In UC's battle with the world's largest
scientific publisher, the future of information is at stake
Michael Hiltzik, LA Times, 12-7-18
Boiled down to dollars and cents, the battle
between the University of California, the nation’s premier producer of academic
research, and Reed Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of academic
journals, can seem almost trivial. UC is paying almost $11 million this year
for subscriptions to some 1,500 Elsevier journals. That’s not much when
measured against the university’s core budget of $9.3 billion.
But in fact it’s a very big deal — big enough for
the university to consider dropping the subscriptions entirely when its current
five-year contract with Elsevier expires on Dec. 31. Scores of town hall
meetings for UC faculty to discuss the ongoing negotiations between UC and
Elsevier have been scheduled across the system as the deadline approaches. What
faculty are likely to hear, in the words of Jeff MacKie-Mason, the university
librarian at UC Berkeley, is that “we’re pretty far apart at this point.”
That’s because more than money is at stake. The
key issue separating the university and the publisher is the concept of “open
access.” At its core, says Dennis Ventry, a UC Davis law professor who is vice
chair of UC’s committee on library and scholarly communication, open access
means that “research should be immediately and freely available to the public upon
publication, and not behind a [subscription] paywall.” The goal of science,
after all, is to disseminate knowledge, not keep it sequestered.
That may sound obvious, but to academic
publishers the principle is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with
their prevailing business model. Scientific and technical journals today are
predominantly subscription-based. Researchers submit papers for publication but
aren’t paid if they’re accepted; the prestige of their work appearing in a
high-profile journal is assumed to be payment enough, especially since they are
judged at their universities by their publication history. Universities
subscribe to the journals on terms typically making them available to faculty
and students affiliated with their campuses or visitors (generally online).
Under open access, by contrast, authors pay the
journals a preparation fee covering the cost of publishing an accepted paper.
The authors retain the copyright, under which their research can be made
accessible to the public at large. Some journals, including some Elsevier
titles, are hybrids, featuring some subscription-only articles and others
available to everyone.
“We all agree that open access is a good thing,”
says Karen Bales, a psychology professor at UC Davis and chair of the campus
Academic Senate research committee. “It increases the visibility of our
research, and it’s something the taxpayers deserve.”
It’s not surprising that Holland-based Elsevier
and other big academic publishers such as Germany’s Springer and the New
Jersey-based John Wiley & Sons have fiercely defended the subscription
model. The academic publishing business has been fabulously profitable. In 2017
Elsevier recorded operating income of $1.17 billion on revenue of $3.17 billion
from scientific, technical and medical publishing, an enviable operating profit
margin of nearly 37%.
“They’re the most powerful publisher in the
world, and they act like it,” MacKie-Mason says of Elsevier. In negotiations,
“they’ve been unyielding.”
Elsevier and the university have agreed to keep
details of their talks under wraps until they conclude. But in general terms,
UC wants to move to a so-called publish-and-read contract, in which the
preparation fees paid by UC authors for papers to be subject to open access are
combined with subscription fees in a single deal, hopefully at a money-saving
rate. UC estimates that its authors pay Elsevier about $1 million a year in
open-access fees that can reach thousands of dollars per paper.
“Elsevier has not shown any interest in
discussing a publish-and-read contract,” MacKie-Mason told me. Instead, the
publisher is insisting on a traditional subscription deal. Elsevier has
expressed some willingness to test a new open-access fee arrangement as a pilot
program, says Ivy Anderson, the associate executive director of UC’s California
Digital Library, which is the signatory to the master subscription agreement.
But it would be on a small scale and not integrated with the subscription
contract. As a result, she says, the proposal wouldn’t advance the university’s
goal of “effecting a large-scale transition to open access for the entire UC
system.”
What’s irksome about the publishers’ stance is
that much of their overhead is shouldered by the same people they charge for
subscriptions. The publishers don’t pay authors for papers or peer reviewers
for their reviews. The research undergirding the published papers often is
wholly or partially funded via public grants — that is, by taxpayers, who must
pay again to read the results.
“All Elsevier does really is a little bit of text
editing and putting the papers online,” says Ted Bergstrom, a professor of
economics at UC Santa Barbara and long-term critic of the publishing industry.
