In “A Failure to Communicate,” Publisher’s Weekly takes a look at the Georgia State eReserve lawsuit. While there’s not really any “new news” to report, the article does a good job of portraying how difficult it can be to play by the book–or rather, the book that publishers are arguing for.
Curious about how a verdict against Georgia State might play out, Smith recently asked Duke’s e-reserves staff to give him random examples of recent permission fees. “For the 2007 book No Caption Needed, we paid $150 for permission to make just 17% of the work available to 12 students. This amounts to over $12 per student to gain access to less than a fifth of a work that sells for $35 retail. …
These are not extreme examples, Smith insists. In another example, fees exceeded $1,000, more than $25 per student.
Considering that most courses require multiple readings per week, the costs indeed would mount quickly. While campus licenses cover the majority of requests (one would hope), the problem is exacerbated by the complexity of the clearance system and the fact that faculty usually make requests close to the start of the term.
A recent study in the UK found that the peer review system “amounts to a £209,976,000 subsidy from publicly funded universities to private, for-profit journals, who then charge small fortunes to the same institutions for access to the journals.” Open journals are a great idea, but the tenure pressure to publish in elite journals have made this a tough nut to crack.
Hopefully a balance can be forged between the time and money invested in the publication process, and the social benefits of research and learning.