The staggering price of world’s best research / Bay Area universities leading charge against publishers, arguing the knowledge in academic journals must be kept within reach

An alarm bell is ringing in the ivory tower. Something’s gone terribly wrong, frustrated scholars say, when scientific journals cost as much as new cars and diamond rings.

Critics are complaining with growing intensity that the most important advances in human knowledge — the new research and discoveries of top universities — have been in effect seized and are being held for ransom by commercial publishers.

…With growing reliance on online subscriptions, many libraries also have had to reduce or eliminate paper copies to save money. Under its new Elsevier contract, UC will receive only one print copy of each journal, to be kept in a central repository for use by all campuses. Half of UC’s online budget has gone to Elsevier, even though its titles account for only 25 percent of the use of such journals, according to UC data.

…Some scientists also question the viability of open access and the sustainability of such journals’ archives. In a statement earlier this month, former Stanford President Donald Kennedy, now editor of Science, said open access deserves support as an experiment that should coexist with nonprofit journals but that it faces the sustainability problem.

The whole article is worth reading but I found the comment about open-access particularly interesting. In serveral years we may find that the biggest gain from the open-access movement was to focus attention on the journals problem. On the other hand, as to the sustainability issue, it would be very interesting to see a proposed version that included peer-to-peer file-sharing.