From a letter to The New York Times, March 7, 1999.
Not only are universities forced to pay unbelievably high prices for scientific journals (news article, March 3) but they also face the ignominy of buying back the research their own scientists have produced. They use university (and quite often, Federal) money, yet scientists must sign over all copyrights to publishers to get their research published.
The publisher of a scientific journal pays nothing for the articles, and its other costs are minor: the journal editor usually receives a small stipend, and the article reviewers are volunteers.
Considering the actual costs in producing a scientific journal, the prices charged can appear obscene...
According to an article in The New York Review of Books (March 18, 1999), because of the increase in the prices of journals, the percentages that university libraries spend on monographs and journals has gone from about 50-50 to about 25-75 in recent years. This accounts in large part for the dramatic drop in the sales of scholarly monographs.
From The New York Times, November 3, 2000.
The average price of a subscription to a scholarly journal has more than tripled in the last 14 years. To keep up, libraries now buy fewer new books than they did a decade ago, diminishing the market for books of all kinds. [In 1999 dollars, the median spending on academic journals went from under $3 million to over $4 million between 1990 and 1999, while spending on books declined from about $1.6 million to $1.4 million.]
Until the 1960's, scores of smaller companies and nonprofit organizations published a vast majority of journals. Since then, a handful of companies led by Reed Elsevier have acquired the bulk of them and have aggressively raised subscription prices...
[Robert Maxwell, owner of Pergamon Press] was among the first to see that scientific journals could potentially yield windfall profits...
Many journal publishers report operating profit margins of nearly 40 per cent of revenue...
Since 1986 ... libaries cut the number of their serials subscriptions by 6 percent. They cut the number of books they buy each year by 26 percent...
"The current system is dysfunctional," Mr. Brand said. "We pay faculty members to undertake research, and then we buy it back. We pay twice."
From the Guardian Weekly, August 7-13, 2003.
Despite snags with individual courses, open courseware already gives
students at any university access to basic MIT courses.
However, [Steven] Pinker sees a risk that the internationalisation of
knowledge may not bring any increase in democracy. One reason is the high cost
of scientific journals. Contributors, including himself, have to pay to have
their own work published, and do all the refereeing gratis. Pinker is "fed up"
with all of this money going from libraries to publishers, and thinks the "huge
prices" are keeping journals out of the reach of third world university
libraries, and hence of "bright kids in Africa and India". Computers have
changed the nature of publication, and he sees a revolt coming, beginning with
the mass resignation of academic staff from journals.
For a webpage devoted to providing information on the open access (free online scholarship) movement, see Open access