[open-science] Finland takes a leading role in the openness of academic journal pricing

Tue Jun 14 08:55:38 UTC 2016

This might be of interest for some on the list if you did not bump into it
already. / Leo Lahti

>From the MostlyPhysics blog:
http://www.mostlyphysics.net/blog/2016/6/13/finland-takes-leading-role-in-the-openness-of-academic-journal-pricing

Freedom of Information request by open science advocates has revealed
academic journal pricing through an administrative court decision. Finland
is the first country where the subscription prices paid by practically all
universities and research institutions to individual publishers are made
available. This strengthens the position of universities in the 2016
contract negotiations, made ever more timely by the recent deep funding
cuts. Comparisons between publishers and countries also supports the
ongoing discussion of alternative publishing models and directing funding
towards open access (OA) publishing.

The costs of academic journals have risen precipitously, but the lack of
detailed pricing information has made the overall situation difficult to
perceive. There are significant price differences between publishers
<http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/PNAS-2014-Bergstrom-1403006111.pdf>,
universities
<https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/> and
countries
<http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/04/publishing/whole-lotta-shakin-goin-on-periodicals-price-survey-2015/>.
While dominant publishing houses have reported profit margins of tens of
percent
<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0127502>
and the industry is ever more concentrated
<http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0127502>,
university libraries including Harvard
<https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices>
have reached a fiscally unsustainable situation. This has in part
contributed to the ongoing breakthrough of open access.

In the spring of 2014, the conclusion that contract prices should be public
also in Finland was reached in a discussion group
<https://www.facebook.com/groups/241398182642057/permalink/411482855633588/>
of the Open Knowledge Finland (OKF) association. In the summer, researcher
and open science advocate Leo Lahti made a Freedom of Information request
to Aalto and other Finnish universities on behalf of the OKF. The
universities themselves would stand to benefit from the openness, making
negotiations more transparent and potentially resulting in cost savings.

None of the universities supplied the requested information. The fear of
publisher legal action may have prevented them from following their own
principles of openness, because for example Aalto refused to even provide
an appealable decision
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iMI9UVHlDXBrw-D0_LmhoFdMM6d_o8WrjiuNXCdFufk/edit>,
denied having acted as a public institution covered by the openness laws,
and finally tried to transfer its responsibility to the National Library.
Open science advocates brought the matter to the Helsinki administrative
court, which predictably confirmed
<https://github.com/okffi-science/2014-tietopyynto-lisenssimaksut/blob/master/HallintoOikeus/20150807-HAO-ratkaisu.pdf>
that the prices of subscription contracts are public information. Similar
demands for openness <https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.72/>
had been made previously; national and university-level figures are
available for some countries
<http://stuartlawson.org/2016/06/publicly-available-data-on-international-journal-subscription-costs/>,
but detailed publisher-specific information has only been made public in
the UK and the USA. In the end, the Open Science and Research Initiative
<http://openscience.fi> (ATT) of the Ministry of Education and Culture took
responsibility for gathering the Finnish pricing data.

After this two-year process Finland is now amongst the first countries
where publisher- specific prices have been made public in detail over
several years. The material includes the costs of 266 publisher titles for
all universities and dozens of other institutions, the total sum of which
in 2010-2015 was 131.1 million euros. A more detailed analysis can be found
in a separate post. Special thanks are due to the Finnish open science
community <http://fi.okfn.org/wg/openscience/>, whose initiative and
perseverance was required to fulfill the spirit of the openness laws.

Links:

   -

   Data <http://openscience.fi/publishercosts> on the subscription costs in
   Finland 2010-2015
   -

   Announcement
   <http://openscience.fi/-/transparency-and-openness-to-scientific-publishing-the-finnish-research-organisations-pay-millions-of-euros-annually-to-the-large-publishers>
   on the data release (ATT)
   -

   Preliminary analysis of the pricing
   <http://ropengov.github.io/r/2016/06/10/FOI/>
   -

   Public documents related to the Freedom of Information request
   <https://github.com/okffi-science/2014-tietopyynto-lisenssimaksut> (OKF)
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