Tag Archives: academic journal subscription

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“Academic Journals and the Price of Knowledge”, Future Tense, radio program on Radio National, ABC.
Interviews are held with, amongst others, Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Harvard University, and Dr Tyler Neylon, Mathematician and organiser of the ‘cost of knowledge’ petition and website.

Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims

Open access will bankrupt us, publishers’ report claims

A report for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers (ALPSP) and The Publishers Association claims that the impact on all publishers’ revenues would be considerable. The findings of the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project announced it had found no evidence that the self-archiving of academic papers threatened journal viability.

Legislative bill that would increase access to academic journals is pending in U.S. Congress

Legislative bill that would increase access to academic journals is pending in U.S. Congress

University of Colorado: Initiative is advocating for a legislative bill that, if passed by Congress, would make academic journals more accessible in the sense that tax-funded research shouldn’t be bought back by students. In 2011, CU library spent $7.5 million on serials.

Essentially, the legislation would expand the National Institutes of Health public access policy — which already guarantees that research funded by the NIH will be accessible to the public — to additional agencies, including departments of defense, agriculture, education, commerce, health and human services, homeland security and transportation. It would also apply to the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Public sector saves £28 million through open access, but much greater rewards to come, says report

Public sector saves £28 million through open access, but much greater rewards to come, says report

The UK public sector spends £135 million a year, made up of subscriptions and time spent trying to find articles, accessing the journal papers it needs to perform effectively. Each extra 5% of journal papers accessed via open access on the web would save the public purse £1.7 million, even if no subscription fees were to be saved. 

The UK’s valuable voluntary and charitable sector would also benefit from open access to academic research. For survey respondents, the two most frequently mentioned barriers to accessing research were cost (80%) and lack of time (46%).

20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

Michael Eisen writes about the opportunities universities have missed.

Universities should have stopped paying for subscriptions, forcing publishers to adopt alternative economic models. And they should have started to reshape the criteria for hiring, promotion and tenure, so that current and aspiring faculty did not feel compelled to publish in journals that were bankrupting the system.