Of mice and medicine…

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 2004 by Beth Schachter

Byline: Story By Beth Schachter

{Scientific} journals have long been a golden goose for publishers. In this realm, where articles must be peer-reviewed for authenticity and accuracy, where scientists must publish in certain periodicals or perish and where academics rely on each other's work to further the cannon of their disciplines, readers are more dependent on publishers than in most other business-to-business categories. Knowing this, traditional publishers have felt free to raise prices as they've liked.

But traditional publishers are now facing a mouse that roared in the form of a new publishing model that could eliminate their stranglehold on the scientific journal business. The new model, called open access, provides consumers with free and immediate access to scientific research online.

Open access has "disruption potential akin to Napster's shake up of the Recording Industry Association of America," says Leigh Watson Healy, chief analyst with Outsell Inc., an information content consultant in Burlingame, Calif.

Journal publishers aren't particularly concerned about open access. "It's just another business model," says Eric Swanson, a spokesman for John Wiley & Sons, a $1.7 billion publisher with leading positions in STM journals.

But university librarians, who are the main consumers of scientific literature, are desperate for alternative ways to acquire scientific works. Just as music lovers revolted against high-priced CDs, librarians are rebelling against the high fees charged by big publishers of science, technical and medical (STM) journals. Recent industry consolidation has let big publishers build monopolies and enabled them to bundle magazines into packages that average $1 million a year per subscription license. Sound high? Subscription licenses can provide access to up to 1,500 journals, of which one, say, Reed Elsevier's Brain Research alone, costs $16,000 a year.

Subscription fees have tripled in 10 years, estimates Karen Brewer, curator and chairman of the Ehrman Medical Library at New York University's School of Medicine. She says librarians, constrained by reduced endowments and funding, are forced to cut back on access to critical research. And once their subscriptions lapse, libraries lose access to past online versions of journals, many of which are now mainly published on the Web.

Some are rebelling by refusing to renew their contracts. Others, like The Triangle Research Library Consortium in North Carolina, and the troika of Cornell, Harvard and MIT are greatly reducing their renewals. "The cost of journals has been rising so fast in the past 15 years that it seems like a train wreck in slow motion," says Watson Healy. "Academic librarians have been pointing this out for some time, but only recently have the scientists started paying attention."

Researchers, too, resent traditional publishing practices, Brewer says they often must give up copyrights to articles published in these journals and can't even use them later for teaching in their own classes.

Reed Elsevier, which dominates this field with 20 percent to 25 percent of the journals, is taking most of the heat. But top publishers, including Springer/Kluwer, McMillan Nature, John Wiley & Sons and Blackwell, are part of the problem. Science, technology and medical journal publishing has grown faster, at 4 percent to 5 percent annually, than any other part of the publishing business in recent years, largely due to price increases, says Bernstein & Co. analyst Michael Nathanson. While science journal publishing accounts for only 16 percent of Elsevier's sales, it accounts for a disproportionate 25 percent of profits.

The company is responding to the rebellion among the libraries by capping price increases at 5 percent annually going forward and argues that fees have actually dropped 63 percent for users of its ScienceDirect database. Elsevier and other commercial publishers also claim that they're flexible in negotiating deals with universities. "Each license is a negotiated agreement and we deliver what the customers want," says Wiley's Swanson. "We're not imposing any structure on them."

Meanwhile, scientific societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, and the Massachussetts Medical Society, which publishes The New England Journal of Medicine, resent being lumped with large commercial publishers.

For one thing, their fees have risen much less, and unlike commercial publishers, scientific societies spend their revenues on nurturing their disciplines. "Profits go back into the society for development of the next generation of researchers, through awards, fellowships, meetings and conferences," says Martin Frank, executive director of the 10,500-member American Physiological Society. "Societies also provide health information on their Websites and offer health information and public education."

Nonetheless, this conflict has created a demand for alternative publishing models. Primary among them is the young but growing open access effort to replace the traditional subscription (user-pays) business models with a new strategy, in which the researcher pays (typically through research grant funds) to publish peer-reviewed papers.