One of my most popular posts, the one on Amy Bishop’s open access publishing, made use of the google cache to cite evidence that the publisher had removed from their web site.  Similarly, the Internet Archive, AKA the wayback machine,by maintaining a history of periodically sampling websites, allows librarians to do things such as….find out what a publisher charged for an e-journal title or package some time in the past.

The case in point I want to focus on in this post is the announcement by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) of their expected 2012 subscription costs.  This was done very forthrightly in a very public forum, the MEDLIB-L electronic discussion list I was reading in my openbiomed email inbox. As the message I was reading  is found in a publicly-accessible archive, and this is in fact a marketing attempt and not a contractual negotiation or any kind of privileged information (email going to thousands of  librarians will hardly remain privileged or private), I wanted to share the good news that was being spread:

RSC Publishing would like to announce pricing for 2012. We’ve achieved over 150% growth in international quality content in last three years with 70+ countries contributing published articles. This growth has been supported by well thought out price increases reflective of customer feedback, increases in costs related to the growth in quality content, and changes in the global economy.

If you followed the URLs provided by this publisher’s Library Marketing Specialist, you could eventually find the price list for 2012.   I decided to check the the wayback machine to see if we could find the pricing from previous years.  In fact,  the archive.org page for RSC tells us that

“http://www.rsc.org has been crawled 417 times going all the way back to January 27, 1998.”

This is not a perfect system, as there are billions of possible web pages that can potentially be sampled, and certainly most sites are not sampled every day or even every month. But you can usually find something intriguing from the past, and I found an RSC price list for 2010, giving me and you a two-year range of comparison for price increases.  So here the 2010 and 2012 prices for some packages and journals, as well as the percentage price increase over two years:

So you can see that my sample of 2010 and  2012 list prices for a few packages and individual journals shows 2-year increases ranging from 15% – 34%. The publisher explains that cost increases are necessary: “increases in costs related to the growth in quality content, and changes in the global economy.”

Back in 2007  an RSC publication, Chemistry World, published an article “Chemistry’s open access dilemma” reflecting the ambiguity of their readership.  RSC has also implemented an Open Science initiative which allowed authors to pay a gold open access fee to make their article available.   Of course, this open option still requires authors to assign RSC the exclusive right to do all the official publishing, while granting authors some personal deposit alternatives.

How do librarians feel about the price increases above?  Do you accept the publisher’s rationalization? Please post a blog comment, if you desire…  You can also send me email (charles dot greenberg at openbiomed dot info), and I would be happy to reprint your comments anonymously in my next post.

Many readers know I am a medical librarian, and many readers have met me at Medical Library Association (MLA) activities.  Medical libraries are valued for making health information accessible, organized, and useful,  and one prominent role for academic and hospital libraries is the collection management role:  providing campus-wide institutional access that can tempt and often succeed in influencing clinicians or researchers to drop their individual print or electronic subscriptions.

During the last decade, on a large campus like mine, there might be hundreds of individual personal and department journal titles that were cancelled  in favor of a single, library managed  electronic subscription.  It is no secret that the centralized role that medical libraries have played as the institutional subscription of record has also produced an ongoing  serials crisis as costs for institutional library subscriptions have expanded exponentially, as publishers struggle to adopt their business model to the reality of fewer individual subscriptions .

As the serials crisis looms for library budgets,  researchers around the world have increasingly recognized that in the environment of electronic publishing and knowledge distribution,  the frequency that other researchers can access and cite your work depends on the consistency of access to your published research.  If  libraries trim their subscriptions in the process of the cost cutting demanded, institutional repositories and open access journals become attractive alternatives for authors.

Eventually, medical libraries themselves recognize the role that open access journals might play in their subscription and budgeting process.  Last spring , an MLA Ad Hoc Committee for Advocating Scholarly Communications developed a survey focusing on the impact of open access initiatives on journal collection development decisions. The survey gathered data about cancellations of journals that have open or public access content. Results could serve as a basis for future study. When the widely distributed survey closed on June 18, 2010, a total of 222 respondents had participated. As the survey was not limited to MLA members, the results present a broader statement about medical library opinion in general.

The results of this survey have just been published in MLA News November/December 2010, Volume 50, Issue 10 (available to MLA membership with MLA ID login).   Fortunately, you can read the report and analysis on MLAnet.

