APPENDIX 27
Memorandum from John Cox Associates Ltd
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. Scientific publishing is a global activity.
The global market is worth somewhere between US $6 billion and
$11 billion, of which 65% is journals. 70% of the market is academic
and 25% corporate. The UK is a small component of the world market,
although the UK's journal publishing industry is significant.
The UK is a substantial net exporter of scientific journals.
2. In the past quarter century the number
of scientific researchers and the number of papers published has
doubled, while library budgets have increased by only 40%, and
library expenditure as a proportion of overall university expenditure
has fallen substantially. The output of papers continues to increase
at 3% a year. The UK's problem must be seen in the context of
consistent under-funding of higher education.
3. The journal market has been fundamentally
changed by online distribution: speed of delivery, on-campus accessibility
and improved functionality. 83% of scientific, technical and medical
journals are now available online.
4. Online publishing has also enabled publishers
to package journals into "collections" and introduce
new pricing schemes. The "Big Deal" in which a publisher
licenses its entire journal list has provided access to a wide
range of journals the subscribing institution did not hold beforehand
has enhanced accessibility of a wider range of literature than
in the print environment, but has been criticised for:
— potentially marginalising small publishers;
and
— compromising librarians' ability
to select only that information relevant to the institution's
needs.
5. Online publishing has resulted in the
creation of library consortia that can use their combined buying
power to negotiate better terms from publishers, to the benefit
of member institutions.
6. The principal factor tending to restrict
access to scientific journal is library funding: see 2 above.
While the market is dysfunctional as price signals do not reach
the real customer, the reader, better organisation of collective
purchasing within the UK higher education community would yield
significant benefits.
7. Open Access is an unproven business model
for journal publishing; its efficacy and sustainability remain
to be demonstrated. Nevertheless, it must be taken seriously as
a challenge from both librarians and researchers to the existing
subscription-based business model; the Annex is provided as a
more detailed commentary.
8. Authors are already able to post accepted
articles to their or their institution's web sites or online depositories.
It is not clear that authors are taking advantage of this on a
wide scale.
9. Legal deposit libraries provide archiving
and preservation function for literature. Legal deposit has never
been intended to supplant legitimate trade in scientific literature,
and should not be used thus.
10. There is no necessary connection between
changes in journal publishing and scientific fraud or malpractice.
INTRODUCTION AND
BACKGROUND
1. This submission addresses the issues
raised by the Science and Technology Committee from the perspective
of a publishing professional of some 35 years' standing, with
a consultancy practice specialising in scholarly and academic
publishing, and with a client base of both publishers and libraries
and library consortia in the UK, Europe and the USA.
2. John Cox is a publisher of some 30 years
experience. A barrister by training, my publishing career has
taken me to IBIS, The Open University and Butterworths. I spent
a total of 20 years as Managing Director of publishing organisations
at the OU, Scholastic, B H Blackwell and Carfax, a journal publisher,
where I worked the establishment of CatchWord, an online publishing
service company. I left Carfax in 1998 when it became part of
Taylor & Francis, in order to set up this consultancy, which
specialises in scholarly and research publishing strategy and
content management issues.
3. I have been active public life, as Chairman
of the Air Transport Users Council from 1986 to 1992, for which
I was awarded an OBE in 1993. I am currently Chairman of the Civil
Aviation Authority's Air Travel Insolvency Protection Advisory
Committee.
4. My standing in relation to this enquiry
lies in my experience as a journal publisher at Carfax and as
a subscription agent at B H Blackwell, and in my knowledge of
the academic library community world-wide:
— Knowledge of university libraries
and of library practices in the UK and internationally, derived
from experience as a book and journal vendor at Blackwell, journal
publishing at Carfax, membership of the BL Advisory Committee
on Bibliographic Services and Document Delivery, frequent attendance
at library conferences in the UK, USA, Australia etc, and work
for libraries and library consortia.
— Experience in online journal publishing.
Under my stewardship, Carfax launched its first online journals
in 1995. From 1998, much of my consultancy work has been focused
on licensing content to libraries and library consortia; this
has involved assignments both for publishers and for consortia.
In 1999 I was responsible for creating a suite of model licences
that can be accessed on www.licensingmodels.com.
— Considerable knowledge of library
consortia and pricing methodologies, derived from a number of
assignments on content management for both publishers and libraries
and library consortia themselves, including competition analyses.
