Magazine crisis one calls the problem in the library nature that particularly since center of the 1990er years the prices for magazines within the ranges natural science, technology and medicine (close. Science, Technology, Medicine, briefly STM) strongly rose, while the budgets of the libraries stagnated for acquisition or are declining. This again led to further price increases, because the publishing houses tried to adjust so their income losses of through fewer subscriptions. Thus it comes to a vicious circle, in whose process that is ever more strongly limited access by scientists and other interested persons to current research information.

Digital magazines

The magazine crisis is still continued to intensify by the change from printed to electronic magazines. Because digital contents permit the copyright holders stronger control of the use and make it for them possible to limit the circle of acquaintances further the access to the magazines have. If a purely digitally available magazine is cancelled, the appropriate university library usually also that is access to those classes refused, for it subscription fees paid (see House OF Commons 2004, 33f).

Many license agreement permit the access to the magazines only university members. So far also other, at the science interested persons had entrance to all existence in many university libraries. These persons must be now excluded (see House OF Commons 2004, 26). In particular for it the science publishing houses planned the model Pay by View, where for each article separately must be paid. The price conceptions are with 25 euro per article.

Causes

After a report of the British House OF Commons the cause of this development is to be seen in the fact that only very few offerers of STM magazines face many scattered buyers (usually university libraries).

Because in the 90's it came in this market to a strong concentration process. In the year 8 magazine companies 66.4% of the world market for STM magazines controlled 2003. The market leader Reed Elsevier alone had a conversion of 7,1 billion euro and a portion of 28,2% of the STM market in the year 2003 (see House OF Commons 2004, 13)

World market portion of the STM Zeitschriftenkonzerne in the year 2003 (see House OF Commons 2004, 13)

Scientist inside are on the other hand forced to publish as much as possible research results in technical periodicals. Only so they can win within their subject at reputation. With the decision, in which magazine they publish, they depend after the reputation and the influence of the magazine, not however on market criteria. On the other hand that is access to some important magazines the condition, in order to be and so at all still research to operate be able informed about the current developments in a subject (see House OF Commons 2004, 9ff). These factors strengthen the positions of the science publishing houses, which could implement therefore annual price increases within the two digit per cent range for magazine subscription and bring capital net yields in of up to 33%, which lies the far over average of the medium industry. In the meantime an annual subscription of a STM magazine up to 6000 euro costs (see Dambeck 2004).

The science publishing houses justify their high prices v.a. with the costs of the Peer Review and their verlegerischen activity. These arguments are however doubted, because the publishing houses usually pay neither to the authors nor at the Peer Review scientists taken part a fee. Frequently it is also required that authors submit their articles ready to be printed after publishing house defaults (see Dambeck 2004).

Alternative one: Open ACCESS

Detailed article: Open ACCESS

When alternative becomes this development from some involved ones, as for instance the signers of the citizens of Berlin explanation set from October 2003 and the British House OF Commons of July 2004 on the principle of the open ACCESS. On the one hand published articles in institutional Eprint archives, which are carried by universities or other mechanisms, are to be published again generally accessible in printed magazines (so the 1991 of Paul Ginsparg initiated ArXiv). It is called to create as much as possible free electronic magazines.

One of the possible business models for such open ACCESS magazines plans that the authors and/or their institutions are to pay for the organization of the Peer Review and the publication in the Internet. Altogether however the costs of an on-line publication are smaller than with a printed magazine.

Exist already over 1000 open ACCESS journals, some of it with very high Impact Factor. Since according to a study by Lawrence in Nature on-line available articles are more frequently quoted than printed works, the proponents of open ACCESS hope that this convinces the authors to publish their articles in open ACCESS magazines. Still however one attaches to articles in outstanding printed magazines for the evaluation of scientific achievement more weight.

The open Archives initiative (OAI) develops standards, interfaces and software for archiving and the retrieval of on-line publications.

For the analysis of quotation ions different systems are developed at present in analogy to the Web OF Science, among them the SPIRES HEP Literature DATA cousin, CiteSeer and the open Citation Project (OpCit).

See also

• Eprint, Preprint, post office print, citizen of Berlin explanation (open ACCESS), Elsevier
• Information explosion

Literature

• Alice cellar: Electronic magazines in the change. A Delphi study. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2001 (library work; Bd. 10).
• Thorsten Dambeck: Rebellion against the guardians of the knowledge. Mirror on-line one, 18 August 2004,
• House OF Commons: Scientific Publications: Free for 20 July 2004,
• Michael Meier: Returning Science ton the Scientists. Paging in the STM Zeitschriftenmarkt. Peniope, Munich 2002. Also on-line under
• Christian Woll: Scientific publishing in the digital age and the role of the libraries. Professional school Cologne, faculty for information and communication sciences, Institut for information science, Cologne, February 2005 (Cologne papers to the library and information science; Bd. 46).

Related links

• http://www.doaj.org directory OF open ACCESS journal
• Magazine crisis side of the library of the University of Konstanz with statistics and left to the magazine crisis
• SPARC the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition is a union from approximately 200 considerable universities, libraries and organizations "“against market failure in the system of scientific communication"”
• SPARC Europe

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