On July 29th, Allan Adler, Vice President of government and legal affairs at the Association of American Publishers (AAP), told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Information Policy, Census, and National Archives Subcommittee that FRPAA would seriously threaten the scholarly publishing industry:

“Publishers strongly believe that American taxpayers are entitled to the research they’ve paid for. As taxpayers ourselves collectively and individually, everyone in this room has paid for government‐funded research, and the data and summary reports that result from this research. But taxpayers have not paid for the private sector, peer‐reviewed journal articles reporting on that research.”

I suppose Mr. Adler is attempting to represent the traditional role of publishers that produce print and electronic journals with independent editorial oversight and marketing, most of which reach a public or private readership via a private or institutional subscription.

The problem with making such a one-size-fits-all statement is that it misses the point that both state universities and public libraries that subscribe to either print or electronic journals are using public taxation resources in their budget to provide shared public access to biomedical journal articles, via institutional journal subscriptions or aggregated article service providers.   Taxpayers are paying again.

Additionally, at nearly every non-public academic medical center, including my own employer,  where I regularly assist consumers looking for health information, costly subscription license agreements allow on-site journal access to visitors, providing public access to consumers seeking current information on health care research.

Public libraries and schools send their consumers or students to health sciences libraries for access to emerging health information.  A public librarian’s first thought is not whether their local medical center library is public or private.

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access, a coalition of patient groups, physicians, researchers, educational institutions, publishers, and health promotion organizations,  has a growing list of institutional members, which also includes the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL).

Academic health sciences libraries understand the serials crisis and the issue of taxpayer access.  Individual researchers drop their personal subscriptions to journals and depend on shared library-subscribed access.  AAHSL provides relevant links to allow libraries to understand the issues of open access.  Taxpayers are paying once for NIH research…and many libraries are paying again.

The Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO), published by the American Society of Clinical Oncology(ASCO), is considered a top shelf medical journal, ranked 4th for impact in oncology by the current Journal Citation Reports.  JCO follows the historical standard of requiring assignment of author’s copyright to the publisher upon article acceptance.  Authors submit manuscripts with the understanding that, if accepted, the copyright of the article, including the right to reproduce the article in all forms and media, shall be assigned exclusively to ASCO. Posting articles on institutional repositories is prohibited.

The leadership of JCO certainly believe in their mission and want their journal to remain respected and useful to the clinical oncology research community. Here’s how they tell it, in very nice suits.

From the medical library viewpoint, the 2010 cost for a JCO institutional subscription is somewhere in the middle, neither cheap nor expensive, though some hospital libraries would be hard pressed to pay:

What if you are at a hospital that cannot afford a subscription to JCO?  To view a full-text article without a subscription, you can purchase access to the article for 24 hours at a cost of $19.00 per article.

By the way, ASCO had an extremely good year in 2009, ending up with a $7,800,000 surplus and net assets of nearly $50,000,000:

Excerpt from ASCO 2009 Annual Report

Yes, cancer care and research is big business. Now, before you start to think that those ASCO assets are going into ASCO-sponsored scholarships and research funding, you should be reminded that  there is an independently-operated ASCO Cancer Foundation which raises research funds and distributes grants and scholarships.

So what does the ASCO do with a $7,800,000 surplus and net assets of nearly $50,000,000?

According to the video you might have just watched above, their flagship journal JCO wants to be “the one journal that every hematologist/oncologist has to read.” So what if the cost of that journal’s subscription prevented some hematologist/oncologists in certain hospitals from reading it?  I bet there are plenty of oncologists that understand the critical nature of their research findings and would be willing to use a portion of their grant funding to publish in author-fee based open access journal, the more prestigious and noticed by colleagues, the better. PLoS gold open access has made this point.

My modest proposal is that ASCO use some of its prosperity to fund an experiment in gold open access and test the waters for those that are willing to pay for universal access to their results.  Perhaps even price this gold experiment with the additional waiver of copyright assignment and permission to place the paper on an institutional repository.

There are certainly many major publishers that are trying to maintain revenue while testing the waters of the rising tide of open access with a model such as this.