THE GLOBAL
CONTEXT
5. Scientific publishing is a global business.
In its Information Content Industry Market Size, Share and
Forecast 2000-07 report, Outsell Inc estimates that the total
global content industry was worth $184 billion in 2002, of which
$171 billion is represented by 200 companies. Scientific, technical
and medical (STM) publishing comprised $11 billion, or 6% of the
total content industry world-wide. J P Morgan European Equity
Research (Scientific and Medical Publishing, 2003) estimates
that the global market is worth $6 billion, of which $4 billion
is scientific and technical information, and £2 billion medical.
Such estimates need to be treated with caution, as the industry
is fragmented and data is not systematically collected.
6. Because of the imprecision of available
industry data, it is difficult to come to firm conclusions about
the true dimensions of the market; a very rough estimate is that
scientific journals make up about $4-5 billion, or £2.2-2.7
billion, of which 65% is made from journals. 70% of the market
is academic, while 25% is corporate, and 5% "other"
(J P Morgan).
7. Although STM publishing is dominated
by a small number of large commercial publishers (Elsevier, Springer
Business + Media, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley,
Thomson, American Chemical Society, IEEE), it is in essence a
cottage industry comprising a large number of small publishers.
Over half the market is in the hands of thousands of small publishers.
In a report for the Association of Learned and Professional Society
Publishers (ALPSP) in 2002, TFPL analysed the survey results from
169 UK publishers, with a combined turnover in 2000-01 of £550+
million:
— 64 had a journals-related turnover
of less than £100,000; and
— only 11 had a journal turnover of
more than £10 million.
8. The market for scientific literature
is dominated by the USA, J P Morgan estimate that the USA accounts
for 58% of STM literature, Europe 26% and the rest of the world
a mere 16%. The UK is a small part of the global market for scientific
journals. The JISC estimates that total UK University expenditure
on journals is £76 million in the current year.
9. Although the UK is a small component
of the world-wide markets for STM literature, its publishing industry
is significant. As well as a wide range of learned societies publishing
journals, the UK is home to major journal publishers including
Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University
Press, Blackwell Publishing, as well as substantial UK publishing
units of international companies like Elsevier and Wiley. The
UK is a substantial net exporter of scientific journals.
10. Scientific journals operate in a dysfunctional
market. Price signals do not reach the customer. The reader may
select but does not bear the cost of acquisition, while the library
deploys the budget but is driven by readers' requirements. In
parallel, library budgets have continued to deteriorate in relation
to the volume of information they are expected to acquire.
THE GROWTH
IN SCIENTIFIC
LITERATURE AND
LIBRARY BUDGETS
11. In the 25 years following the Second
World War, investment in scientific research was substantial.
During this period, commercial journal publishers became significant
players, as they were much more innovative in reacting to the
resulting demand for scientific publishing capacity than the learned
societies. At the same time, university education was rapidly
expanding. The abundant resources for scientific research were
matched by abundant funds for libraries collecting the resulting
literature.
12. In the 1970s disillusionment set in.
Science began to be seen as failing to deliver. It failed to solve
the oil crisis in 1973. It has failed to show how we can avoid
ecological disaster. We have turned away from nuclear weapons
and nuclear energy. The popular regard for science in such areas
as the genetic modification of crops or the safety of vaccines
like MMR is low. Government support has been reduced. Nevertheless,
research and development manpower has continued to grow in the
last quarter century, albeit reverting to the growth rate of about
3% that prevailed before 1939. But while there are twice as many
scientists in research as there were in 1975, publishing twice
as many papers per year (Tenopir C & King D W, "Trends
in Scientific Scholarly Journal Publishing in the United States",
Journal of Scholarly Publishing 28 (3) 1997), library budgets
have increased by only 40% during the period.
13. The output of scientific papers is still
growing at about 3% a year. Overall figures show that an increase
of around 100 new peer-reviewed papers a year world-wide results
in the launch of a new journal. New titles result from the growth
of new fields—set against the decline of others—and
the overall growth rates of scientists and researchers (Mabe M
& Amin M, "Growth Dynamics of Scholarly and Scientific
Journals" Scientometrics 51 (1) 2001).
14. In the 1970s, library expenditure as
a proportion of total university expenditure in the western world
was running at 4% of total university expenditure. Since that
time, that proportion has steadily declined. It is currently well
below 3%. It is simply undeniable that university libraries have
not been successful in selling the value of the library to the
university community at large, and the faculty in particular.
And faculty have failed to support the one facility that provides
them with the literature they need for scholarship and research.
The problem in the UK is compounded by the consistent under-funding
of higher education over many years, which by general agreement
is some £8 billion less than it should be.
