Week 5 - Pricing Models and Consortial Arrangements

After reading "UC Libraries, Nature Publishing Group in Heated Dispute Over Pricing; Boycott Possible" as well as "The Librarians Dilemma: Contemplating the costs of the 'Big Deal,'" it seems clear to me that the current commercial publisher model needs to be changed.  It seems ridiculous that research professors are essentially required to submit their articles for free to commercial publishers and then professors from the same university have to pay to access these articles.  University of California estimates that their faculty generates $19 million in revenue for Nature Publication Group and yet, at present, they will have to pay $17,479 for subscriptions to these journals in 2011. 

Furthermore, somehow commercial publishers have convinced researchers to donate their time in the form of peer reviewing articles at no cost.  I have never really understood this except that it must operate in a similar way to Frazier's description of cooperation in game theory.  Humans or animals who have to interact in the same way repeatedly realize that cooperation is more beneficial to all involved.  Similarly, a researcher is more likely to peer review someone else's article if he or she wants to publish a peer reviewed article in the future. 

I was intrigued by Frazier's mention of the Public Library of Science which, as an example of the open access model, hopes to be an "online public library that would provide the full contents of the public record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form."  I searched the internet a bit to determine how this project has progressed since Frazier's article in 2001.  According to a July 7th, 2010 article in the Los Angeles Times titled "UC takes scientific journals to task over fees" (originally I was looking at this article to see if UC and NPG had come to a resolution) by Michael Hiltzick, the Public Library of Science is still in existence and, in fact, doing quite well.  In their model, researchers are charged a fee up to $2,900 to publish in one of their journals.  However, the article is then available to anyone free of charge and the researcher keeps the copyright for his or her article.  Additionally, the National Institute of Health encourages researchers to use their grant funds to pay these publication fees so that "the work they [NIH] pay for be made available without unreasonable delay and without pay barriers."

Lastly, I have a question regarding the conclusions drawn by "8.6 Reasons Why Journal Subscription Prices Spiraled Upward" in Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet.  The authors believe that journal prices significantly increased from 1975 to 1995 in part because most journals had smaller circulations in 1995 than in 1975.  In addition to the increase in overall number of journals, this is because "the average number of personal subscriptions per scientist dropped more than 50 percent over a twenty-year period."  What they don't consider, however, is that the human population increases each year.  I would like to know how this affects the size of circulation from year to year or if the change is small enough to be negligible compared to the other factors mentioned.