Written by Claus Rosenkrantz Hansen and Lars Nondal
CBS Library regularly receives requests for access to journals that we do not currently subscribe to. We greatly appreciate these requests, and we encourage our faculty to keep making them. However, developments in the pricing policies of some publishers have convinced us to write this piece, because at what point do journals become too expensive?
A lot of journals are currently transitioning to full Open Access, something that does not happen overnight but only gradually, over time. During this interim period, the journals are known as ‘transformative’ journals, which basically means they are on their way to becoming full-blown Open Access.
In the transformative period, some journal articles are Open Access whilst others are locked away behind publisher paywalls. This means that research libraries still need to purchase a license before researchers and students can access the locked content.
Now, one would be inclined to think that the price of the license would follow and match the proportion of locked articles, that when an increasing number of new articles are made available as Open Access, the subscription price for the journal would drop accordingly.
That is not the case, however.
An example:
The Nature family comprises two journals, Nature Energy and Nature Human Behavior, that are in high demand at CBS for both research and teaching purposes.
Each of these journals costs between 75,000-80,000 DKK annually for an organization like CBS – even though roughly half of recent articles are freely available as Open Access.
It is clear, that publishers defy common sense and reasonable pricing by freezing prices of transformative journals – in which half of the new articles are freely available as mentioned. The question is, do we accept this situation? CBS Library tries to procure access to relevant articles on a case-by-case basis and through other means than a subscription. But this process is also time-consuming and costly.