From the ARL SPARC press release:

Washington, DC – The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.
The Subcommittee’s interest stems from the growing number of visible expressions of interest in the issue of public access that have surfaced in recent months, in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Notably, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year hosted a Public Access Policy Forum on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information.
Additionally, H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which was introduced into the House on April 15 by Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) and is supported by a growing bi-partisan host of cosponsors, was referred to the Committee. The bill, and its identical Senate counterpart (introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)), proposes to require those eleven federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to implement policies that deliver timely, free, online public access to the published results of the research they fund.

========= END SPARC PRESS RELEASE==============

Want to see the arguments that the commercial sector will take? They are going to try to kill the House bill H.R. 5037 with this kind of argument:

• the government to become a competitor of independent publishers operating within the private sector in a well-established marketplace.
• Duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities published in scholarly journals.
• It would require the affected federal agencies to develop and maintain costly electronic repositories.
• Agencies will need to divert millions of dollars away from federal research grants and towards database costs.

The letter that the opposition published in the DCPrinciples web site, signed by:

Acoustical Society of America
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Association of Anatomists
American Association for Cancer Research
American Association for Clinical Chemistry
American Association for Dental Research
American Association of Immunologists
American Association of Physics Teachers
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American College of Clinical Pharmacology
American College of Radiology
American Dairy Science Association
American Dental Association
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Institute of Physics
American Medical Association
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
American Psychological Association
American Physiological Society
American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists
American Roentgen Ray Society
American Society of Animal Science
American Society of Agronomy
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
American Society for Investigative Pathology
American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
American Society of Plant Biologists
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
AVS–Science &Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing
Cambridge University Press
Crop Science Society of America
Elsevier
The Endocrine Society
Entomological Society of America
European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Genetics Society of America
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
International Association for Dental Research
International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB)
John Wiley and Sons
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
The McGraw-Hill Companies
Mycological Society of America
The Optical Society
Oxford University Press
The Physiological Society
Poultry Science Association

So it has come down to special interests promising to honor and protect the public interest, even as libraries continue to drop subscriptions from many of these publishers (some public libraries do not have a single journal from any of these publishers).  Does the current system work?   Will we be better off with more open access or with the status quo?

Time for you to contact congress or plan to be in DC on July 27th.

On June 4th the University of California Library System issued a very public complaint about Nature Publishing Group‘s proposed triple-digit increase in institutional subscription costs, coupled with a threat of author and editorial boycott by faculty.

On June 24th, David Carlson, the Dean of Library Affairs at Southern Illinois University(SIU), Carbondale, and Associate Dean Connie Poole at the SIU School of Medicine, Springfield, issued a memo to their own faculty regarding the recent NPG controversy with California State University Libraries.

Here are the major recommendations to SIU faculty on the Carbondale and Springfield campuses, if you don’t have time to read the entire memo:

• Be aware of the financial value of the work you contribute when you write, review, and edit articles.
• Whenever possible, choose to publish in journals with equitable business models – open-access journals, or those with reasonably priced subscriptions.
• Assert your rights as an author. Negotiate with publishers for better control of and broader access to your published work through an author addendum such as the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum (http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/).
• Place a copy of your work in SIU’s digital repository, OpenSIUC, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. This will not only be a positive contribution, but will advance the visibility, impact, and reach of your research.
• This past year, the SIU Faculty Senate and Graduate Council endorsed a resolution for faculty to support Open Access. A second resolution called for faculty to “grant SIUC permission to make his or her scholarly journal articles… openly accessible in OpenSIUC.” Support this effort and provide your permission when you are surveyed in the Fall.

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., has decided to offer an open access option for publications like the Journal of Neurotrauma.  Most, if not all Liebert journals offer authors of accepted articles the opportunity to post their work  free online with immediate unrestricted open access for a $3,000 fee. Subsequent articles using the open access option will receive a 50% discount ($1,500). Authors from an organization that has an Institutional Membership (an e-license for the entire Liebert Online journal collection) also pay the reduced Open Option fee of $1,500 for all articles.  The open access option does not effect the author’s obligation to assign copyright for the article and its distribution to Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

So who chooses the open option?  Three articles in the May 2010 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma are marked for free access:

Juan Lu, Anthony Marmarou, Kate Lapane, Elizabeth Turf, Lindsay Wilson.  Journal of Neurotrauma. May 2010, 27(5): 843-852.

