Open access: What price affordability?

Richard Poynder

Independent journalist and blogger, Cheltenham, UK

Correspondence to: Richard Poynder. Email: [email protected]

Dating from 1665, the scholarly journal has served the research community well for over 300 years. In the past few decades, however, the subscription model it utilises has created a couple of apparently intractable problems—what we will call the affordability and accessibility problems. The affordability problem has its roots in the dramatic growth in research after World War II, a problem made worse by the constant above-inflation increases in the cost of journal subscriptions—which led to what librarians call the “” [1]. The situation was further exacerbated by the fact that learned societies struggled to cope with the growing demand from researchers for publication outlets. Spotting a lucrative market opportunity, for-profit companies (led by Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press) began to launch new scholarly journals [2], and to invite learned societies to outsource their journals to them, on the promise that by doing so they would be able to generate more money to subsidise their other activities. Further aggravating the problem, it turns out that scholarly publishing does not operate like a classic market. For a number of reasons, no effective mechanisms for restraining prices have emerged [3]. In effect, scholarly publishers are as good as able to charge whatever they want for their journals. Editorial The upshot: Today even the wealthiest universities in the world can no longer afford to subscribe to all the journals their faculty need to do their work effectively [4], and the subscription model is now widely viewed as unsustainable so far as scholarly journal publishing is concerned. While the accessibility problem is clearly a consequence of the affordability problem (since access would not be an issue if research institutions could afford to subscribe to all the journals they needed), we should view them as separate issues, not least because solving one of the problems will not necessarily solve the other. It goes without saying that the affordability problem is most serious for researchers based in the developing world. Their institutions have never been able to afford more than a handful of journal subscriptions, and the more prices rise the fewer the number of journals they are able to subscribe to, and so the greater the accessibility problem becomes for them.

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Published: 14/08/2014 Received: 23/07/2014 ecancer 2014, 8:ed41 DOI: 10.3332/ecancer.2014.ed41

Copyright: © the authors; licensee ecancermedicalscience. This is an article distributed under the terms of the Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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