Letter from the Faculty Committee (FCLS)

Journals Purchasing Environment Poses New Problems

Letter in PDF format

About us > News > News Briefs

Faculty Assistance Sought as Libraries
Respond to Pressures from Commercial Publishers

A Letter from the Faculty Committee on the Library System (FCLS)

Dear Colleagues:

The Faculty Committee on the Library System (FCLS) urges your attention to the issues raised in the accompanying article by Carol Fleishauer.

In particular, we are concerned about the pressures exerted on the scholarly publishing system by a small number of highly profitable commercial publishers concentrating in science and technology journals. These publishers lock libraries into high-priced packages for combined print/electronic output, and contractually constrain libraries ability to manage expenditures. Libraries must invest a continually larger percentage of their budgets in providing access to these publications.

In recent years the MIT administration has provided a good funding base for the MIT Libraries allowing for access to electronic products and for new purchases to support emerging areas of research and teaching at MIT. The Libraries judiciously use these funds to support students and faculty in their work. The Libraries' web-site presents an impressive array of products that have become critical to our work, but this access is now at risk because of publisher pricing practices.

There are no simple solutions to the problems of the scholarly communication environment. However, since the "raw materials" from which commercial publishers derive their profits are the collective output of researchers, faculty need to be involved in developing a better system.

The FCLS recommends that each of you consider the following actions:

1. If possible, submit and review papers for journals that have reasonable pricing practices. Resist assigning unlimited rights to publishers. The Creative Commons web-site (http://www.creativecommons.org/) provides alternatives to consider.

2. In addition to formal publication, consider submitting papers to digital repositories such as DSpace (http://www.dspace.org), MIT's institutional repository, and such discipline-based repositories as the physics preprints archive (http://arxiv.org/).

3. Take an interest in the business aspects of any journal you edit; if warranted, consider moving your journal to a non-commercial publisher or creating an alternative journal.

4. Use your membership in scholarly associations to encourage reasonable publication pricing and to discourage contracting or selling publications to commercial publishers.

5. Use your position on editorial boards to influence publishers to concentrate on the goal of the widest possible dissemination at reasonable prices.

The pressures on the scholarly communication system are significant and growing. We can no longer guarantee that our future students will have access to the scholarly literature they need. This not simply a problem for libraries; it is a problem for the academy. Faculty must contribute to the solution. Members of the FCLS and library staff would be happy to respond to your questions or to visit your department meetings for a discussion of the issues and these recommendations.

The Faculty Committee on the Library System