Pricing
initiatives this year, including offshoring the production of a number of our journals to India, and cutting down wherever possible on frequency increases and page extent increases,’ Parry adds.
Faculty input Pricing models aside, Farley of California Digital Library believes that publishers should also reward, more readily, the input from faculty members to the publishing process. ‘Value is added by the publishers but the fact is that the faculty are providing the content and the peer review,’ she says. Indeed, as she stated in her letter to the
UC Faculty on a proposed NPG boycott: ‘An analysis by CDL suggests that UC articles published in Nature alone have contributed to at least $19 million dollars in revenue to NPG over the past six years… Moreover, UC faculties supply countless hours serving reviewers, editors and advisory board members.’ Although NPG stated it was ‘utterly confused’ by the revenue claims, the publisher acknowledged the value faculties add to the publishing process is ‘critical to our existence’.
‘Today’s pricing models are generally based on what was spent on
printed journals in the mid- 1990s; even “big deal” packages are typically based on libraries’ print holdings’ John Cox
Librarians are taking other action too. As Henderson highlights: ‘Libraries have been dealing with [these issues] for years, but what’s new now is the budget situation has gotten so tight that people are looking for their own solutions.’ She describes how small, less-research oriented institutions are switching from big deal packages to pay-per-view models to counter cash problems, while open-access titles are being adopted. ARL’s Charles
B Lowry also emphasises a key future role for digital legacy collections and believes money can also be saved by more multi- institutional collaboration. Citing the Hathi Trust as one example, he highlights how this co-owned digital archive library of materials was formed by ARL members and is used by 26 libraries. And then, of course, there are boycotts.
In November 2003, Elsevier’s journal, Cell Press, was the target of a boycott initiated by UC, again over pricing issues. UC successfully negotiated a new price that was less than that of the previous year. Also, there is no denying that the
latest threat to NPG publications by the University of California is getting results. In Farley’s words, ‘productive discussions, are now underway, and a resolution should be achieved ‘within a few months’. As Bosch of the University of Arizona
points out, libraries and publishers do not want to give up on each other, it simply is not in each other’s best interests. But, as he adds: ‘If the University of California had to publicly tweak NPG on the nose to get a result, then so be it.’
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