University of California in subscription showdown with Elsevier

System urges researchers to consider boycotting academic publisher as negotiations go to the wire

Published on
December 14, 2018
Last updated
December 19, 2018
American football game
Source: Getty
Face-off: ‘US libraries are really starting to get serious about cancelling Elsevier and other commercial publisher journal subscription bundles’

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Reader's comments (4)

In the era before word processors and websites, commercial publication of academic journals made sense. Typesetting was difficult and expensive; printing and distributing each issue of a journal was difficult and expensive. Today, there is no reason for commercial publication of academic journals to exist. An individual university faculty (or school or department) or disciplinary organisation can easily get someone to be editor (due to the disciplinary influence of the position) and easily get peer reviewers (ditto). Authors are already obliged to and do submit 'manuscripts' which are 'typeset' and conform to the journal's style guidelines. Any competent member of support staff can quite quickly and easily proofread accepted articles, ensure standard format, and post them online. And there is no need for an infrastructure to deal with subscriptions, because there is no need for subscriptions-- there is hardly any cost involved, and we are all being encouraged to go open access anyway. The only remaining strength commercial publishers have is that the most prestigious publication venues are commercially published, because they are long-established. That will, surely, sooner or later drain away.
Everywhere I keep reading that the assumption that the only alternative to paying the like of Elsevier is for researchers to pay publishers (this is indeed the only alternative for commercial publishers). While this is a common practice now, there are of course many other alternatives. This includes prominent book publishers (such as Open Humanities Press, Punctum and Meson and many others). If universities wanted to support open access and save a lot of money they could do so by supporting, at a much lower cost, more stable platforms and processes for those open access publishers that do not charge processing fees. It would also help if national research organisations were a little more open to diversity and experiment in publishing. Although I realise that some are heading this way, largely because people are still stuck somewhere between the 17th century invention of journal publishing and what are now decidedly 20th century commercial publishers' need to generate profit for their shareholders.
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