THE IMPACT
OF PUBLISHERS'
PRICING AND
"BIG DEAL"
PACKAGES
15. The market for journals has been changed
fundamentally by the adoption of online distribution of scientific
journals by many publishers from the mid-1990s onwards. The benefits
of online distribution are numerous, all of which improve the
accessibility of published scientific research:
— Speed of delivery has been improved.
Articles are accessible from the moment of publication, with no
delays for mail or other delivery systems. This benefits UK readers
in respect of journals published overseas (and vice versa).
— Accessibility on campus has been
improved. Online journals are available on the campus network
and accessible from departmental offices and halls of residence
as well as in the library.
— The speed and functionality of the
technology has improved the ability to search and locate research
papers, to link from citations to the articles cited, and to link
from articles to databases and other resources. Indexing of online
literature has become easier and more effective.
— The growing availability of usage
data on journals, now based on international standards, provides
hard evidence on which librarians can base selection and acquisition,
which will lead to information services better targeted on what
is required by the institution.
16. One effect of online publishing has
been to release publishers and their customers from the straitjacket
of individual journal subscription prices that apply to printed
journals. The first manifestation was licence offered by Academic
Press (now part of Elsevier) in which consortia of libraries were
offered online access to the whole Academic Press list for an
annual fee comprising the total expenditure on Academic Press
journals by libraries in the consortium plus a premium of around
10%. The benefits of the "Big Deal" is a matter of controversy:
— The early anecdotal evidence, from
organisations such as OhioLINK, the University of Toronto in Canada,
the University of Warwick in the UK and Macquarie University in
Australia, is that, where a package of journals is opened up to
users, the pattern of usage does not follow the journals actually
purchased by the library. OhioLINK provides an example. It is
a consortium that comprises 82 member institutions from research
libraries to public and school libraries. Before its creation,
an average of 25.1% of 4,800 key journal titles from 25 leading
publishers were held on subscription. The highest holding was
55.1% at Ohio State University. By 2001 it had negotiated licences
for access by all its members to some 3,700 titles, and reported
on usage over three years:
— 85% of usage came from 40% of
the titles available online via OhioLINK; and
— 52% of usage was from titles
not previously held on subscription at the user's campus; at Ohio
State, with a huge collection, the figure was 30%.
Clearly the smaller libraries benefit from access
to volumes of journal literature that were previously unavailable.
More significantly, the major ARL libraries within OhioLINK—Ohio
State, University of Cincinatti, Case Western Reserve—now
regard access as more important than selection (Sanville T, "A
Method out of the Madness: OhioLINK's Collaborative response to
the Serials Crisis—a Progress Report", UK Serials
Group Conference, April 2001).
— Many librarians contest the efficacy
of offering large collections of journals to their readers that
include many titles that would never have been held otherwise.
This has come into sharper focus as budgets have tightened. In
conducting a recent survey of academic librarians in the UK and
the USA, I have been struck by the desire to return to individual
title selection to more accurately reflect the needs of faculty
and research.
— Many librarians and smaller publishers
have criticised the range and extent of "Big Deals"
effected by major publishers such as Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer,
Wiley, ACS, AIP, IEEE, Blackwell as putting at risk smaller journal
publishers by potentially excluding them from consortia purchases;
"Big Deals" are difficult to get out of, and limit librarians'
ability to select what is most appropriate for their readership.
This particularly threatens society publishers with only a handful
of titles (albeit key titles in their respective disciplines).
The possible marginalisation of such smaller publishers is a concern
shared not only by the publishers themselves but also by academic
libraries worried about the sustainability of important titles
that represent value-for-money. There are a number of initiatives
that are attempting to compete with such deals by forming coalitions
of small publishers, eg ALPSP's Learned Journal Collection (UK),
and BioOne (USA).
17. Publishers have reacted to this controversy
by offering a multiplicity of different pricing models, based
on simultaneous users, size and/or type of institution, and subject-based
packages that are subsets of their journal lists. Some are also
experimenting with "self-select" packages in which discounts
are offered on a sliding scale, depending on the number of titles
ordered.
18. On the customer side, a notable feature
of the market has been the development of library consortia, in
which libraries have pooled their resources and use their combined
buying power to negotiate better deals from publishers. OhioLINK
was one of the first, established by the State of Ohio. Others
are membership-based organisations. In my firm's work, we track
the development of library consortia; there are now over 230 world-wide
that actively buy scientific literature for their constituent
libraries. In the UK, NESLi2 is the UK's national collective effort
to license online journals for higher and further education for
the period 2003-06. It has to be recorded that UK higher education
has failed to establish a permanent organisational structure for
collective acquisition. Moreover, it has failed to engage with
major publishers in a systematic and organised manner, as compared
with many other consortia, until very recently.
