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Leading specialist science-journal publishers have responded cautiously to an open letter signed by German, Austrian, Swiss and Dutch university libraries asking how they propose to keep prices affordable in future.

The letter was sent out in January, and pointed out that the announced increase in the price of journal subscriptions in 1999 was significantly above that of library budgets. The highest increases were from MCB University Press (27.3 per cent), Wiley (20 per cent) and Elsevier Science (19 per cent).

Most of the publishers replied by saying that their pricing policies for 2000 and beyond are not yet fixed. Some, such as Wiley, indicated that they were prepared to discuss the issue with libraries in the next months — a move welcomed by librarians, who say that publishers usually refuse to discuss pricing policy with them.

Elsevier promised to keep price rises next year below 10 per cent, but this statement has not reassured librarians, who still find the increase too high. Göttingen University librarian Elmar Mittler, for example, points out that although library budgets, which are paid out of public funding, are not necessarily falling, any increase is usually only a few per cent. “Last year we fought for, and won, a supplementary fund of DM1.2 million (US$651,200) to keep up subscriptions at Göttingen University library. But even so, we still had to cancel 150 subscriptions,” he says.

Derk Haank, chairman of Elsevier Science, told Nature that Elsevier has been forced to introduce high price rises because of changes in exchange rates. Also, he says, the rising number of submissions to some journals means that they have to increase in size.

The librarians' letter points out that market forces do not operate in the world of research publications — researchers need access to many journals, and most are controlled by a small number of large publishing houses. Electronic access to these journals does not as yet offer a solution to high prices, as publishing houses tend to offer all-inclusive deals for paper and electronic forms.

Reinhardt says scientists need to change their attitudes towards publishing and boycott over-expensive journals. But an article in this month's Laborjournal, a German magazine for biological scientists, says researchers select their journals more on impact factor than price. The article points out, separately, that impact factor often correlates inversely with price (see table).

Table 1 Price increases and impact factors for some specialist science journals
Full size table