Harvard Library sent out a memo to the university's 2,100 lecturers and
researchers urging them to publish their academic work open access.
"Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly
communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically
restrictive," it says in the notice.
Unaffordable journals - the answer is open
access
By now, the library had journal related expenses of almost $3.75
million per year. Academic journals would exploit their copyright
monopoly in order to extract high profits, the communiqué hinted:
"Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can
be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the
prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply
of new articles."
Harvard Library director, Robert Darnton, talked to the Guardian about this issues
calling upon other universities to follow suit: "I hope that other
universities will take similar action. We all face the same
paradox. We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee
papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it
for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at
outrageous prices."
"The system is absurd, and it is inflicting terrible damage on
libraries. One year's subscription to The Journal of Comparative
Neurology costs the same as 300 monographs. We simply cannot go on
paying the increase in subscription prices. In the long run, the
answer will be open-access journal publishing, but we need
concerted effort to reach that goal," Darnton commented.
This development may blow further wind in the sails of open
access advocates. 2012 started with an uproar by a British
scientist criticizing efforts by major publishers like
Elsevier to limit open access through the U.S. Research Works Act.
In the end, this legislation did not gain enough support, yet a critical light was thrown on
academic publishers and the open access debate.