19. In 2003 I undertook a survey for ALPSP
of publishing practice of a cross-section of journal publishers
in the UK, Europe, the USA/Canada and Asia (Cox J & Cox L;
Scholarly Publishing Practice, ALPSP 2003). Of the 275 publishers
surveyed, which included all the major commercial and society
journal publishers whose output dominates the acquisitions of
most academic libraries, 66% responded, and their responses analysed.
In relation to pricing and accessibility, the following practices
were reported:
— 57% were STM publishers.
— 83% of STM titles are available online.
— The prevailing approaches to pricing
individual titles are either to provide online access free with
print, and/or to offer online subscriptions at a discounted price.
— Society publishers offer "bundles"
of journals comprising the complete list more frequently than
commercial publishers; many, by definition, publish only in one
subject. A significant number of commercial publishers offer subject
bundles or sub-sets of their lists.
— Many publishers are using combinations
of four or five methods to establish a bundle price; this indicates
that most publishers are still experimenting, and that there is
no custom and practice in pricing at this stage.
— Most publishers base pricing for
library consortia on previous print subscriptions. Discounting
the full price and pricing by size (usually by the number of sites)
are also widely used. Large commercial companies who have been
dealing with library consortia for some time have the most uniform
models.
— While a third of publishers license
the whole journal list to consortia, without any variation, 7%
will license a sub-set selected by the publisher (eg a subject
bundle).
— 34% of publishers allow the customer
to select the titles they want, and then base the consortium offer
on that aggregate selection.
— Most publishers provide active subscribers
with access to the back volumes available online at no extra cost.
Many small not-for-profit organisations make their journal archives
freely available to non-subscribers once a set period after publication
has elapsed.
ACTION NEEDED
TO PROMOTE
A COMPETITIVE
MARKETPLACE IN
SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS
20. The principal requirement is for more
funding to equip UK academic libraries to develop complete and
coherent collections to meet the needs of scientific research.
This cannot be disconnected from the general issue of higher education
funding. Suffice it to say that, in the context of overall government
expenditure, the current journal expenditure of £76 million
is very low—considerably lower than average expenditures
of the principal research libraries in the USA with which the
UK is competing (see Association of Research Libraries statistics
on www.arl.org).
21. While it may not lead to a fully functioning
market, with all the checks and balances that are implied (see
7 above), the creation of a more effective consortium for the
purchase of scientific literature for UK higher education would
assist the HE community in securing better and more appropriate
deals from publishers than has been possible via the current JISC-operated
mechanisms. I believe that this would best be effected by central
funding and an organisation empowered to act on behalf of the
entire community, as OhioLINK and similar state government agencies
are in the USA.
22. The machinery for the monitoring and
control of competition and, in particular, the abuse of dominant
power in a market by the Competition Commission and the Office
of Fair Trading should be sufficient for the management of a competitive
market. There is no case for treating scientific publishing as
separate and distinct from other commercial activity, if university
administrators and libraries use their buying power as consumers
of information.
OPEN ACCESS
23. The concept of scientific information
being freely available to everyone is a seductive one. Within
the past two years the "Open Access Movement" has gathered
a head of steam, and has certainly engaged the attention of both
librarians and many researchers. I am in the position of a sceptic,
if only because open access is unproven as a sustainable business
model and also because the enthusiasts for open access tend to
describe its advantages in quasi-religious terms rather than in
objective systemic and organisational terms. The Annex to this
submission contains background information on Open Access and
observations on the practical problems of making the transition
from the current subscription-based business model to an open
access model where the financial burden falls on the author or
his agent in the form of the university or research funding agency.
24. The Committee should note that much
of the demand for Open Access has arisen in the life sciences.
The two most substantial Open Access publishers, Public Library
of Science and BioMed Central, both publish exclusively within
the biological and medical disciplines. In considering the efficacy
of Open Access as an alternative publishing model, the Committee
should explore its appeal and applicability to other disciplines.
25. There are two aspects to Open Access:
the development of Open Access journals, and the posting of published
papers in institutional depositories that are freely accessible
in parallel with formal publication in a journal.
