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How We Pay for Publishing, Page 1
How We Pay for Publishing Kevin S. Hawkins University of North Texas Libraries How did we get into this mess? Higher education administrators, funding bodies, and librarians are unhappy with the cost to acquire and access scholarly literature, especially subscription-based journals from commercial publishers, whose price increases far outstrip the growth in library budgets. An outsider might ask how it can cost so much to get access to many leading scholarly publications in an age when it costs so little to produce copies of documents. After all, the retail prices of print books have been largely flat, despite inflation, and Amazon and Apple have driven down the prices for digital books and music. Readers and authors are increasingly feeling the system's dysfunction as well, finding that they are unable to get access through their institution to the publications that they need for their work and that acquiring their own copy is ridiculously expensive. While the problem has been created by commercial publishers skimming the cream of academic publications and then charging handsomely for access to these prestige brands, it has been difficult to effect change in the system because scholars are the consumers of the content but only rarely the purchasers of it; as with health care and prescription drugs, the true costs of market consolidation and intellectual property protection are not borne by the consumers of the services and products. How might we get out? Many stakeholders in scholarly publishing want not only to see a more efficient market but also to make scholarly literature free to read and reproduce at the same time. The argument for this is strongest in the case of government-funded research, whether produced with support from a research grant or simply by virtue of the author's employment at a publicly supported or mission-driven non-profit institution (such as a state or private university, respectively)-which frankly covers nearly all authors of scholarly publications. Proposed interventions in the system aimed at increasing open access to scholarly literature are, broadly speaking, of two types: a) Publishers claim that if they made their publications free to read, their sales or subscriptions would no longer cover their costs. Therefore, the academy could find money to give subsidies to the publishers beyond what they already pay for subscriptions to cover the "first copy" costs (what it costs the publisher to select,
