For junior faculty yearning to see their name in print, getting published in a prestigious journal is as vital to getting promoted as what goes on inside the classroom.
But while researchers want their work to have an impact on as many readers as possible, journal costs have skyrocketed to the point where few can afford to access their research.
Now, scholars are attempting to reclaim control by creating alternatives to leading commercial publications that have triggered this "journal crisis."
A new, nonprofit, online venture, The Electronic Society for Social Scientists (ELSSS), is offering journals that are at least 50 percent cheaper than major commercial academic publishers.
Instead of pocketing profits, ELSSS will share its gains with the academic community. It will also make all its journals available at no cost to developing countries.
"In the next three months decisions will be taken that will change significantly academic journal publishing in economics," said Manfredi La Manna, an economist at St. Andrews University who created ELSSS.
ELSSS' entire production process, from submitting manuscripts to editing, refereeing, and distributing the final product, will all be done on the Web.
"I believe the ELSSS journals will be the first to make full use of the Web to improve the quality and speed of scholarly communication," La Manna said in an e-mail interview.
Unlike most traditional journals, ELSSS will pay substantial fees and stipends to authors, referees and editors. By paying referees, La Manna hopes to speed the review process, which can take anywhere from 4 to 12 months for a conventional economics paper to be published.
ELSSS' desire is to pressure commercial publishers to lower their prices. Reed-Elsevier and Springer-Verlag tend to increase their prices every year, charging almost six times as much per page as nonprofit publishers.
La Manna is not alone in his effort to dethrone commercial publishers. Some scholars have organized boycotts or started new independent publications.
Dismayed by failed efforts to get the publisher to reduce prices, the entire editorial board of Evolutionary Ecology left to create a new independent journal, Evolutionary Ecology Research. The new journal has succeeded in drawing leading authors while reducing subscription prices significantly.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) recently published "Declaring Independence," a guide for scientists to find alternatives to commercial publications.
"We see it as a real call to arms," said Alison Buckholtz, assistant director of SPARC.
"When scholars and scientists realize how commercial interests have benefited from their labor, and how little say they have about the matter, they can't help but ask, 'Isn't there a better way?'" said SPARC director Rick Johnson.
Alternatives such as ELSSS, Economics Bulletin and bepress.com, offer authors a better way to publish their research, Johnson said.
"Each of these new ventures demonstrates a promising new model," Johnson said. "They get the wheels of change turning."
But with over 300 economics journals already in distribution, some question whether any new journals can survive.
Cognitive scientist professor Stevan Harnad doubts that ELSSS will be able to entice authors away from established journals or induce publishers to lower prices.
I don't think it will succeed, for the simple reason that sacrificing the practice of submitting to ... established journals in favor of new, untested ones simply for the sake of making one's work available at a lower cost does not pose a strong enough incentive," Harnad said in an e-mail interview.
Many insist that alternatives like ELSSS, which has already enlisted more than 1,000 scholars, can give commercial publishers a run for their money.
"Whereas there are indeed too many journals, the established, prestigious, and on the whole extremely expensive journals have been insulated from competition for a very long time," La Manna said.
"There's always been new journals, year after year, from commercial publishers," Buckholtz agreed. "It's time now for alternative journals to compete on the same basis."
But some say that alternatives like ELSSS do not go far enough.
"They are aimed only at lowering journal prices, which is better than nothing, but not nearly enough," Harnad said. "There is no price that is low enough so that all the refereed research can be accessed by all researchers worldwide, as it should be."
Harnad believes that paying authors will only add to the cost of the journals.
"Authors don't want pennies for their papers, they want impact," Harnad said. "That means readers, citations and researchers building on their work. That's what gets them the real rewards."
Some, like Harnad, believe that refereed literature should be ultimately free of charge. Authors could continue to publish in established journals and make drafts of their work available for free using self-archiving software under the Open Archives Initiative.
"That way, junior faculty can have their cake and eat it too," he said.
But who will subscribe to refereed material that is available for free on the Internet?
"Nobody, certainly not budget-constrained libraries," said La Manna, who believes that such an approach would ultimately threaten to collapse the refereed journal system.
"Turning raw research material into quality-controlled, quality-graded output involves a cost, and someone has to bear it. There are no free lunches in academic publishing."
