What We Can Do About Science Journals

John Baez

January 24, 2011

The problem and the solutions

Luckily, there are also two counter-trends at work. In mathematics and physics, more and more papers are available from a free electronic database called the arXiv, and journals are beginning to let papers stay on this database even after they are published. In the life sciences, PubMed Central plays a similar role.

There are also a growing number of free journals, especially in mathematics. Many of these are peer-reviewed, and most are run by academics instead of large corporations.

The situation is worst in biology and medicine: the extremely profitable spinoffs of research in these subjects has made it easy for journals to charge outrageous prices and limit the free nature of discourse. A non-profit organization called the Public Library of Science was formed to fight this, and circulated an open letter calling on publishers to adopt reasonable policies. 30,000 scientists signed this and pledged to:

publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.

A number of other organizations are also pushing for free access to scholarly journals, such as Create Change, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative, funded by George Soros.

Editorial boards are beginning to wise up, too. On August 10, 2006, all the editors of the math journal Topology resigned to protest the outrageous prices of the publisher, Reed Elsevier. In August of this year, the editorial board of the Springer journal K-Theory followed suit. The Ecole Normale Superieure has also stopped having Elsevier publish the journal Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure.

So, we may just win this war! But only if we all do our part.

What we can do

1. Don't publish in overpriced journals.
2. Don't do free work for overpriced journals (like refereeing and editing).
3. Put your articles on the arXiv before publishing them.
4. Only publish in journals that let you keep your articles on the arXiv.
5. Support free journals by publishing in them, refereeing for them, editing them... even starting your own!
6. Help make sure free journals and the arXiv stay free.
7. Help start a system of independent 'referee boards' for arXiv papers. These can referee papers and help hiring, tenure and promotion committees to assess the worth of papers, eliminating the last remaining reasons the existence of traditional for-profit journals.

The nice thing is that most of these are easy to do! Only items 5 through 7 require serious work. As for item 4, a lot of journals not only let you keep your article on the arXiv, but let you submit it by telling them its arXiv number! In math it's easy to find these journals, because there's a public list of them.

Of course, you should read the copyright agreement that you'll be forced to sign before submitting to a journal or publishing a book. Check to see if you can keep your work on the arXiv, on your own website, etcetera. You can pretty much assume that any rights you don't explicitly keep, your publisher will get. Eric Weisstein didn't do this, and look what happened to him: he got sued and spent over a year in legal hell!

Luckily it's not hard to read these copyright agreements: for math journals, you can get them off the web from the arXiv. A more extensive list is available from Sherpa, an organization devoted to free electronic archives.

If you think maybe you want to start your own journal, or move an existing journal to a cheaper publisher, read Joan Birman's article about this. Go to the Create Change website and learn what other people are doing. Also check out SPARC - the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. They can help. And try the Budapest Open Access Initiative - they give out grants.

You can also support the Public Library of Science or join the Open Archives Initiative.

Also: if you like mathematics, tell your librarian about Mathematical Sciences Publishers, a nonprofit organization run by mathematicians for the purpose of publishing low-cost, high-quality math journals.

Which journals are overpriced?

How can you tell if a journal is overpriced? Up-to-date information on the rise of journal prices is available from the American Mathematical Society. They even include an Excel spreadsheet that lets you do your own calculations with this data! Some of this information is nicely summarized on a webpage by Ulf Rehmann. Using these tools you can make up your own mind which journals are too expensive to be worth supporting with your free volunteer labor.

When I first learned how bad the situation was, I started by boycotting all journals published by Reed Elsevier. This juggernaut was formed by merger of Reed Publishing and Elsevier Scientific Press in 1993. In August 2001 it bought Harcourt Press - which in turn owned Academic Press, which ran a journal I helped edit, Advances in Mathematics. I don't work for that journal anymore! The reason is that Reed Elsevier is a particularly bad culprit when it comes to charging high prices. You can see this from the above lists of journal prices, and you can also see it in the business news. In 2002, Forbes magazine wrote:

If you are not a scientist or a lawyer, you might never guess which company is one of the world's biggest in online revenue. Ebay will haul in only $1 billion this year. Amazon has $3.5 billion in revenue but is still, famously, losing money. Outperforming them both is Reed Elsevier, the London-based publishing company. Of its $8 billion in likely sales this year, $1.5 billion will come from online delivery of data, and its operating margin on the internet is a fabulous 22%.

