Date: 25 May 2005 11:39:36 -0000 From: Shahab <smshahabuddin@rediffmail.com> Peer Pressure Scholarly Journals' Premier Status Is Diluted by Web More Research Is Free Online Amid Spurt of Start-Ups; Publishers' Profits at Risk A Revolt on UC's Campuses By BERNARD WYSOCKI JR. BERKELEY, Calif. -- From a stool at Yali's caf, near the University of Cali= fornia campus, Michael Eisen is loudly trashing the big players in academic= publishing. Hefty subscription fees for journals are blocking scientific p= rogress, he says, and academics who think they have full access to timely l= iterature are kidding themselves. "They're just wrong," Dr. Eisen says. He = suggests scholarly journals be free and accessible to everyone on the Web. This may sound like the ranting of a campus radical, but Dr. Eisen is a wel= l known computational biologist at a nearby national laboratory and a Berke= ley faculty member. He is also a co-founder of a nonprofit startup called t= he Public Library of Science, which produces its own scholarly journals, in= competition with established publishers, distributed free online. It's a campus twist on a raging Internet-era debate about who should contro= l information and what it should cost. For decades, traditional scholarly j= ournals have held an exalted and lucrative position as arbiters of academic= excellence, controlling what's published and made available to the wider c= ommunity. These days, research is increasingly available on free university= Web sites and through start-up outfits. Scholarly journals are finding the= ir privileged position under attack. The 10-campus University of California system has emerged as a hotbed of in= surgency against this $5 billion global market. Faculty members are competi= ng against publishers with free or inexpensive journals of their own. Two U= C scientists organized a world-wide boycott against a unit of Reed Elsevier= -- the Anglo-Dutch giant that publishes 1,800 periodicals -- protesting it= s fees. The UC administration itself has jumped into the fray. It's urging = scholars to deposit working papers and monographs into a free database in a= ddition to submitting them for publication elsewhere. It has also battled w= ith publishers, including nonprofits, to lower prices.=20 "We have to take back control from the publishers," says Daniel Greenstein,= associate vice provost for the UC system, which spends $30 million a year = on scholarly periodicals. The clash between academics and publishers was exacerbated last year when t= he taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health proposed that articles res= ulting from NIH grants be made available free online. That prompted protests from Reed Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc. and sever= al nonprofit publishers such as the American Diabetes Association, which ar= gued such a move would hurt their businesses. The NIH retreated and in February made the program voluntary. It now asks a= uthors to post on an NIH Web site any articles based on NIH grants within 1= 2 months of publication. The debate comes at a time when it's easier than ever to find scholarly art= icles by using simple Internet tools such as Google. In late 2004, Google I= nc., in Mountain View, Calif., launched Google Scholar, a free service that= can search for peer-reviewed articles as well as theses, abstracts and other scholarly material, much of it in scien= tific fields. Traditional publishers argue that the expensive process of selecting and ed= iting journals is a necessary filter to help scholars sift through vast amo= unts of research. The nonprofit publisher of the prestigious Science magazi= ne makes content available free after 12=20 months. Other publishers note that with a combination of free abstracts, fr= ee distribution to the developing world and public-library subscriptions, m= uch of the globe already has access to what they produce. "The vast majority -- 90% of researchers in the world -- have access online= to our material," says Karen Hunter, senior vice president at Elsevier, th= e science and medical division of Reed Elsevier that publishes the company'= s journals. Elsevier's scholarly journals bring in about $1.6 billion in an= nual revenue with an operating-profit margin of about 30%. Publishers have been entrenched in academia for decades. One big concern, t= he U.K.'s Taylor & Francis Group, now part of T&F Informa PLC, was founded = in the 18th century. The venerable nonprofit Science was founded in the 188= 0s by Thomas Edison. The industry became firmly established in the 1950s an= d 1960s in the wake of the Soviet space program, whose success spurred a wa= ve of scientific publishing. Although learned societies such as the American Physical Society hold sway = at the top of the prestige pyramid, commercial publishers have created a se= cond tier, producing thousands of niche periodicals from Addictive Behavior= s to Zoology, both Elsevier titles. Scholars are generally grateful that pu= blishers take the risk of starting new titles, which often take years to br= eak even.=20 The publishers' prestige derives from the rigorous system of peer review, i= n which a journal's editorial board will select experts in a field to vet a= rticles. At some top scholarly journals, less than 10% of submitted articl= es make it into a publication. In turn, the peer- review system lends authority to a scholar's work, and has long been a spri= ngboard to academic advancement.