Library Publishing Agreements Benefit Scientists
Dave Crowder is a professor in the WSU Department of Entomology, the director of the WSU Decision Aid System Service Center, and the assistant director of the WSU Molecular Plant Sciences Graduate Program. Research in his laboratory deals with the population dynamics and ecology of insects, as well as their interactions with plants. Most of this work is conducted in agricultural systems, with a focus on leveraging fieldwork with technology and models to solve pest management challenges. His interests include sustainable agriculture, pest management, and population dynamics of insects and insect-borne pathogens. His laboratory group consists of six graduate students, four postdoctoral scientists, four senior staff, and 10 undergraduates. Over his career, he has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles. To learn more about Crowder and his laboratory group, see his WSU website.
The business of scientific publishing is like no other. For researchers, writing journal articles allows us to share our findings and create impact. The number and quality of our publications are also a measure of academic performance. Yet, publishing a manuscript is not just about writing a compelling scientific story; you also have to have lots of money.
There are thousands of scientific journals, but the vast majority are managed by a few extremely large corporations. The top five publishers collectively generate $30 billion a year in revenue, with profit margins that exceed tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They accomplish this feat by getting academics to pay them to publish their research, while the same academics provide free labor by acting as journal editors and reviewers.
Scientists also often relinquish their work’s copyright after publication, allowing the publisher to sell the manuscript to third parties. If the book industry operated the same, every time Stephen King wrote a new novel, he would have to pay a publisher millions of dollars to take it off his hands, and he would not be paid a penny, no matter how many copies were sold.
University libraries manage relationships with publishers. Specifically, they make deals with each publishing company to obtain access to a set of their journals in bulk, and then the content of these journals is made available to WSU-affiliated staff and students. If WSU did not have such agreements, every time a student or faculty member downloaded a scientific article, the cost would be about $40. A typical scientist may read 3-5 articles a week, and without such agreements, we would spend thousands of dollars per person per year just to read literature.
The WSU Libraries evaluate these publishing agreements annually, taking into consideration how often journals are accessed and their costs. This process determines what journals are available within the library system. I have been fortunate to work with library staff and learn more about how they make these difficult decisions in concert with the WSU community. One thing is certain: Investment in the libraries provides broad benefits to WSU.
Over the past decade, more journals have also moved to open-access (OA) models, where scientists pay even higher fees than traditional subscription models so they can keep their copyrights and the journal cannot charge fees to third parties. Recent government OA mandates have also necessitated a shift towards this model. OA publishing benefits scientists, as nobody wants their research to be hidden behind a paywall.
For example, much of the research in my laboratory focuses on developing new tactics to promote pest management and mitigate invasive species. In some cases, the papers we publish may be impactful to other scientists who want to repeat our methods in their own systems. In other cases, our papers may be useful to farmers or other agricultural partners, or students taking a pest management course. OA publishing thus allows scientists to make their work available to the entire public, because anybody can access research publications without having to pay. In this sense, journals that publish their OA articles create a sort of digital public library.
However, OA fees can be obscenely high, especially at some “prestigious” journals. To publish an article, Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charge $12,690, $5,450, and $5,495, respectively. A typical article in these journals is between 3-6 pages, so about $1,000 to $4,000 per page. Again, to use the Stephen King analogy, imagine him needing to pay $2.5 million to publish his new 625-page book, never earning another cent.
Given the intense competitiveness of academia, publishing an article in a prestigious journal can provide immeasurable benefits for one’s career, especially for early-career scientists. Unfortunately, only those with considerable grant funds can even consider certain journals as outlets for their work.
The WSU Libraries have made a deliberate effort to support OA publishing. In particular, in recent years the libraries have expanded their publishing agreements with multiple companies to cover the cost of OA publishing for WSU-affiliated scientists.
This is a big deal. Over the past three years, my lab has published 10 articles in journals managed by academic publishing giants Wiley and Elsevier. Without the WSU agreements, these 10 papers would have cost my lab $27,000 to publish. Simply put, we probably couldn’t have afforded it and would have pursued more affordable, but less visible journals. The costs of publishing are extreme, and the WSU Libraries are allowing more university scientists to consider a broader set of outlets without these limitations and considerations.
When I was a bachelor’s student at the University of Illinois, which has an amazing library, I used to go there to study and get away from people. I did the same at the University of Arizona when studying for my doctoral exams. The WSU Libraries similarly are a great place to visit, with incredible physical content to explore and spaces to spread out and think. Yet, what I did not realize as a student was that a library is not just a physical space with books, but that it also maintains access to science in the digital world. As a student, I am sure I thought there is no way a published article can’t be free to obtain, but I was certainly wrong.
As a scientist now of 25 years, I have learned more broadly the extent that the libraries support every person at our university. While I wish we had a different publishing industry, and I’m sure most of my colleagues would agree, the role of the libraries in dealing with publishers deserves greater appreciation.