Yesterday I mentioned the conflict between libraries and commercial vendors. One wants to collect, organize, and disseminate information. The other wants to make money. (Or, at least they usually do. This morning brought me an email from Marquette Journals, saying that in January they will begin publishing eight completely open access communication journals). That conflict is one problem that research libraries may not survive. Another problem is journal monopoly.

Almost every journal is a monopoly. This is especially true of prominent journals. A few years ago I made a presentation to a group of Princeton faculty on the economics of scholarly communication, making the argument to a diverse group that rising science journal costs can make it more difficult for humanities junior professors to get tenure. (I tried to be inclusive.) I included a slide with this:

Journals are Not a Commodity

• Can’t unsubscribe to Brain Research ($18K)
• And substitute Brain ($611)
• Or Mind ($135)
• Commercial publishers keep consolidating
• Libraries have to buy

The prices have probably gone up, but the general point is the same. Research libraries are trapped as long as certain high-priced journals are considered necessities. The best scholars usually publish in them, and larger universities have to buy them. The vendors know this. They know that without a scholarly publishing revolution many libraries are going to keep paying, no matter what the cost. I occasionally make dire pronouncements about research libraries going broke because of certain rising costs, but I don’t really think that will happen. Instead, I think rising journal costs will rise until equilibrium is achieved, and certain vendors know that even the richest libraries just can’t afford to pay any more. Then they will maintain that equilibrium as every other goal of the library is sacrificed for certain expensive parts of the collection.

Or maybe most research libraries will either go broke or just not be able to collect necessary scholarly materials. With that equilibrium argument, I was just trying to present the sunny side of the picture. Then again, perhaps there will be a revolution in scholarly communication, even if it takes a generation or two.

Science won’t be putting its back issues on JSTOR anymore, Yale has stopped supporting BioMed Central, and now the American Anthropological Association (AAA)will be moving their publications from the University of California Press to Wiley-Blackwell. All in all, it’s been a bad month for open access, more access, or cheaper access. It seems that Yale is pulling out of BioMed and the AAA is moving to Wiley-Blackwell for the same reason – money. Yale doesn’t want to pay to publish their scholars’ research, or at least not so directly, since they’ll be paying for it one way or another. The AAA makes its money from its publications, and they can make more of it through Wiley than through UC.

The AAA decision may be the right one for them. They probably will make more money. In the case of that decision, the only people likely to suffer are scholars, not the association itself. I think Yale’s decision has more potential to backfire for them. If publishing, especially STM publishing, continues to be dominated by commercial publishers, prices will continue to go up. I’ve heard librarians complain that commercial vendors don’t seem to be good citizens, or something like that. The problem isn’t that they aren’t good citizens. And the problem isn’t that they don’t provide good content. The problem is that commercial vendors and scholarly institutions have two different goals. Scholars want to disseminate their research and libraries want to provide access to that research if they can. Commercial vendors want to make money. I don’t see a problem with making money, and I’d certainly like to make more of it myself, but there’s bound to be conflicts of interest. And as costs go up and libraries get strapped for cash, some research will be less available.

A commenter on the IHE AAA article notes that he doesn’t understand the negative reaction, because increasingly even commercial journal publishers are allowing authors to place their articles in institutional repositories and the like. He notes that the UC Press and Wiley are “both are “Green” on author Open Access self-archiving, meaning they have both endorsed immediate self-archiving of the author’s final, accepted draft (postprint) in the author’s Institutional Repository, providing immediate Open Access to the article.” It’s a thoughtful comment with many supporting links, but I still think librarians and scholars should have a problem. First, not every institution has an institutional repository. Second, libraries are still going to have to subscribe to the journals as long as they can afford to, at least at research libraries. The commenter argues that the “62% of deposits that are immediately made OA will soon draw the 38% that are Closed Access deposits over to their ranks under the natural pressure of research usage and impact alone.” Possibly. But if “green” commercial publishers aren’t making enough profit, how likely is it that they will stay green? If no one subscribes to the journals because pre- or post prints are available in repositories, will the journal continue to exist? And if it doesn’t, how will universities adapt?

I once heard an anecdote that I hope is mythical, but perhaps not. A consortium of 10 libraries were paying $10K/year for some science journal. They told the publisher that 9 of them were going to cancel their subscriptions and split the last subscription, and maintain access through ILL. The publisher said fine. The remaining subscription would now be $100K/year. It may or may not have happened, but it could happen.

JSTOR announced last week that they won’t continue to digitize Science, because “after a very productive association of nearly 10 years, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has decided to discontinue its relationship with JSTOR, effective December 31, 2007.” JSTOR customers will continue to have access to what has already been digitized (1880-2002), but the previously moving wall won’t move anymore. For many, perhaps most, academic libraries, JSTOR is a model of a dependable, space-saving, archive. I know a lot of libraries have moved their JSTOR-archived issues offsite or weeded them completely. I’m assuming this won’t be the norm for JSTOR journals, but what if?

This raises concerns for me about the future of digital archives. JSTOR has done a great job and now has an outstanding collection of journals in many areas, but unless the future lies with JSTOR-type projects and non-commercial digitization projects, scholars will eventually be the ones suffering. Any one particular journal is relatively unimportant, but it is still an example of an unfortunate development for academic libraries. Today Science, tomorrow everything else, and then we’re done for.

A related concern is the future of science journals in general. I have a feeling the AAAS will be coming out with their own backfile package like some other journals have done, and many libraries will subscribe. The AAAS isn’t commercial, but their move still bodes ill for libraries. Commercial science journal publishers seem to be under the impression they can do whatever they like and large academic libraries will just fork over more money to them. Given the difficulty libraries have had in resisting the large increases in STM serial prices in the last decade and the only moderate success of establishing non-commercial, open access, peer-reviewed journals that garner the same respect among publishing researchers as some of the most expensive commercial journals, it seems unlikely that libraries will be able or willing to resist more of this kind of thing in the future. And yet it should be obvious to everyone that the current science publishing model is probably unsustainable. Even if 100% of acquisitions budgets were dedicated to STM serials, eventually the price increases would outstrip the budget increases.

The current model of much academic research is just bizarre. Either university or public monies go to fund a lot of scientific research that is published in journals that the universities then have to subscribe to at often exorbitant rates that usually climb faster than the rate of inflation or library budget increases. In the case of public universities, the public funds the research, and then has to buy it back. I could never see how this benefits anyone but the journal publishers.

An article in the most recent C&RL examines a couple of arguments behind the open access movement. “Does Open Access Really Make Sense? A Closer Look at Chemistry, Economics, and Mathematics,” by John C. Navin and Jay Starratt, concludes: “The case made that public funded research needs to be fully accessible is, at least intuitively, one of the most satisfying arguments. Clearly there is considerable public funding supporting the research published in the journals we examined. Even in our lowest publicly supported field, economics, nearly one third of the published research articles acknowledged public funding.” (According to their results, 59% of chemistry articles, 31% or economics articles, and 59% of mathematics articles specifically acknowledge public funding.)

I’m obviously conflating a number of issues here, but only because they seemed connected to me. One journal pulling out of JSTOR is not a catastrophe, though we can certainly hope it’s not the wave of the future. And the AAAS isn’t a commercial publishing venture like Elsevier or Wiley. But the discontinuation of the relationship between JSTOR and the AAAS could very well be another symptom of a disease that will eventually kill library budgets.