British Research Libraries Draw Line in Sand Over Journal Pricing
By Michael Kelley Jul 28, 2011Research Libraries UK (RLUK), which represents 30 British research libraries, is pledging to cut through "the barbed wire thrown up by journal publishers around scholarly research."
David Prosser, the group's executive director, wrote the above phrase in a letter to the Guardian newspaper on April 8, and in a previous article in March he reported that the group "would not support future journal Big Deals unless [publishers] showed real price reductions."
Compromising capacity for research
After its annual conference last November, the group instructed JISC Collections, which negotiates with publisher on behalf of the UK higher education sector, that it should "secure contracts which will not only rescind the unreasonable price rises of the last three years, but also offer affordable deals for the future."
Prosser wrote that the library community has to be prepared to walk away from unacceptable deals, because without price reductions libraries will have to cancel a significant number of subscriptions "which will fatally compromise the UK's capacity for research.".
"The reluctance to do so in the past has caused many of the problems that we see today," he wrote.
As library budgets shrink, Prosser wrote that publishers such as John Wiley & Sons and Reed Elsevier are profiting from a dysfunctional market "whereby customers respond weakly to price changes ... because journals and their articles are 'non-substitutable.' "
On June 16, Wiley, based in Hoboken, New Jersey, reported for the quarter ended April 30 a net profit of $28.6 million, up from $28 million, a year earlier.
"STMS (science, technical, medical and scholarly) continues to navigate well through a tight library and corporate budget environment, thanks to the outstanding quality of our content and relationships," Stephen Smith, Wiley's president and CEO, said in June.
Reed Elsevier reported today that its net profit was up 19 percent in the first half of 2011, to 434 million euros ($623 million), but total revenue was down three percent to 3.34 billion euros year-on-year.
"The first half has seen the growth trajectory improve with our large subscription and data revenues strengthening and most of our cyclical businesses recovering," said Erik Engstrom, Reed Elsevier's CEO.
Prosser noted that big deals have been rising at twice the rate of inflation over the past decade.
"Some larger universities now pay over £1m per year to access content from individual publishers, but are limited by restrictive licensing terms in how they can make the content available to the public," he wrote to the Guardian.
The United Kingdom higher education sector spends about £190 million a year (about $310 million) on journals and databases.
'With annual journal price inflation running at double the rate of RPI [Retail Price Index, a measure of inflation in the UK] since 2000, it has distorted the acquisition policies of libraries, with an ever-increasing proportion of budgets being spent on electronic big deals," said Phil Sykes, the chair of RLUK and librarian at Liverpool University, in a press release after the November conference. "This leads to diminishing funds for monographs, textbooks, and journals from smaller publishers, which cannot but damage scholarship and teaching ...."
The cost is compounded by the fact that the British currency has lost buying power since 2008, but UK customers must pay in the currency of the publisher. So, in the case of Elsevier, an Anglo-Dutch publisher based in Amsterdam, universities have to pay in euros to access papers in ScienceDirect. (LJ's Periodicals Price Survey Periodicals Price Survey 2011 | Under Pressure, Times Are Changing examined the impact of budget pressures on U.S. libraries.)
Deal not likely
Derk Haank, the CEO of Springer, told Information Today back in January that the serial pricing crisis of the 1990s had been solved by the Big Deal, which he called "the best invention since sliced bread."
"The reality is that our journals are growing in volume by 6 percent to 7 percent per year, Haank told Information Today in January. "We have been doing all that is possible over the last couple of years, and will continue to do so to ensure that our price increases are lower than the volume increases. But not increasing our prices is not an option in the long term," he said.
Prosser told the Chronicle of Higher Education this month that Elsevier and Wiley have proposed new deals, but the outlook was not promising. "We are having to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we may not be able to reach a deal," he said.
In the long term, RLUK supports "a shift in scholarly communication to open-access models so the fruits of publicly funded research are available to all," Prosser wrote to the Guardian.
