carole, publish independently in both print and electronic formats. Annual institutional Internet subscriptions are $272, and the print edition costs $305.

Libraries--SPARC members and nonmembers alike--are responding favorably to the journal alternatives SPARC offers. Wabash College in Indiana, which is not a SPARC member, recently canceled Tetrahedron Letters in favor of the electronic Organic Letters--with the full approval of its faculty chemists. "With the cost savings, we are able to add thirty-five new journals for ten different departments without any budget increase," says Larry Frye, head librarian at Wabash.

Universe of Options

SPARC isn’t the only option out there. Others in the academic community have weighed in with thoughtful, action-oriented solutions to help reduce journal prices and ensure wider dissemination of scientific research. University of Kansas provost David Schulenburger, for example, recently proposed the National Electronic Article Repository. Schulenburger argues that copyright agreements between authors and scholarly journals should specify that an electronic version of the author’s article is to be included in a single, publicly accessible repository after a lag time following print publication.

University of Rochester provost Charles Phelps sees separating peer review from the publication process as a way to reduce journal prices. According to Phelps, a journal’s prestige comes from the quality of the certification bestowed on its articles by the peer-review process. If certification was not held hostage to publication, he reasons, then leverage could be exerted on prices.

Similarly, National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus has proposed the creation of E-Biomed, which would alter traditional practices of copyright assignment and decouple peer review from publishing to improve the process of communicating biomedical research.

Another option put forth by many in the academic community is to reduce the emphasis on the quantity of articles published in promotion and tenure evaluations. Doing so would help reduce the number of second- and third-tier journals that deliver poor value and strain library budgets.

All of these approaches to solving the crisis in science publishing have merit, but each requires the leveling of some tough barriers. SPARC’s goal is to create new channels of scientific communication that offer libraries lower prices and better license terms. It also hopes to provide scholarly societies and independent publishers with a means of extending their services to more scholars and reducing the risks associated with creating new journals. Most important, SPARC aims to give scientists better ways to reach one another and more control over their channels of communication.

Missing Ingredient: Prestige

What’s missing here? Prestige, the most complex ingredient of all in the success of electronic journals. It can come only from the participation of highly regarded scientists and the delivery of quality products.

Prestige is not an abstract idea in the world of electronic publishing. It’s a quantifiable resource. An electronic journal gains prestige when prominent members of the field edit it, when up-and-coming faculty members contribute to it, and when members of a discipline accept it. Prestige is a factor for print journals in every discipline, of course. But the lingering perception that online journals are of lesser quality means that they have to work twice as hard to prove their worth.

Mike Rosenzweig, the University of Arizona biologist who created Evolutionary Ecology Research, has succeeded in securing a solid, positive reputation for his journal. EER carries the same cachet his former print journal had, and the same brand-name biologists publish in it. Rosenzweig, whom the New York Times christened "the poster child" of the movement to reduce journal costs, has spoken extensively about the need for more publishing options in the sciences. "EER must become the vanguard of a movement to recruit academic editors to their professional responsibilities," Rosenzweig says. He also argues for the need to educate academics. "They don’t even know about their own rights and privileges," Rosenzweig says. "When it comes to publishing, they are an uninformed herd, fed, milked, and slaughtered at will."

Like Rosenzweig, Wolfgang Sadee, editor of the electronic journal PharmSci, envisions an active, constructive role for academics concerned about journal pricing. "I accepted the role of editor-in-chief because I feel that [electronic publishing] provides a clear opportunity for the scientific community to take back responsibility and oversight for [research]," he says.

One by one, academics see the evidence and draw their own conclusions. Physicist Mark Riley of Florida State University recently protested high journal prices by resigning as a referee from Nuclear Physics A, one of the costliest journals in science. Different scientists will choose different roads. Those taking the electronic path believe it will ultimately deliver a fair solution to their disciplines. For them, recognizing and acting on the potential of electronic journals to revitalize scientific publishing is an important step forward.

Thus the electronic genesis has already extended beyond its initial seven days of creation. If the eighth day brings a shift half as radical as the first, scientific communication has a chance to remain fresh and vibrant into the next century.

Alison Buckholtz is communications manager for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). She can be reached by e-mail at alison@arl.org. SPARC’s Web address is www.cni.org/sparc.