Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 15 2020, @05:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday February 16 2020, @03:50AM

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Sunday February 16 2020, @03:50AM (#958681) Journal

    There are already respected zero-fee open access journals like Chemical Science [rsc.org], sponsored by an academic society. I expect that in the future, journals like this will gain prestige, because getting published there is equivalent to winning a several thousand dollar prize (the cost of publishing in a run-of-the-mill open-access journal). Academics love prizes. Even though such a journal loses money for the publisher, it can work economically as a loss-leader.

    In that future, the best journals will be zero-fee and open access, while authors of lesser work will need to pay a publication fee. But that fee will drop as scientists push for lower pricing, and publications become more efficient. The current system where much of the publication cost is born by one group (libraries) while another group (authors) decides where to publish leads to perverse economics. That's why the journals like it so much.

    Publishers like Nature may be planning for this already with the huge number of Nature Specialization journals they started in the last 15 years. Researchers submit their best work to Nature, and rejection letters often include the option to forward the paper to one of those specialized journals, which is easy because the manuscript is already in the system. In the future, those specialized journals with their huge article count will be the money makers, and Nature, which doesn't accept many articles anyway, can be zero-fee.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Interesting=3, Informative=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5