Harvard faculty members were told this month that spending millions every year on scholarly journals “cannot be sustained,” and they were implored to publish their work in an open-access format while encouraging others to do the same.
The campus’s Faculty Advisory Council sent the bluntly-worded message April 17, sounding an alarm about the “untenable” model of buying and subscribing to journals that can cost as much as $40,000 annually.
Two providers of scholarly material have more than doubled their annual prices for online content since 2005, while Harvard spent more than $3.7 million for its collection of academic journals in 2011.
The Faculty Advisory Council said that research funding given to the university has not compensated for the massive and consistent price increases in journal costs.
“The library has never received anything close to full reimbursement for these expenditures from overhead collected by the university on grant and research funds,” the council’s letter said.
Continuing with the current academic journal model, the council charged, “would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.”
The letter addressed to faculty members included nine suggestions for how they can help the school slash its spending on academic journals. Among the suggestions: Publishing research in respected open-access journals, freely accessible online.
“Move prestige to open access,” the letter said.
Other suggestions included publishing research in journals with a more reasonable pay-per-use system, contacting organizations to raise the issue of affordable or open-access journals, and helping “library-friendly” groups gain control of scholarly literature.
The letter was made public just a week before Harvard, on April 24, put bibliographic information for all 12 million of its libraries’ works into the public record. Information from all of the university’s audio recordings, videos, manuscripts, maps, and books—housed in 73 libraries—was made available under the Creative Commons public domain license.
Harvard’s concerns about the cost of academic journals signal just how serious the problem of expensive journal subscriptions has become in higher education, observers said.
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