The near-monopolization of academic publishing by
for-profit companies began in the 1960s, Bergstrom explains. At that time, most
publishing was in the hands of professional societies. But the societies
couldn’t keep up with the demand for more specialized journals as their
disciplines expanded. The commercial companies stepped in to meet the demand.
“At first they weren’t exploitatively priced,”
Bergstrom says. “But the publishers noticed the demand was inelastic and they
could get away with selling these things for much higher prices.” Come the
internet and the shift from paper to online publication, and it became a simple
matter to bundle hundreds of titles together in a single institution-wide
contract.
The growing institutional discontent with this model
arises partially from changes in the economics of public universities, which
are increasingly strapped for money. At UC, support from the state budget has
fallen by one-third since 2000-01, accounting for inflation. That has forced
the university to rely more on student tuition, which has more than tripled
after inflation, and nonresident tuition, which has nearly quintupled. Both
factors erode the universities’ fundamental mission to serve California
students. Nevertheless, Elsevier’s contract with UC, which
was signed in April 2014, calls for annual rate increases running ahead of
inflation. Over the five-year term ending Dec. 31, the subscription rate
increased by more than 11% while inflation raised consumer prices by less than
7%.
Elsevier says it’s a believer in open access. “We
absolutely support public access to publicly funded research,” Gemma Hersh, its
vice president for global policy, told me. But she says the best solution is to
integrate open access into the “menu of options” that Elsevier offers its
customers. The vast majority of academic papers are still offered via
subscriptions, she says, because many customers prefer to pay for access over
time rather than upfront via publication fees.
Revenues from the subscription model are still growing
by 3% a year on average. Hersh acknowledges that the open access model is
growing faster, by 20%, but it’s building on a much smaller base, accounting as
yet for only 15% of the research papers published globally. Yet it isn’t clear that the publishers, powerful
as they are, can hold back the tide. Publishers devoted entirely to open access
have gained high prestige in the marketplace, including the Public Library of
Science, or PLoS, which was founded in 2001 by scientists at Berkeley, Stanford
and the National Cancer Institute.
In 2012, investment analyst Claudio Aspesi of
Bernstein Research warned that if academic researchers decided that Elsevier’s
business model was “hindering the progress of science or their ability to
efficiently perform research, the risk of a further escalation in what is
already an acrimonious debate would rise substantially.”
In September, a consortium of 11 European
research agencies decreed that by 2020 every paper they fund will have to be
freely available from the moment of publication, an initiative known as Plan S.
The decree means that papers would no longer be able to appear in high-profile
journals such as Science and Nature or Elsevier’s Cell and Lancet unless their
business models changed drastically. German and Swedish universities have
dropped their Elsevier subscriptions to protest the firm’s resistance to full
open access.
Open-access advocates believe that UC, if it
stands firm, could serve as the standard bearer for American researchers.
Certainly no institution is better positioned to play that role. The university
boasts that it accounts for nearly 10% of all published research in the United
States. It’s also a significant partner of Elsevier, which publishes about 18%
of all UC output and collects more than 25% of the university’s $40-million
overall subscription budget.
UC policy has been explicitly committed to open
access since 2013, when the university’s Academic Senate adopted the policy. UC
authors are required to deposit versions of their papers or links in the
university’s eScholarship online repository, which currently holds more than
200,000 items available to the public for free. (Compliance by researchers is
thought to be spotty as yet, however, in part because there’s no enforcement
system.)
No one knows yet how the showdown between UC and
Elsevier will play out. Some observers expect that the deadline will be
extended so the two sides can continue negotiating, though Elsevier would have
the right to shut off access to new journal issues as of Jan. 1. (Access to
prior publications already paid for wouldn’t be affected.)
As for the longer time frame, the research
community expects the big publishers to stay in business, but perhaps with
narrower profit margins and an evolved model more reliant on preparation fees
than subscriptions. Researchers have begun to sense that they may
have more leverage against the publishers than they assumed. “As authors, we do
have a choice of where we send our articles and invest our time as peer
reviewers,” Bales says. “If enough of the publishers’ customers end their
subscriptions... they’ll have to change.”
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