By Sheldon Greaves

A friend of mine forwarded me a fascinating item from the Inside Higher Ed web site about what could be a significant change in the academic publishing landscape. But first, a little background.

There was a time, years ago, when research generated by universities (including quite a bit funded by your tax dollars) was available for anyone to read. All they needed to do was visit the library of a nearby university. Even local public libraries could request articles from obscure journals, which were photocopied and sent back for the patron to take home, free of charge. During my student days, I photocopied articles, essays, sometimes even whole books to my heart’s delight. I kept these articles in file folders, with reading notes, and recently managed to get them (mostly) entered into an index. 

But, somewhere along the way, the publishers of these journals such as Elsevier, Sage, JSTOR, and others decided that by imposing some artificial scarcity on their goods, they could make tons of money. So what had once been available to all vanished behind paywalls. An article that once needed a few cents to photograph two or three pages now runs at least $30 for a .pdf file. University libraries must pay exorbitant fees running into the millions to subscribe to “bundles” of journals and indexes where the latest research is published regardless of the field. Also, many publishers require that only university staff and students have access to their databases. Ordinary citizens and guerrilla scholars like your Humble Correspondent don’t get to access the goods. I estimate that the articles in my files (many of which, though printed in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s are now behind paywalls) would cost me well in excess of $15,000 to acquire today. Now it is true that some research does become available after some period of time–usually years after they first appear, if they become available at all.

Academics of yore had a sort of informal communal attitude towards research data and publications, sharing offprints and letting colleagues photocopy anything that wasn’t restricted for some reason (and sometime, even those leaked out). This kind attitude blunts the problem of paywall, a little, on college campuses, but the rest of us must rely on the hope that some slightly rebellious soul posted a copy of their article on sites like Academica or Zenodo or other research-sharing sites. There are also pirate archive sites located beyond the reach of publishing copyright attorneys. But all these and other developments, welcome as they are,
only offer partial solutions.

Enter the University of California, which I’m proud to claim as my alma mater, which has decided to play hardball with publishing giant Elsevier:

The UC system, which paid over $10 million this year to the publishing giant Elsevier in journal subscription fees, is unhappy with the status quo. So unhappy that when the UC system’s current five-year contract with Elsevier ends on Dec. 31, officials say, they are willing to put access to Elsevier journals on hold until the university gets what it wants. An Elsevier representative said that the publisher is working hard to reach an agreement with the UC system before its contract expires.

Millions of dollars in potential fees are not the only leverage the UC system is using against the publisher. A recent email from the University of California, Los Angeles’s provost to the campus urged the faculty to consider declining offers to review articles for Elsevier and not publishing in Elsevier journals “until negotiations are clearly moving in a productive direction.”

Considering that UC produces nearly 10% of all the research output in the United States (Yes, you read that right), they have a very big stick they can wield, and I hope they lay on with a will. But here’s what I find particularly interesting: Not only is UC trying to reduce the cost of their subscriptions, they are trying to research paid for with public funds available to the public. There are more details at the article, but this could herald a major change in how academia communicates with the public. It’s a change that is long, long overdue.