Sharing science
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...industry during the research boom of World War II. Today they publish two million articles a year with $8 billion in annual revenue. Most cost hundreds to thousands of dollars for an annual subscription, but some, like Brain Research and Combustion Science and Technology cost nearly $20,000 per year. This forces all but the wealthiest universities and foundations to cull their subscription list. Journals are expensive to produce, no matter how many subscribers they have. As the number of subscribers goes down, prices rise for the fewer institutions that must share the total cost of publication. In a vicious cycle, rising prices induce even more subscribers to cancel. This cycle applies to all types of journals, although the more specialized the audience, the more significant the impact. If one hundred libraries cancel their subscription to Nature, it barely affects the journal’s bottom line, but it might be the death knell for Colloid and Surface Science.

Shrinking access to scientific journals angers researchers the world over, as the ever-increasing costs of print publications shut out scientists from poorer institutions. Researchers’ frustrations climaxed in 2001, when 30,000 scientists from 180 countries signed a boycott letter calling on publishers to make their work freely available in online libraries within six months. They pledged not to “publish in, edit or review for, or personally subscribe to" journals that do not comply. “The current business model is unsustainable, since it is now economically and physically possible to disseminate an article worldwide at zero cost,” says Peter Suber, publisher of the Open Access Newsletter from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an organization of universities and libraries that aims to raise awareness about this issue. “It’s a dysfunctional system; [publishers] are racing into a brick wall.”

Some changes have already taken place to satisfy researchers and keep traditional journals financially viable. Almost all journals published today put at least some of their articles on the internet, an “added value” meant to retain subscriptions by making the journals more worth their high cost in the eyes of buyers. Large databases link electronic articles, and scientists use search engines like “Web of Science” to gather, in a matter of minutes, the same information it previously would have taken months to find. Electronic versions of articles have quickly become...