26. Open Access journals form a very small
part of current scientific journal literature: some 700+ titles
out of 18,600 active English-language peer-reviewed titles (Ulrich's
Periodicals Directory, 4 February 2004). As is noted in the Annex,
it is a difficult proposition to persuade an author to submit
a paper to an unproven Open Access title and pay for the privilege,
instead of an established high-impact journal that will publish
the paper at no charge to the author. Furthermore, there are three
issues that must be addressed in judging whether a transition
to open access journals will serve the scientific community well:
— At present, non-academic purchases
comprise some 25% of journal revenues—corporate, government
and other non-academic libraries—while non-academic authors
are much less significant as a proportion of total authorship.
If open access journals establish themselves, these libraries
will access the literature free of charge. The academic community
will have to bear almost the entire burden of financing the publishing
cycle. Even if open access publishing is less expensive than the
subscription-based model, the advantage to the academy is lost
by excluding revenue from corporate and other sources.
— Many learned societies depend on
publishing revenues to finance other member activities—seminars,
conferences etc. Open access may well destroy the financial underpinning
of most learned society activities.
— Much of the information infrastructure
that publishers and librarians have developed over many years
will remain necessary so that the literature emanating from a
fragmented publishing industry can be indexed, navigated, searched,
accessed and linked together in an effective information service
will remain necessary. Some open access advocates talk of "scholarly
skywriting" etc (Harnad S, www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm£8)
and confuse the formal publishing process with the full range
of communication between scientists that has always been a feature
of the research community. It is not explained how this unstructured,
anarchical, approach to disseminating the "minutes of science"
benefits science.
27. Posting published papers to an institutional
depository in parallel with formal publication involves financing
a parallel information system. It requires the establishment of
appropriate servers in each university and the probable expansion
of JANET, the UK academic network. Most important of all, it requires
the active participation of authors. In the ALPSP survey, it was
found that, while most publishers require authors to transfer
copyright, most also allow published articles to be posted to
web sites; they are more inclined to allow posting published articles
to the author's own site than their institution's (although retrieval
technology makes the difference between the two minimal). Few
publishers disallow the re-use of authors' material within the
academic institution, subject to proper acknowledgement of the
journal and publisher. Publishers are not inhibiting posting to
institutional depositories; authors have, in general, not yet
been persuaded that this is a desirable thing to do.
LEGAL DEPOSIT
LIBRARIES
28. Legal deposit has always been intended
to preserve the publishing output of the nation for future generations,
and never to supplant the legitimate trading activities of publishers.
It is quite antithetical to the interests of orderly scientific
publishing to propose to use Legal Deposit electronic publications
to circumvent copyright. It would amount to the theft of material
in which the publisher has invested substantially. It has never
been intended that legal deposit should be used for purposes other
than the maintenance of the archive.
SCIENTIFIC FRAUD
AND MALPRACTICE
29. There is no necessary connection between
changes in journal publishing business models and the controls
necessary to detect and eliminate malpractice. The system of peer-review
is not perfect—particularly in cases of deliberate fraud—but
it has been in place for over 300 years and has served the scientific
community well. It is, of course, undertaken by scientists for
scientists, and is facilitated by the publisher by funding the
process and providing administrative support. It is difficult
to see how a largely self-regulated academic process is likely
to be put at risk by changes in scientific publishing.
30. There is a very slight risk that Open
Access publishing, in which the author or his/her agent funds
publication, may weaken the integrity of peer review. If the publishing
process is funded by the author, there is a potential for the
exercise of undue influence on editors anxious to build the flow
of papers for publication in their journals. In the current subscription-based
publishing system, the flow of money is wholly divorced from the
process of review and acceptance for publication. In Open Access
publishing, the flow of money to support the enterprise is very
closely linked to acceptance for publication.
CONCLUSION: THE
MARKET IS
CHANGING
31. The market for online journals is still
in a process of development and experiment; it is less than 10
years old. Publishers are still grappling with the implications
of migrating from a print to an online publishing environment.
For the foreseeable future, publishers' journals will be available
in both modes. Nevertheless, there are some important indicators:
— Four out of five scientific journals
are now available online; almost all will be in the near future.
— Pricing models are still at the experimental
stage, and are still tied to the print price. This is likely to
be eroded as publishers feel more confident of the market for
online journals.
— Access to journal back volumes is
becoming an integral part of the online product.
— Although most publishers still require
journal authors to assign copyright, the author is not restricted
from using the work for personal or institutional purposes, including
open depositories.
As a matter of competition law, publishers are
properly prevented from co-operating to create pricing models.
As a result, the market is inundated with different approaches
to pricing and packaging access to online journals. A process
of convergence in policy and practice is likely, although it is
not clear how quickly stable and predictable business practices
will emerge. Much will depend on the vigour with which libraries
demand appropriate pricing mechanisms from their suppliers.
February 2004
|
