This post was inspired by a Guardian article about the American University Harvard (probably the world’s richest university) announcing that “Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained” by which they mean that the journals (aka periodicals) where academics like me publish our research results are getting so expensive that Harvard can no longer afford them.

This caught my eye, after all Harvard charges fees of (at the current exchange rate) almost £24,000/year. Even this coming year our fees, like almost all UK universities, are only going up to £9,000. If Harvard cannot afford journals, what hope do we (or Imperial, Cambridge, Sussex, etc.) have.

So I read the Harvard announcement, and they spend $3.75 million just on journals from a couple of the big commercial publishers – that’s a lot. So let’s look at some figures. The Guardian article refers to one particularly expensive journal: The Journal of Comparative Neurology. For both paper copies and online access this costs £18,500 per year (some physics journals cost similar amounts, for example Nuclear Instruments and Methods A & B costs even more).

I quickly checked the VW website, and you can get a brand new 5-door Golf for that, and they’ll throw in a fancy digital radio, offer finance, etc. So where does this money go. Well the biggest publisher is Reed Elsevier and in 2011 they reported revenue of £6 billion and profits of £1.2 billion. I make that 20% profits.

Maybe your initial reaction to reading that profit margin is to see if you can scrape together all your spare cash and buy some Elsevier shares. But the Harvard article is just one of many signs that university libraries, academics, and funders of research are all getting fed up of journal prices. So maybe Reed Elsevier and the others are heading for a fall. They can’t get keep taking ever larger amounts of taxpayers’, students’ and charitable research funders’ money.