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

[Katja Mayer]

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: 	[open-science] Finland takes a leading role in the openness of 
academic journal pricing
Datum: 	Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:55:38 +0200
Von: 	Leo Lahti <leo.lahti at iki.fi>
An: 	open-science at lists.okfn.org



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)