$3,000-a-year journal subscriptions endanger major sources of research information, Cornell panel says

Thanks to soaring prices, academic agricultural and biological journals, which for 200 years have been crucial to providing information on advances in biology, food production, plant diseases and animal science, are likely to go the way of the plow horse. That is the view of a Cornell University faculty task force that has been studying the problem.

Subscriptions to the 312 research journals studied by the panel are as high as $5,000 a year, and nine of the scholarly journals studied now cost more than $3,000 a year. In 1994, the panel's report says, 24 of the 25 highest priced agricultural journals and 26 out of the 30 most expensive biological titles were from commercial publishers, as opposed to university, government and society publishers.

"If subscriptions continue to rise at their present rate, the end result will be the extinction of many journals -- because they will no longer be commercially viable -- and drastic reductions in scope of many university library journal collections," says Kraig Adler, Cornell vice provost for life sciences, professor of biology, and chair of the task force.

The panel made its price comparison of journals on the basis of a cost-per-printed-character and a cost-per-page analysis. (See accompanying list, "Current Top Ten Highest-Priced Scholarly Journals at Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library.")

As prices increase beyond inflation, the study notes, more libraries are being forced to cut journal subscriptions. "The costs of the journals are then spread out over an ever-decreasing number of institutions at still-higher prices that even fewer institutions can afford," Adler says.

"Once we stripped away the cost of living, adjusted for the American dollar, compared the prices to journals in other categories using the same printing companies, and factored out all the usual arguments, we found that the remaining motive for escalating costs of commercial publications was profit," he says.

The task force report, "Price Study of Core Agricultural and Biological Journals," was written by Wallace C. Olsen, a senior research associate at Cornell's Albert R. Mann Library. Also on the task force were Cornell professors Martin Alexander, soil science; Gerald F. Combs, nutrition; Nelson Hairston, ecology; Harold Hintz, animal science; Kenneth Horst, plant pathology; Betty Lewis, nutrition; Donald Rutz, entomology; and Christopher Wien, fruit and vegetable science.

How can faculty combat the trend of escalating subscriptions? The report suggests that researchers could decide not to submit articles to high-priced journals and that university researchers could withhold their editorial services from the journals. Academics, it says, must be aware of the implications of their publishing patterns, and of the subsequent costs to the institutions and their readers.

The report finds that price jumps have forced university libraries to cut their subscriptions, particularly to those journals with extraordinary price increases. It says that researchers and scholars are beginning to find their usual printed resources reduced, and that smaller libraries -- like those at community colleges -- borrow more expensive titles through inter-library loans, which places even greater resource stress on larger university libraries, particularly the large agricultural libraries at the nation's land-grant schools.

The Cornell panel studied price changes in 312 core agricultural and biological journal subscription prices between 1988 and 1994. During that period, on a price-per-page basis, the prices of the agricultural journals increased by 64.7 percent for all titles. The prices of agricultural journals from commercial publishers increased as much as 77.8 percent and those published by scientific societies and associations increased by 33.3 percent.

The average cost of biology journals rose by 35.5 percent over the same period. Commercial biology journals were again at the high end with a 36.8 percent increase and university biology journals at the low end with an average 25.8 percent rise.

The study also finds that price increases for the core agricultural and biological journals substantially outpaced both inflation and U.S. dollar exchange losses against currencies in France, Germany, Holland and Britain, where most of the expensive titles are published.

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