Alternative publisher to fund e-journals

Ratcheting up its David-and-Goliath battle with publishing behemoths, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has announced it will offer $500,000 for the creation of new electronic journals.

The grants will go to nonprofit start-up ventures in science, technology and medicine. SPARC wants to transform the scholarly communications process through publishing alternatives to journals now owned by giant conglomerates such as Elsevier, an Anglo-Dutch publisher that also owns the Lexis-Nexis database company.

The reason: Conglomerates have pushed their journal rates so high that many academic libraries have had to cancel subscriptions. Some journal rates could buy you a new car. Brain Research, published by Elsevier, costs libraries $18,000 a year.

The journal increases squeeze an already tight budget: UW–Madison libraries have not received a state-funded acquisitions increase for a decade. The UW System has requested that lawmakers add base funding for collections and resource sharing in the 1999-2001 state budget, and the governor has proposed a $7.3 million increase.

There’s more at stake than money. Faculty members rely heavily on scholarly publishing to get promoted, win grants and receive recognition for their research. Their careers are profoundly affected by library cutbacks in subscriptions.

Into that fray last year jumped SPARC, an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries with 135 institutional members in several nations. SPARC was founded to support increased competition in scientific journal publishing, which is why it’s now offering $500,000 in start-up grants.

“We want to create whole new models of publishing, and that will require applications of computer technology and the Internet,” says Ken Frazier, director of UW–Madison’s General Library System and chair of SPARC’s steering committee. “And as librarians, we can help electronic publishers work on the problem of archiving electronic information.”

SPARC previously supported, through nonmonetary means, the creation of three new journals: Evolutionary Ecology Research, PhysChemComm, and Organic Letters of the American Chemical Society to be launched in summer.