All three of my regular readers will know this blog’s commitment Open Access, not just in education (OER), not just in collaboration between institutions, but in Open Access to research as well. Lingua is one of the foremost journals in the Linguistics community, and published by Elsevier. Laughably, the website sports the label Supports Open Access. The editors protested Elsevier’s policies on pricing and requested that it convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online under a collective of editors. Elsevier refused. Lingua’s entire Board and editors have now resigned in protest at Elsevier’s policies. They plan to start a new open-access journal. Peter McPherson, President of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities put the issues well from a US perspective:
As publishers have merged and become more powerful, universities are often paying more for publishers’ markups. The federal government makes massive investments in researchers, staff and facilities to advance knowledge; publishers do not. Universities similarly make big investments in research. University faculty generally are the authors, editors and reviewers of the articles coming out of that research. To get their articles published, faculty usually must transfer significant copyrights to the publishers. Then the publishers sell back to the universities the very content they as a group produced, and at steadily higher subscription prices. The system is fundamentally broken.
They did, of course, make $1.1 billion profit in 2012 on a 36% profit rate. They have just established (correction: leased) new offices in the UK that include basketball courts for their staff, even as our university budgets here face a forecasted cut of 40%. So they may have a different idea, in the mind of shareholders, as to what “sustainable” actually means. I define it as: covering labour, technological and business costs necessary to publishing on a not-for-profit/charitable basis. Not paying for Elsevier to play basketball on our time.
John Ulmschneider, Librarian at the Virginia Commonwealth University, estimates that with current price increases the cost for subscription payments would “eat up the entire budget for this entire university in 20 years”. Partly in response to that, VCU has launched its own open access publishing platform.