Credit this accomplishment to two things. One is that Reed primarily sells not advertising or entertainment but the dry data used by lawyers, doctors, nurses, scientists and teachers. The other is its newfound marketing hustle: Its CEO since 1999 has been Crispin Davis, formerly a soap salesman.

But Davis will have to keep hustling to stay out of trouble. Reed Elsevier has fat margins and high prices in a business based on information - a commodity, and one that is cheaper than ever in the internet era. New technologies and increasingly universal access to free information make it vulnerable to attack from below. Today pirated music downloaded from the web ravages corporate profits in the music industry. Tomorrow could be the publishing industry's turn.

Some customers accuse Reed Elsevier of price gouging. Daniel DeVito, a patent lawyer with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, is a fan of Reed's legal-search service, but he himself does free science searches on the Google site before paying for something like Reed's ScienceDirect - and often finds what he's looking for at no cost. Reed can ill afford to rest.

Why should we slave away unpaid to keep Crispin Davis rolling in dough? There's really no good reason.

More recently I have had to boycott Springer-Verlag as well. I did this with real regret: this publisher had demonstrated a serious interest in mathematics for its own sake in years past. But then they were bought by Bertlesmann Media World, which also owns Random House, the record company BMG, and so on... and on February 2004 BertelsmannSpringer was bought by Cinven and Candover, who had already bought Kluwer in January 2003. So, they are now part of an enormous publishing conglomerate, and we can expect them to pay increasing attention to the "bottom line". Many Springer-published journals are already very expensive, and they will probably raise prices to the limit of what the market will bear.

I have also boycotted Birkhäuser, for similar reasons. By now I mainly do free work for free journals and journals run by the AMS and other professional societies. There are a lot of these, so I'm sure I'll still be busy.

Sneaky tricks

• Proprietary Preprint Archives. Examples included ChemWeb and something they called "The Mathematics Preprint Server". The latter was especially devious, because mathematicians used to call the arXiv "the mathematics preprint server".

  However, the Mathematics Preprint Server didn't fool many smart people, so lots of the papers they got were crap, like a supposed proof of Goldbach's conjecture, and a claim that the rotation of a galactic supercluster is due to a "topological defect" in spacetime. Eventually Elsevier gave up and stopped accepting new papers on their preprint server. Now it's a laughable shadow of its former self. Similarly, ChemWeb was sold off.

• Web Spamming. More recently, publishers have tried a new trick: "web spamming", also known as "search engine spamming" or "cloaking". The company gives search engine crawlers access to full-text articles — but when you try to read these articles, you get a "doorway page" demanding a subscription or payment. Sometimes you'll even be taken to a page that has nothing to do with the paper you thought you were about to see!

  Culprits include the Springer, Reed Elsevier, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. The last one seems to have quit — but check out their powerpoint presentation on this subject, courtesy of Carl Willis.

  If you see pages like this, report them to Google or your favorite search engine.

• Journal Bundling. Worse still is the strategy of "bundling" subscriptions into huge all-or-nothing packages, so libraries can't save money by ceasing to subscribe to a single journal. It's a clever trap, especially because these bundled subscriptions look like a good deal at first. The cost becomes apparent only later.

  Luckily, people are catching on. In 2003, Cornell University bravely dropped their subscription to 930 Elsevier journals. Four North Carolina universities have joined the revolt, and the University of California has also been battling Elsevier. For other actions universities have taken, read Peter Suber's list.

• Legal bullying. Large corporations like to scare people by means of threats of legal action backed up by deep pockets. A classic example is the lawsuit launched by Gordon and Breach against the American Physical Society for publishing lists of journal prices. Luckily they lost this suit.

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