FEATURE ARTICLE
Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals
Can scientists find ways to share published research without high cost? The experiences of one society suggest it can be done cheaply, even profitably
Thomas Walker
The Serials Crisis
The troubles for libraries were initially a simple outgrowth of the proliferation of new knowledge and the acceleration of scientific and technical advances. As fatter issues and more journals were published, research libraries found it increasingly difficult to pay for all the old and new journals that their clients needed. Between 1960 and 1970, 12 established research universities increased their acquisitions expenditures in constant dollars by 150 percent and the number of volumes by 117 percent. This growth could not be sustained. In the following decade their expenditures increased only 2 percent, and the number of volumes declined by 11 percent (Cummings et al. 1992).
The 1970s witnessed the beginning of extraordinary increases in the real prices of science journals. Whereas the costs of scholarly publishing in general, as represented by prices of hardbound books, closely followed the Consumer Price Index, the average prices of science and technical journals diverged upward (Figure 2). The trend has continued. Since 1986, the 121 members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) have spent 124 percent more on serials to purchase 7 percent fewer titles.
By 1994 there was much interest in electronic publication of scientific research as an economical alternative to traditional paper publishing. Clearly the sheer volume of all those pages printed and shipped on paper was a major factor in the cost spiral, and digital technology presented many new, more flexible options for high-volume storage, searching and the retrieval of research results. In every discipline scientists were, by this time, equipped with sophisticated computers that were connected (in most parts of the world) to the Internet, and they were already using them routinely to exchange unpublished research information.
The Florida Entomological Society, to which I belong, began in 1994 to examine these trends and consider a move toward electronic publication. I conducted a crude study of the trends in journal pricing in our field. Although there are varying reasons for the steep increases in journal prices in many fields, I wondered whether the different economic models used by societies and commercial publishers were having differing impacts on pricing in entomology. For instance, commercially published journals seemed to be increasing subscription prices disproportionately. Did that simply reflect an increase in the amount of material published in these journals?
I selected three society-published journals (Florida Entomologist, Canadian Entomologist and Journal of Economic Entomology) and four commercially published journals (Journal of Insect Physiology, Physiological Entomology, Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology and Journal of Applied Entomology) and determined the cost to libraries of each square meter of printed matter in each journal in 1973, 1983 and 1993. Then I adjusted the results for changes in the Consumer Price Index. The three society journals, as it turned out, cost less initially, and their cost per square meter changed the least over the 21 years (–28 percent to +166 percent), in constant-dollar terms. The cost per square meter for the four commercially published journals increased an average of 271 percent. In 1993 a library's cost of access to a square meter of one of the three society-published journals was, on average, 14 percent of the comparable cost for a commercially published journal. The alternative means of financing available to societies—page charges and memberships—were helping keep costs down for libraries, but the cost of subscription-financed commercial publication was contributing heavily to the serials crisis even in our small field.
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