=20 In the late 1990s, Dr. Eisen was studying the yeast genome, a booming field= that has a large overlap with the human genome and 200 journals publishing= related research. He wanted all these journal articles freely available at= his fingertips, an impossible request because many are behind subscription= barriers. Some scholars think publishing should operate like the Linux computer opera= ting system, where programmers build on each other's work in an ongoing, co= llaborative project. In the scholarly realm, a database called arXiv -- pro= nounced "archive," as if the "x" were the Greek letter "chi" -- has become = a repository of scholarship in the physics field. It's owned and operated b= y Cornell University and partially supported by the National Science Founda= tion. If the UC administration has its way, something like that would be th= e norm throughout academia. To experienced publishers, much of the open-access talk seems naive. "A l= ot of this is self-righteous talk," says Alan Leshner, executive publisher = of Science and chief executive of its nonprofit parent, the American Associ= ation for the Advancement of Science. He says giving away content isn't a= viable business model because of the tremendous costs of putting out rep= utable journals. He notes that Science gets 12,000 submissions and publishes 800 articles a = year on a $10 million editorial budget. That averages more than $10,000 per= published article, a high number because of the costs associated with hand= ling the unusually large number of submissions the journal receives. Indust= ry experts say typical per-article costs are between $3,000 and $4,000. If open access takes off, information will flow faster, but publishers will= make less money. Among those who would be hurt is Reed Elsevier. Sami Ka= ssab, analyst at investment house Exane BNP Paribas in London, estimates th= at such a movement could sharply cut the company's profit margin on perio= dicals to between 10% and 15% of revenue, from the current 30% or more. Currently, the open-access movement makes up between 1% and 2% of the marke= t, experts say. While that number seems small, the concept is assuming an i= mportant role channeling academic discontent. "There's a lot of sentiment that work is being taken advantage of by the co= mmercial publishers," says Alessandro Lizzeri, associate professor of econo= mics at New York University and editor of Elsevier's Journal of Economic Th= eory. He says that while editors get little compensation for their work, au= thors and reviewers -- aside from prestige -- usually get nothing or just a nominal fee.=20 Prof. Lizzeri says that two of the 40 members of his editorial board resign= ed recently because the journal isn't free to readers. "If half the board r= esigns I'm in trouble," he says. These rumblings hit the University of California early on. In October 2003,= faculty members made a rare display of solidarity with the university admi= nistration. Two scientists at the University of California at San Francisco= staged a protest over a $91,000 bill from Elsevier's Cell Press unit for o= ne year's access to six biology journals. The two professors called for a w= orld-wide boycott, urging fellow scholars at UC and beyond to refuse to ser= ve as authors, editors or peer reviewers at the six periodicals in question. Their timing couldn't have been better for the university administration, w= hich was just about to begin negotiations with the Reed Elsevier unit over = a new contract. In the late 1990s, all UC campuses had banded together in= to a single buying consortium. In 2002, the university hired Dr. Greenste= in, a history professor turned expert on digital libraries. With the stat= e of California's budget crisis forcing him to trim library spending to $= 62 million a year, Dr. Greenstein wanted to take a hard line. "It was the opening shot, really, in struggling head-on with this world of = scientific publishing," says Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean at UCSF me= dical school and one of the boycott's leaders. The university was paying Elsevier $10.3 million a year for print and onlin= e subscriptions to most of its 1,800 journals. The university demanded a 25= % reduction and at one point threatened to walk away from the table. As the negotiations grew tense, faculty at other UC campuses started to chi= me in sympathetically. The UC Santa Cruz faculty senate passed a resolution= urging faculty to boycott Elsevier journals by refusing to submit articles= or to serve on periodical boards. "That alarmed us," says a Reed Elsevier spokeswoman in Amsterdam. More than= 100 UC faculty members serve as senior editors of Elsevier journals and ab= out 1,000 serve on editorial boards. The publisher fanned out across the ca= mpuses, drumming up support among friendly faculty with breakfasts and ot= her meetings. The spokeswoman says the company concluded that most UC fac= ulty members didn't know about the boycott call or didn't support it. The negotiations dragged on for two months and grew testy. In late 2003, = the university won a 25% price reduction to $7.7 million a year for 1,200 E= lsevier periodicals. Elsevier agreed to throw the six biology journals into= the deal. "They got a very, very good deal," acknowledges Reed Elsevier's Ms. Hunter.= She says the company got some concessions, too. UC gave up access to sever= al hundred periodicals, for example. UC says Elsevier unilaterally added th= e titles into the arrangement before negotiations started and says it doesn= 't care about their removal. Suddenly, the UC negotiation was the buzz of the academic library world and= an inspiration for others to follow suit. One UC librarian, Catherine Cand= ee, says a university negotiator elsewhere "called us up and said, 'Thank y= ou, you saved us $1 million.' " ----------------- Write to Bernard Wysocki Jr. at bernie.wysocki@wsj.com