Magazine crisis

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As a journal crisis in will librarianship the problem indicates that especially since the mid-1990s, prices for magazines in the fields of science, technology and medicine (eng. Science, technology and medicine, in short STM) rose sharply, while the budgets of libraries for the acquisition stagnated or declined. So they canceled many of these magazine subscriptions. This in turn led to further price increases, because the publishers tried to compensate for the loss of income caused by falling subscriber numbers. This created a vicious circle in the course of which access to current research information for scientists and other interested persons was increasingly restricted.

Digital magazines

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The magazine crisis is exacerbated by the change from printed to electronic magazines . Digital content gives copyright owners greater control over how it is used and allows them to further restrict who can access the magazines. If a purely digital journal is canceled, the corresponding university library is generally also denied access to the volumes for which it has paid subscription fees (cf. House of Commons 2004, 33f).

Many license agreements only allow access to the journals to a certain number of people or a defined group, e.g. B. Students with proof of enrollment or users in the real rooms of the library. So far, other people interested in science have had access to all holdings in many university libraries. These people are now excluded (see House of Commons 2004, 26). For them in particular, the scientific publishers have provided the pay-per-view model , in which the interested reader has to pay separately for each article. The asking price is currently around 25 euros per item.

causes

According to a report by the British House of Commons , the cause of this development is to be seen in the fact that many scattered buyers (usually university libraries) are faced with very few providers of STM journals (Science Technics Medicine journals). Because in the 1990s there was a strong concentration process in this market. In 2003, eight magazine groups controlled 66.4% of the world market for STM magazines. The market leader Reed Elsevier alone had sales of EUR 7.1 billion in 2003 and a 28.2% share of the STM market. Large scientific societies such as the American Chemical Society have also dramatically increased the prices of their products (sometimes by several hundred percent) in recent years:

World market share of the STM magazine groups in 2003
(see House of Commons 2004, 13)
Surname proportion of
Reed Elsevier 28.2%
Thomson 9.5%
Wolters Kluwer 9.4%
Jumper 4.7%
John Wiley 3.9%
American Chemical Society 3.6%
Blackwell Publishing 3.6%
Taylor & Francis 3.6%
Others 33.6%

On the other hand, scientists are forced to publish as many research results as possible in specialist journals ( publish or perish ). This is the only way for them to gain reputation within their field. When deciding which journal to publish in, they are based on their reputation and influence on the journal, but not on market criteria such as the number of copies . On the other hand, access to some important journals is a prerequisite for being informed about current developments in a subject and thus to be able to conduct scientific research at all (cf. House of Commons 2004, 9ff). These factors strengthen the positions of the scientific publishers, which are therefore able to push through annual price increases in the double-digit percentage range for magazine subscriptions and achieve a return on investment of up to 33%, which is well above the average in the media industry. In the meantime, an annual subscription to an STM magazine cost up to 6,000 euros (cf. Dambeck 2004). In 2015, 9 of the 10 most expensive magazines came from the market-dominant Elsevier publishing house, with annual costs between 11,000 and over 23,000 euros per subscription. According to a survey by the DEAL project group , the total expenditure for printed and electronic journals at German university libraries in 2015 was around € 106.5 million. More than half of these issues came from three major journal groups alone (Elsevier 28%, Springer Nature 17%, Wiley 13%).

The science publishers justify their high prices primarily with the costs of the peer review and their publishing activities. These arguments are questioned, however, because many publishers pay the authors relatively low fees and the scientists involved in the peer review often no fees. Scientific publishers are also increasingly required to submit their articles ready-to-print according to the publisher's specifications (cf. Dambeck 2004). The majority of STM journals also charge printing subsidies or other publication fees.

Alternatives

As an alternative to this development, some participants, such as the signatories of the Berlin Declaration of October 2003 and the British House of Commons of July 2004, are relying on the principle of Open Access . Here are intended both in printed journals published articles in institutional Eprint Archives; supported by universities or other entities, again publicly posted accessible (so the 1991 by Paul Ginsparg initiated ArXiv ).

In 2017, Switzerland decided on a “National Open Access Strategy”. According to this, all publications financed with public funds should be freely accessible by 2024.

One of the possible business models for such open access journals is that the authors or their institutions should pay for the organization of the peer review and the publication on the Internet. Overall, however, the cost of an online publication is lower than that of a printed journal. There are already over 8,000 open access journals, some of them with a very high impact factor . Since, according to a study by Lawrence in Nature , articles available online are cited more often than printed works, the proponents of open access hope that this will convince the authors to publish their articles in open access journals. However, more weight is still given to articles in respected printed journals for assessing academic performance.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops standards, interfaces and software for archiving and retrieval of online publications. Various systems are currently being developed for the analysis of citations in analogy to the Web of Science , including the SPIRES HEP Literature Database , CiteSeer and the Open Citation Project (OpCit).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The twenty most expensive magazine subscriptions for 2015 - in descending order by price. University library of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.
  2. ↑ Frank Scholze : Project DEAL - current status and outlook. March 19, 2019, p. 4 , accessed May 20, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Leonhard Dobusch : "Excellence includes openness": Swiss research from 2024 completely open access. 2nd February 2017