In January, University of Arizona biologist Michael Rosenzweig will independently launch the first issue of a low-cost ecological journal as a protest against subscription prices set by commercial publishers. He is abandoning a similar journal he founded in 1987 because, he said, the publisher has made it so expensive that many libraries and colleagues can no longer afford it. The price will be little more than one-third of that of the other periodical, published by Wolters-Kluwer.
Titled Evolutionary Ecology Research, the publication has received the endorsement of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries that aims to "create a more competitive scholarly communication marketplace in which prices are lower, quality is enhanced, and publisher responsiveness to market needs is rewarded," said SPARC director Rick Johnson.
Both SPARC and Rosenzweig assert that commercial publishers of scholarly journals have become too profit-oriented and have crippled researchers' efforts to disseminate knowledge.
Posted November 30, 1998.