Journal Publishers Not Yearning to Be Free

Inside Higher Ed today reports slow going in a project to change professional journal publishing. The project was announced about a year ago by a consortium of universities including UC-Berkeley. In essence the idea was that journals would be free and open to anyone online. Universities would provide the revenue for reviewing, editing, etc. This approach was thought to be less expensive than library subscriptions to journals.

From an article from Sept. 2009 at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/15/open

“What the model does long term is change the way universities support journal publishing from having them pay fees to publishers for access to the journals, to paying fees when their faculty members have work accepted. Thomas Leonard, university librarian at Berkeley, stressed that the goal of this project is not to be an ‘add on’ to what universities already pay publishers. Rather, he said that the goal is to be ‘transformative’ in the relationship between universities and publishers. He stressed that he did not see traditional, paid circulation journal publishing as viable. ‘We think the system is going to fall apart of its own weight,’ he said.

The odd thing about the plan is that it seemed simply to revolve around having the university pay the fee that some journals charge for submissions. (Note that not all journals charge fees.) There was no deal with the publishers who control the process. As a result, today’s Inside Higher Ed reports there has been little progress. Berkeley was reported to have paid submission fees for 94 faculty over the past year.

In the new article in Inside Higher Ed, one of those interviewed about the project now says “It may take a while. Five years, 10 years, never — who knows?” The article is at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/11/cope

Apparently, this project has run into an obstacle: