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Higher noon

The all new and improved PhD-diarist is now back from moving houses and is well on the way to catching up with work that has been neglected of late and thus can spend some time making up for the lack of entries here. Although work has suffered quite considerably from all of the recent distractions, progress is being made towards the end of year report which is due in October, the first part of which is a reasonable proof that is setting on my desk, waiting to be edited. But it can wait just a touch longer whilst I consider the latest edition of Higher Noon.

Higher Noon is the twice-weekly newsletter from The Guardian and is generally a good read that helps me catch-up with what is going on the higher education sector. I thoroughly recommend it (and the paper's other email services) to anyone with an email address.

This week's first issue has an interesting article on the price of subscriptions to academic journals, or more what is to be done about the massive subscription rates charged by publishing companies:

"Faced with the escalating cost of journals for academic libraries, the House of Commons science and technology committee is urging all UK universities to set up their own repositories to store their published research and make it available online free of charge."

Of course, this sort of suggestion doesn't go down too well with people like Sir Crispin Davis, which is to say those folks that have more than a vested interest in such matters:

"The rise of open access publishing of scientific research could jeopardise the entire academic publishing industry, according to the chief executive of Reed Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of scientific journals. Writing in the company's in-house Review newsletter, Sir Crispin Davis warned that asking researchers to pay for their work to be published but then making it freely available on the internet 'could jeopardise the stable, scalable and affordable system of publishing that currently exists'."

An interesting point that Sir Davis raises, there. Presumably, however, he hasn't been to the library at the University of Surrey of late to try and find recent issues of mathematical journals that would help members of the maths department with their research. On a recent trip, I could not find any one of four academic papers I was looking for because the library could no longer afford to maintain subscriptions to the journals in question. Thus, I spent a great deal of time looking at MathSciNet and other online repositories in order to find the papers I required. In fact, at great cost to the University library, I decided to request an inter-library loan in order to get my hands on a paper that would help with my studies. Let me be honest when I say that I do not blame the library for their lack of a subscription: if publishers think that they can charge whatever they like for their journals under the assumption that customers (i.e. university and other librarires) will have to buy them, then the customer cannot be ascribed any blame. I'll be the first to admit that I've had a good moan before about the library, but such complaints deal with their practices and not their circumstances.

How much do journals cost? This plea, written in 1997, gives a detailed analysis of the prices of American mathematical journals, their printers and the money spent by American universities in subscription and purchasing rates, in this case being $70m (in 1991) - roughly equal to the budget for mathematics of a large national scientific organisation charged with promoting the mathematical sciences. Note that:

"The lowest priced journals tend to be those produced by universities (e.g. Indiana, Michigan, Pacific J.) or societies (e.g. AMS, Assoc for Symbolic Logic, SIAM), and the highest priced are those published by commercial publishers (e.g. Springer, Elsevier)."

Of which company is Sir Crispin Davis the chief executive? Why, it's Elsevier - one highlighterd for charging up to 10 times as much for their journals as others.

When Sir Davis laments that making papers freely available on the internet "could jeopardise the stable, scalable and affordable system of publishing that currently exists" I have little sympathy for him: I consider the "system of publishing" to which he refers a great barrier to the promulgation of new ideas and knowledge — the fundamentals of academia. If authors published their papers such that they were freely available online, it is not the academic community that would suffer — it is the publishing companies.

Posted by rich at 13:03 in PGs in the HE sector