Scientific publishers gird for EU fight

A battle over the future of scientific publishing is shaping up in Brussels, as the industry’s leading publishers banded together in a joint statement on 13 February telling the European Commission to butt out of their business.

A new Commission initiative to review the industry “does not make clear why government intervention is needed, and risks promoting one business model over another,” said a statement from the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, a trade group that represents most of the world’s private publishers of scientific journals.  “Nobody will benefit if a major European industry is undermined and with it the peer review system upon which science and society depend.” The group issued a 10-point “Brussels Declaration” asserting the industry’s value to science and society.

The histrionics are a warm-up to a conference  that the Commission plans 15 and 16 February, on ways to improve the dissemination of scientific information in Europe. At issue is whether the Commission will follow the UK government, the US National Institutes of Health and some other agencies in taking steps to encourage free-access journals – a direct threat to the business models of the established publishing companies.

In a statement issued 15 February, the Commission reiterated its intention to examine the industry - and added that it has a few "concrete" measures in mind. It said it will "support experiments with open access in its recently-launched research programme (by, for example, refunding the project costs of open access publishing)." It also noted that it has already set aside about €50 million in 2007/08 "to support and help coordinate infrastructures for storing scientific data across Europe and €25 million for research on digital preservation."

Warning shot

Last November, in what amounted to a shot across the industry’s bows, the Commission published a damning “expert report” on the $7 billion to $11 billion scientific publishing market. The Commission report concluded that the market is inefficient and recommended government intervention. At stake, the report argued, is the ability of European scientists to publish their discoveries and thereby advance research internationally.

Certainly, the industry – led by such publishing behemoths as Anglo-Dutch Reed-Elsevier and the Macmillan unit of Germany’s Holtzbrinck – has made few friends of late among university administrators, hard-pressed to keep their libraries stocked with the thousands of specialized journals that their researchers need. The EC report noted that average scientific journal prices rose by up to 300 per cent beyond inflation between 1975 to 1995; and since then average prices have continued to rise at smaller, though still above-inflation, rates - despite the widespread adoption at university libraries of low-cost electronic distribution methods.

The price of profit?

The report also noted that journal prices vary by a factor of 12 from one discipline to another, with law journals the cheapest and applied-physics journals the most expensive. It found that for-profit journals charge an average three times as much as not-for-profit journals, and suggested that the private publishers may be wielding too much “market power” – raising the costs, and restricting the flow, of scientific communication.

The publishing debate has been building over the past decade - and governments and some learned societies have started to respond by encouraging online, “open access” journals. Some of these are free to read, but the scientist or university pays a submission fee. The private publishers argue that such business models are unsustainable, as they won’t generate enough revenue to pay for the expensive but important process of peer review that the scientific community expects of reputable journals. And in truth, few of the fledgling open-access publications operate today without some form of public or charitable support.

The Brussels Declaration, signed by such dominant publishers as Elsevier and MacMillan, makes “self-sustaining” business models the first of 10 prerequisites for the dissemination of scientific information. The publishers also argue that for-profit models successfully maintain the range and quality or titles, the peer-review system, and ready access to archives.