Article:		The Real Problem with Textbooks: A SafariU Editorial
Subject:		price of textbooks and scholarly journals
Date:		2005-10-24 06:35:07
From:		ericleasemorgan
The skyrocketing cost of textbooks is mirrored by the costs of scholarly journals. For at least the past 15 years or more the average subscription cost of scholarly journals has risen about 7% per year every year. How would you like to get a 7% raise every year? The average scholarly journal costs around $3,000 for twelve issues. Moreover, while these things are increasingly in electronic inform, access to these journals is through licensing agreements. Libraries don't own the content, just the permission to look at it. The whole thing is very frustrating because the model that is being played out does not truly support the increase of human knowledge. Instead, some greedy publishers are taking advantage of the scholarly communications process and making the access to ideas difficult, not to mention expensive. As mentioned above, "The good news is that internet technology can put teachers back in control of their teaching tools and save their students money, too." Open access scholarly publishing is one possible solution to these problems. -- Eric Lease Morgan, Librarian University Libraries of Notre Dame

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• price of textbooks and scholarly journals
  2005-11-04 14:35:02  bonniedalzell [Reply | View]
  
  
  A further annoyance on the cost of scholarly journals is this. To the best of my knowledge the only party that obtains any payement for journal articles is the paper publisher. The article authors do not and the institution(s) that support(s) the research are actually asked to pay towards the cost of publishing. Yet the journal publishers not only charge outrageous costs for subscriptions but they may want fees as high as $25 for online viewing of the full text of 4 or 5 page article.
  
  Further the journal publisher may often copyright in their own name graphs and figures in the article making it difficult to assemble teaching materials without extensive correpondence. I find this especially distressing in relation to research that is funded by the public through the National Science Foundation but published by journals owned by publishers such as Elsiver. If my tax dollars paid for the research and the drafting of the figures why should Elsiver own them?
  
  If you are a scholar who is no longer associated with a university it becomes very difficult to keep up to date on some topics.