Martin White's Behind the Firewall in the December 2001 EContent presents a publisher-oriented perspective on the current situation with scientific journals and electronic access. His story is one way of viewing history and the present, but many academic librarians and scholarly authors see things a bit differently. Here I am again, library person in a content-producer's land, annoying you with a different perspective.

The Backstory
White says that, after 300 years in which most STM journals were published by societies as part of membership, a major change occurred after World War II "as the rapid growth of scientific progress meant that professional societies could no longer keep pace with the supply of papers being submitted for publication." In his story, the heroic innovators of North Holland and Pergamon Press saved the day by developing a commercial STM publishing business "where it was the publisher taking the initiative and risk, and not just the scientific societies."

Jean-Claude Guédon of the Universitéde Montréal offers a similar timeline, but with a twist, in his article "Beyond core journals and licenses: the paths to reform scientific publishing" (ARL Bimonthly Report 218, October 2001, available at www.arl.org/newsltr/218/guedon.htm). There had long been commercially-published STM journals, playing "a relatively minor, fragmented, and ultimately secondary role." Then came Science Citation Index, defining a set of core scientific journals. To quote Guédon, "With the sudden emergence of a core set of journals, publishers became aware of the fact that these journals would have to be bought by every library worth its salt. In other words, the previously vaguely prestigious, financially uninteresting field of scientific periodicals had become an inelastic market that could be milked for all it was worth. Periodical prices then began to climb precipitously."

White recognizes the inelasticity as placing publishers "in an enviable position," but uses the innocent comment "the profit margins on STM publishing were very good." White further suggests that it was primarily outside of North America that library budgets weren't rising at the same rate as journal prices—but North American libraries have never had bottomless pockets either.

White says the crunch came in the "mid-1990s" when "libraries had to make some hard decisions about cancellations." The Library Systems Office at UC Berkeley helped coordinate a 10% serials cancellation in the Berkeley libraries while I was there—in the mid-1970s, not the 1990s. As Guédon points out, the problem has been around for at least three decades, warping library acquisitions budgets as new books are forsaken in order to maintain serials subscriptions. By the 1990s, the problem had reached true crisis proportion in many major academic libraries.

Electronic Delivery and The Big Deal
White tells us that, while it's straightforward to build full-text databases from journals already produced electronically, "it would require investment, and so the electronic journals would cost more than the print versions"—sometimes as much as 150% above the print price. He believes that this pricing is the progenitor of library consortia and "difficult negotiations" for publishers.

Many in the library field see those negotiations as "difficult" in a rather different way. Librarians and digital gurus pointed out that one presumed major cost of journal publishing is the printing and distribution. Some libraries would be only too happy to abandon the print version as long as lasting access to full-text articles was assured. That should save big money for the publishers; libraries expected to share in that savings.

That isn't how the "Big Deals," as Kenneth Frazier calls them, worked out. The big publishers offered monolithic packages: You (the library or consortium) get all of our (the publisher's) articles in electronic form—but only if you pay us every penny you're paying now for print subscriptions, plus more, plus a guaranteed annual increment.

Frazier, director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, detests the Big Deal and makes a compelling case for opposing it. You'll find Frazier's original article on the Big Deal in the March 2001 D-Lib Magazine, available at www.dlib.org/dlib; a number of responses to the article appear in the April 2001 issue. Meanwhile, many academic librarians saw the horse's head on their budgetary beds: it was a deal they did not feel they could refuse.

White tells us that (correctly) libraries want to know which articles (or which journals) are being used and that publishers don't want to tell them. Such recalcitrance reduces library knowledge of journal usage patterns and is not sustainable in the long run. But then, the Big Deals may not be sustainable either.

Where Do We Go From Here?
White says that scientific publishing is a "delicate linear chain" from author to publisher to library to reader—but a growing number of radicals question the need for that second party, at least in publishers' present form. White says there are more than 10,000 scientific publishers—but also that "the business is&8230;the province of a relatively few publishers," pre- sumably the likes of Reed Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. That leaves some 9,995 publishers to fend for themselves. Finally, he looks for a "much greater degree of harmony&8230;between publishers and libraries," but thinks it will take years for that to happen.

Note the fifth word of this column's title: articles, not journals. Once access is primarily in electronic form, readers of the scientific literature not only don't care about the publisher (as White rightly says)—they may not care much about the journal either. They want access to articles. More knowledgeable readers also want validation, some indication that these articles are legitimate scholarship.

Stevan Harnad proposes free access through universal self-archiving and open harvesting of article metadata, with journals retaining only the key function of refereeing and validation. He suggests that, at most, 10% of current journal prices should cover this limited role as a small, but profitable enterprise, since most editors and referees volunteer their efforts. Go to www.text-e.org/conf, then Harnad's paper on this issue and a lengthy, vigorous set of debates around the paper.

Andrew Odlyszko offers a more radical suggestion in Learned Publishing 15:1 (available on the Web). He seems to feel that journals should simply disappear, with Web links constituting a sort of informal refereeing process among self-archived articles. I find the "validation through linking" concept ludicrous for scientific literature, but the article appears in a respected publication.

Retreating from these levels—while noting that Harnad's model is essentially in place for high-energy physics—librarians and scholars are mounting a range of initiatives to weaken the ability of large international publishers to raise STM prices at will. ARL's SPARC initiative has helped found a number of new, less-expensive scholarly journals, most commonly back in the hands of universities and scholarly societies, competing head-on with established commercial titles. A growing number of electronic journals and collections of refereed articles are free to readers, with refereeing overhead and server costs covered through institutional sponsorship or author fees.

Tens of thousands of scientific scholars recently signed a manifesto asserting that they will no longer contribute papers to any journal that does not allow free (no-cost) posting of published papers six months after publication. Time will tell whether this initiative plays out.

I don't have answers. I don't think anybody does. It's not simply a question of libraries and established publishers achieving a "greater degree of harmony" barring revolutionary changes in pricing and publisher policies. Too many libraries have been pushed to the wall and can go no further, and many scholars now recognize the plight of the libraries and are unwilling to see a complete abandonment of monographic acquisitions just to shore up STM periodicals for a few more years. Things are starting to give.