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Harvard Library: subscriptions too costly, faculty should go open access

The faculty members that advise Harvard's library have told their peers that …

The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council, which says the costs of subscriptions to major research journals "cannot be sustained." It says that the cost of these journals has gone up by 145 percent over the last six years and, if things continue at that pace, it'll be forced to cut back.

Just to put this in context, the total cost for subscriptions is $3.75 million a year. As of the end of the last fiscal year, Harvard's endowment was $32 billion. If it received a similar rate of return on its investments as it did last year, it would take it about five and a half hours for its endowment to cover this cost.

In any case, the Faculty Advisory Council is fed up with rising costs, forced bundling of low- and high-profile journals, and subscriptions that run into the tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's suggesting that the rest of the Harvard faculty focus on open access publishing. The statement calls on the faculty to "move prestige to open access" and to consider resigning if they're on the editorial board of a subscription journal.

None of this is binding, and there's a very good chance that if a researcher gets an opportunity to publish in Nature, they'll take it. But it's another sign of a general dissatisfaction with the current state of academic publishing, which was what spawned the open access movement originally, and has more recently given rise to a large boycott of the publisher Elsevier.

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