College agrees to open-access pact

By Ashley Blum, The Dartmouth Staff

Published on Wednesday, October 27, 2010

• Print
• Report an Error
• Share

The cost of scholarship is steep — and growing.

Last year, Dartmouth spent over $7 million out of a $9 million information budget on subscription fees to scholarly journals, according to associate librarian for information resources Elizabeth Kirk. To pay for the increasingly high subscription rates of these journals, the Dartmouth library has had to reduce spending in other areas, particularly in the number of books it collects, Kirk said.

Currently, students are able to access scholarly publications largely through commercial journals to which their universities subscribe. But the subscription fees that these journals charge have increased over the past few decades at a much higher rate than overall inflation, placing an increasing financial burden on libraries’ budgets, according to Harvard University computer science professor Stuart Shieber.

This situation led Shieber to develop the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity, which Dartmouth signed in 2009 along with 12 other colleges and universities. Under the compact, signatory universities commit to paying publication costs for researchers who choose to publish in open-access scholarly journals. Open-access publishing, a publishing model in which journals do not charge readers a subscription fee for access to the articles they publish, may broaden the scope of access to scholarly research, while also reducing universities’ dependence on expensive journal subscriptions in the long term.

There are two general business models publishers use to take in revenue and, in many cases, turn a profit. Journals will have some combination of charging readers for access to the published material or charging authors a publication fee, according to Shieber.

Some journals will charge authors approximately $1,000 to $1,500 to publish an article, although the price varies significantly among journals, Shieber said. Many authors prefer publishing in subscription journals in part because they do not want to pay the publication fees that many open-access journals charge.

The intent of the compact is to develop financial support for authors who choose to publish in open-access journals but who do not want to pay publication fees, according to Shieber. Signatory universities agree to “underwriting reasonable publication charges” for open access journals, according to the compact’s website.

Shieber said that there is a “market failure” in the subscription publishing system. Because copyright laws create a monopolistic system in which the journal is the only one with the rights to a particular scholarly work, purchasers have no options to choose from if they want to access it. He also said there is often an issue in the current system of “moral hazard,” as readers have no incentive to be concerned with the costs of access because libraries bear the cost of purchasing subscriptions.

By allowing authors to choose from the journals that offer publishing and the associated services at competing prices, the open-access model changes this dynamic by making the author the purchaser, not the library, Shieber said.

Because universities already financially support scholarly publication by subscribing to these journals, they should be willing to support open-access publication as well, Shieber said.

“We should be more willing to underwrite those [publication] fees [for open access journals] because those fees are part of a market that doesn’t manifestly have a market failure,” he said.

Because subscriptions can be so expensive, institutions with smaller budgets often choose not to subscribe, limiting their students’ ability to access many scholarly publications. As a result, students at these universities have less access to scholarly publications than students at wealthier institutions, such as Dartmouth.

“We really have a privileged little island here,” Kirk said.

Open-access publishing allows students at less wealthy institutions, as well as interested members of the public, to access scholarly publications. This is consistent with universities’ goal to spread research to as many people as they can, Shieber said.

“The goal is to disseminate research as broadly as possible,” he said. “We don’t want to keep that research under wraps.”

Supporting open access publishing also supports authors’ choice, according to digital resources program director Barbara DeFelice.

“We are supporting scholars’ choice and the diversity in what we call the ‘publishing ecosystem,’” DeFelice said.

The compact’s effect on the publishing industry and universities’ reliance on subscription journals will probably be minimal for at least a decade, Kirk said, because it will take time for enough universities to sign the agreement to alter the system and for enough authors to be willing to submit their articles to open-access journals.

Many of the journals that are open access are relatively new and work with relatively new publishers, which may deter authors who are looking to publish in the most prestigious journals, Kirk said.

Dartmouth only financially supports professors’ publication in “scholarly, established open-access journals” in which articles are peer-reviewed, according to the library’s website.