Scientists Balk At Soaring Journal Prices

In 1984 an annual subscription to Leukemia Research cost a library $160. It’s now $540. In 1985 a year’s worth of Gene was $627.40. This year it’s $1,870. Computers and Structures was $425 in 1983. Today’s rate:, $1,425. Brain Research, a weekly, is now priced at $5,080 per year. “Price gouging,” says Duane Webster, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). “Devastating,” says Michael Keller, an associate librarian at the Sterling Library at Yale University. And Chuck Hamaker, director of the Louisiana State University library, declares that the trend is “horrendous.” The price of professional science journal is skyrocketing, forcing librarians to cancel subscriptions to old titles and declare moratoriums on accepting new ones. Meanwhile, the researchers who depend on these journals are worried about the free flow of scientific information. They also see the rising unavailability of certain journals hampering their work. As one scientist says, chance insights often depend on wide readout the important information out of all the noise.” Others see the coming scarcity of journals as limiting the opportunities for research into new fields. Much of this recent alarm has been sparked by ARL, which last year commissioned two studies of journal prices and discovered that they had been rising far faster than the estimated publishing costs. In May, the groups annual meeting in Providence, RJ., turned stormy as one librarian after another declared war on commercial publishers, especially the four that were scrutinized in the ARL report: Plenum, Per- gamon, ier, and Springer-Verlag. One ARL study found that the median price of purchased serials had jumped 32% from 1986 to 1988, to $115. Publishers deny the charges of price gouging, saying that an increase in the size of the journals and, in the case of the foreign journals, the devaluation of the dollar in the 1980s are responsible for the higher subscription prices. Nevertheless, the two ARL studies suggested that the organization create an office that would compile and distribute information about the costs of specific titles, so that its members know which publications are the least cost-effective. The librarians also intend to explore non-profit alternatives to the conventional means of distributing scientific information. And, responding to the swelling size of the publications, the librarians will urge the scientific community to pay more attention to the quality of papers, rather than the quantity, in determining career advancement. A specific plan is to be-decided at the ARL Board of Director meeting in Washington this week. A study by The Scientist on the impact of journals within the scientific community (see “Commentary” on page 12 and a related story on page 14) shows that some of the ones most criticized by the librarians have little or modest consequence on science. For example, Computers and Structures, published by the Oxford-based Pergamon Press, ranks 88th among journals in its field when measured by impact, that is, the extent to which a journal’s articles are cited. Brain Research and Leukemia Research each ranks 27th in its respective field. (These rankings include review journals, which generally garner more citations than those that publish original research reports.) Another study, performed by Paul Ribbe, a geologist and former president of the Mineralogy Society of America surveyed 17 major journals in mineralogy, petrology, and geochemistry and rated citations versus price (Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference of the Nbrth American Serials Interest Group, in press). He found an enormous discrepancy: While the cost per article for the professional society journals ranged from 63 cents to $3.21, the commercial journals charged between $4.29 and $10.48. An earlier study, done by Henry Barschall for Physics Today (July 1988, page 56), also rated cost versus impact, criticizing the commercial publishers. For scientists, the principal concern is that high costs directly affect availability, and hence research. Henry V. Huang, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis, says that as journals become scarce, “the scientist definitely loses.” Huang’s departmental library has canceled its subscription to Gene and another “budget-buster,” The Journal of Molecular Biology (which costs $1,368 per year, and ranks 12th in impact among serials in biochemistry and molecular biology). Huang, who has published in Gene and considers it especially important for learning about new techniques, says he can still read the journal in the School of Medicine library, but, “if you ‘want to see something, you want to see it soon.” He says that without these publications at hand, “you’re going to miss a lot of the collateral stuff you'd find through browsing.” LSU, which has more than 26,000 students, about a quarter of whom are studying science, is an example of the extent of the libraries’ problems. Hamaker says his library has added $350,000 to its serials budget in the last two years—and was still forced to cancel about 200 titles, including the Analyst (from the Royal Society of Chemists), Experimental Eye Research, and a number of Plenum journals, including Petroleum and Chemical Engineering. Three percent of Hamaker’s titles account for 25% of his $1.6 million annual serials expenditure. In turn, LSU’s serials budget represents twice as much as the library spends on books. As recently as the 1985-1986 academic term, the money LSU spent on serials and the money it spent on books was about equal. Other libraries report similar ailments Yale cut $110,000 worth of science subscriptions last year. Ado Landolt an astronomer at LSU, says serials unavailable at his university library can usually be obtained from other libraries, but “you can’t do your research in as timely a fashion. You really have to lay your work aside until you get the article. It’s a terrible way to do science.” The delays in getting materials through interlibrary loan is frustrating enough, but for some scientists, the quality of faxes or photocopies usually delivered by this service is of no use at all. For instance, Leo Hickey, a Yale biologist who studies the evolution of flowering plants, says that no copier can effectively reproduce the high-resolution photographs that provide him with vital structural data. Faculty committees often advise academic libraries on which journals to keep, but the participating scientists say their representation isn’t enough. Hickey belongs to one such group at Yale, but fears “journal erosion” in fields not represented by him and the group’s other members, like the study of algae and the non-vascular lower land plants. Because certain journals are unavailable on campus, he suggests, “we’re focusing research into more narrow concerns.” His graduate students and postdocs are likely to be discouraged from entering disciplines in which the on-campus source material is weak, he says. “It’s a bad thing for science, because science is so damned serendipitous. You don’t know what the next direction for re search will be, but you can be sure it will be something we’re not doing now.” Hamaker adds that LSU’s library hasn’t bought a new serials title In three years—which means that-research in hot new fields, like high- temperature superconductivity, is under represented in its collection. Many librarians are looking for ways to avoid costly subscriptions by using telecomniunications systems. They look forward to the day when the researcher will have access to a peer-reviewed archive,through which he or she could easily browse and then choose papers of interest. One university library plans to have an experimental network communicating mathematics research on-line by this fall. Meanwhile the commercial presses have also made attempts to diversify the delivery of information. Several have joined forces in an experimental system called Adonis, which is being tested in 12 libraries around the world. The system offers the full text of 200 biomedical journals on CD-ROM. The publishers deny that the journals have become, as one librarian puts it, “cash cows.” Karen Hunter, vice president and assistant to the chairman at ier, the Dutch owned firm that publishes Gene says the increases in their subscription prices are due in part to the growth in the number of pages being published. Hunter says that, when Gene was first published in 1977, it was 400 pages a year. By 1980, its size was four times that. ier increased the size of the page, but by 1985 the number of pages had doubled again. Gene expects to publish’ more than 4,000 pages this year. Hunter adds that the rush of new information sometimes forces publishers to take a loss for publishing larger issues than anticipated. In addition to blaming the information glut, publishers point to the devaluation of the dollar in the mid-1980s for the rise in foreign journal prices. The dollar’s return to strengthshould moderate ier’s 1990 prices, which Hunter predicts. Will increase by about 9.5% in Dutch guilders. But librarians remain worried. As Yale’s Michael’ Keller says, the rise in journal prices is “a concern, and not only for our scientists but for us librarians as the custodians of the future.”

Scientists Balk At Soaring Journal Prices

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