#3: Intensive Care Medicine (Springer) Springer provides an open access option called Springer Open Choice. In this model, authors do not have to transfer copyright, and immediate PubMedCentral deposit can take place. The fee Springer asks for is US$3000 (EU$2000).

#2: Critical Care Medicine (Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins) There is no open access option for authors, and this journal is not represented in PubMedCentral.

#1: American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (American Thoracic Society)  There is no open access option for authors; however, this journal is represented in PubMedCentral.

Out of these five top journals, three offer some degree of or provision for open access.  For critical care medicine, open access is certainly worth considering.

An objective summary of  EBSCO journal subscription price records for academic medical journals (2005-2009 Journal Price History) shows an average 40% increase for the past five years.

Last year, the Medical Library community issued a Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and its Impact on Health Sciences Library Collections which called to both publisher and public attention to “the cost of STM (scientific, technical and medical) journals has risen disproportionately higher than other fields, and certainly higher than the vast majority of budget increases in health sciences libraries… the purchasing power and flexibility to build diverse collections suited to institutional needs have steadily eroded in health sciences libraries.”

Publishers seemed to have heard the distress in their customer base.  Many biomedical journal publishers have provided assurances that there will be no annual price increases in 2010.

In the U.K., where green repository access is seen as a sensible long range investment, the system of paid subscription to knowledge is known as toll access:

Set up an institutional repository of biomedical  pre- or post-print papers, theses, or open curriculum, and you wonder:  how will my content be discovered? A very elegant solution exists called OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).

The original specifications for the OAI-PMH emerged from a coalition of web visionaries and programmers from both the Coalition for Networked Information and the Digital Library Federation. These partners, aided by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, established  Open Archives Initiative (OAI)   in October 1999 to address problems of discovery and interoperability for author self-archiving repositories .

The OAI-PMH emerged from the original OAI consortium as both a way for repositories to expose there deposited object metadata records to other servers that would harvest (or collect) the metadata  descriptive records in an archive, in turn providing searching functionality for these and many other aggregated records from many archives and repositories.  The metadata-based search result from a service provider provides a link back to the archive where the actual object or document is found.   Because the search engine is only “light-weight” metadata records and not whole objects,  the time spent searching is minimal.  The full text or object is only a click away in the result list.

OAI registered service providers that provide searching of metadata records of archives and repositories include Scientific Commons, OAIster (fed into WorldCat), The Norwegian Open Research Archives (NORA), and SCIRUS.

There is a great and nearly comprehensive directory of actual archives that expose and allow harvesting of their records at the University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider Registry.  Among the more than 2300 registered and functional repositories, several exist for biomedicine:

• Washington University School of Medicine Digital Repository
• eResearch at Queen Margaret University
• Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

The Date: May 25th, 2004

The Place: Washington, DC

The Event: Medical Library Association Annual Meeting

The Moment: Business Meeting Pt II

There can be no Sancho Panza without a Don Quixote,  or a Dulcinea.  I was sitting next to my Don,  Wayne Peay,  as a new editor of the first open access medical library journal.  I had been pulling together a team and preparing to write my first editorial prior to the annual meeting.   Wayne had come to the conference determined to show leadership in the simmering debate about the risks and rewards of open access, and he had chosen a normally placid and routine business meeting.

I found my Don in the auditorium.  He had a twinkle in his eye, and I asked if the seat next to him was taken, and he implied that I needed to be in that seat at this moment.   The story is in the official proceedings for the meeting.  MLA President Patricia Thibodeau asked “Is there any other new business to come before the assembly?”  Wayne rose and moved to the floor microphone and spoke:

“My name is Wayne Peay. I am at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and I would like to offer the following motion: The Medical Library Association will cease accepting funding from publishers who do not support open access. And I have a second.”

Well, I wish it had been me, but Wayne had already arranged for a colleague, future MLA President Mary Ryan.  Then the consent was given for Wayne to speak in support of his motion:

“This is Wayne again. First of all, I would appreciate the opportunity to present this motion and the assistance I receive from the board and the leadership and the staff. I would like to begin by reminding us of the first principle of our Code of Ethics. The health sciences librarian promotes access to health information for all. To be true to our professional values, we must champion open access.