The high cost of journals has had local impact, too. The Harvard libraries is being re-organized in large part because of the impact that this behavior has had on the library budget.

The facts here seem pretty straightforward, yet its hard to know why nothing has changed over many, many years of the situation as described remaining basically the same: high prices for top-notch journals. What viable alternatives are there to "regulating" the margins of private companies in the business of editing and distributing important information that is based on publically supported research? Protesting is fine, but lets just hope the outcome/"solution" is better than the most obvious potential negative trade-off: quality for price. Everyone who buys Apple's products, say, already is willing to pay insane margins for what they think they need because they recognize the value. And probably a fair amount of the underlying technical basis for those products is based on pubicly supported research...

Reasonable people can disagree, but this article is pure nonsense and not helpful to anyone seeking an understanding of how the scholarly system operates, what publishers contribute and how it has been evolving to improve access for everyone. This below outlines our responses to the concerns Mr. Gowers has expressed. -- Tom Reller, Elsevier We pay close attention to the voices of the research community we serve, including those who have responded to an online petition that is putting forward some serious negative judgments about Elsevier. Being criticized by even one researcher, let alone all the signatories of the petition, is difficult for a company whose reason for being is to serve the research community. The essence of our work is to create and sustain journals that make it possible for researchers to have their work efficiently reviewed, enhanced, validated, recognized, discovered and made highly accessible, in perpetuity, to readers in virtually every country of the world. It's work that is both complex and investment-intensive, performed by Elsevier employees working for a vast global community of more than 7,000 journal editors, 70,000 editorial board members, 300,000 reviewers and 600,000 authors. We are proud of the way we have been able to work in partnership with the research community to make real and sustainable contributions to science. In reviewing the petition and the commentary, we're also troubled by the distortions and misstatements of fact that have been advanced — distortions that need correction. First, the cost of downloading an article has never been lower than it is today — on average one fifth of what it was just 10 years ago. As the effective price paid per journal accessed has decreased, the number of journals accessed has increased, and the usage of those journals has grown by over 20% per year. We have invested heavily in making our content more discoverable and more accessible to end-users and to enable the research community to develop innovative research applications. Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that in a study published by the Publishing Research Consortium, which Elsevier's research team help conduct, 93% of university researchers report that access to journal articles is "fairly easy or very easy." The full report is available here. Libraries are never forced to take "bundled" packages; they always have the option to purchase individual articles, subscribe to titles, or subscribe to sets of journals. Most choose large collections, however, because they get substantial volume discounts that offer more titles at a lower cost. And the additional titles they subscribe to are used by their researchers. In fact, on average approximately 40% of researchers' usage is of journal titles that the library previously had not subscribed to. Elsevier has actively and progressively promoted a wide range of access options, which are important since no one model will ever be the only solution for every type of journal. We publish eig

I am very pleased to hear that this is getting broader attention! Elsevier has been guilty of some of the most egregious examples of corporate selfishness of any of the major scientific journal pulishers. A long-standing personal grievance: AIDS, one the pre-eminent journals on breaking HIV/AIDS research, has a 6 month embargo on electronic subscribers to major scientific databases. This news is absolutely critical to a scientific community that needs information in a timely fashion to enable faster responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Just plain greed, in my opinion (as their subscription prices would suggest). Thanks again.