Academic journals create budget crunch

College students complain about high textbook prices, but they've got nothing on Patricia Iannuzzi.

UNLV's dean of libraries spent just over $15,000 for a subscription this year to Tetrahedron, an academic publication about organic chemistry.

A subscription to Physics Letters, a journal about physics-related issues, ran nearly $18,000.

Now Iannuzzi is joining a national fight against journal publishers that have caused UNLV's budget, and the budgets of libraries around the nation, to skyrocket in recent years.

Iannuzzi is encouraging faculty to bypass publishing their work in traditional subscription-based journals and instead choose free, open-access journals. She's also giving classes to faculty members on how they can maintain ownership of their work instead of surrendering it to the academic journals.

But some said her grass-roots effort could be a losing one, with change coming only if federal lawmakers take action.

Were Iannuzzi and her fellow librarians to succeed, it would turn the dog-eat-dog world of academic publishing on its head. The best journals, the ones faculty aspire to publish in, are the same ones that charge thousands for subscriptions.

University libraries have been engaged in a cyclical, frustrating battle with publishers for decades, Iannuzzi said. Libraries need access to the publications; publishers have exploited that need, she said.

"It's a nonsustainable model," Iannuzzi said.

UNLV Executive Vice President and Provost Neal Smatresk is less diplomatic.

"Publishers have milked the research establishment," he said. "It's a nationwide issue."

UNLV's library has been bludgeoned by rising subscription costs, officials say. Its collections budget, of which academic journal and database subscriptions consume 84 percent, has jumped 88 percent during the past five years.

Last year, the budget was a staggering $4 million, or about one-third of the entire budget for Nevada State College.

The university is asking each department to cut its budgets this year, but it's protecting the library from the cuts because of how important the library is to the university's research, Smatresk said.

The issue also has drawn the attention of Congress, which could provide relief to university libraries.

One bill in Congress would prevent taxpayers from, in effect, paying twice, by requiring public access to papers that use federally funded research, such as that paid for by the National Science Foundation.

Another measure would require public access to all papers that use funding from the National Institutes of Health, a major source of research funding for faculty.

Publishers have complained, however, that the cost of editing and publishing academic papers continues to increase.

Calls for comment to the Association of American Publishers, the chief trade group lobbying against congressional action, were not returned.

Caught in the middle are faculty, who exist in a "publish- or-perish" environment.

The public doesn't understand how big an issue writing papers and getting published is for faculty, said UNLV professor Brett Riddle.

Hundreds of hours each year are devoted to writing grant proposals for research, writing papers for publication and reviewing other academics' papers, known as "peer review."

Faculty typically will be asked to review, for free, between six and 12 papers per year, spending usually two to five hours on each paper.

Deans and department heads use the number and quality of papers published as a measure of faculty performance, Riddle said.

"This is the difference between a university and a community college," said Riddle, who is an editor for the Journal of Biogeography and an assistant editor for Systematic Biology. "If we don't do the research, and we don't get the grants, we sort of get relegated to a back office somewhere. ... It's a downward spiral."

There are thousands of academic journals, covering everything from specific subjects in the sciences to broad topics in psychology and the liberal arts.

Some are obviously better, or more reputable, than others.

In the sciences, the best journals are Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For medicine, it's the New England Journal of Medicine.

Public-access journals, which Iannuzzi is encouraging faculty to publish in and are available for free on the Internet, are improving in reputation and quality, several faculty said.

But their standards for publication sometimes aren't as rigorous as subscription journals.

Brian Hedlund, a UNLV assistant professor and biologist, said Iannuzzi's idea sounds good but might be unrealistic.

"For me ... the more people who have access to it (my articles), the better," said Hedlund, who has published in Proceedings and other prestigious journals.

"I want to get the word out there. But I want to make sure the journal I publish in carries a certain amount of prestige," Hedlund said.

Iannuzzi is also suggesting faculty own the rights to their papers so that faculty can make the paper available to anybody. But it's unusual for publications to give up ownership of an article, most faculty said.

Ron Yasbin, dean of the College of Sciences at UNLV, said the movement toward publishing in public access journals is gathering support, and that he'll approach the subject with faculty.

"This is a real problem in the sense that researchers are caught between the journals that we publish in and wanting it to be as public as possible," he said.

The real issue isn't as black-and-white as proponents on either side make it out to be, however, said University of Nevada, Reno Dean of Libraries Steve Zink.

"There is a religious issue here," he said. "There's a belief that information is free, or should be."

Zink, a former editor of the Journal for Government Information, acknowledges that his view is unusual for a university librarian, and that current increases in subscription costs are not sustainable.

But he said publishers also need to make money on their product.

The best way to curb those costs is by using a model similar to what UNR's new library will use -- not paying for an entire subscription to a journal and buying only the article the faculty member wants.

Contact reporter Lawrence Mower at lmower@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0440.