[Distributed via lis-e-journals and liblicense-l, please excuse
duplicate posting]

Dear list members, 

In 2004, EMBO Journal will be transferred from Oxford University Press 
to Nature Publishing Group, joining its sister publication EMBO reports
which was transferred in 2003, cf. Nature Publishing Group's press 
release of August 2003, 

http://www.nature.com/embojournal/EMBO_press.pdf

Several new services like Advance Online Publication will also be
introduced, cf. http://www.nature.com/embojournal/aims_scope.html

Dual platform hosting - both on HighWire and nature.com - is a welcome
feature maximising the services and the choices available to the
community. 

From 2004 on, a subscription to EMBO journal (24 issues/year) will by
default include 12 issues of EMBO reports. While EMBO members will
actually see no price increase or even a price reduction for the 
combined product (2004 price: GBP 160 for Print+Online, GBP 90 for 
Online only), institutions and their libraries will see a price increase
between 

        30% and 220%

depending on the institution's size (as measured by FTE for all science
faculties excluding Mathematics, Engineering and Computer Science). The
typical increase for institutions around +/- 5000 Sciences FTE will be
110% or 140%. (Prices for Online only are 10% less than prices for
Print+Online, if I got correct information from NPG.)

Bundling EMBO reports with the highly cited EMBO journal, of course, is 
a classical way to increase the profitability. In fact, there were many
subscribers of EMBO journal which did not consider EMBO Reports to be 
an absolute "must". So in fact many of us will see an even higher price
increase of 80% to 340%.

What I find disturbing here is that no one at EMBO or NPG seems to find
it necessary to write a letter to subscribers explaining those price
increases. Is there any justification for such excessive price increases 
other than the assumption that the market will bear it? My belief is 
that the moving force behind the price increase is EMBO as much as the
publisher. While some societies actually exert a restraining influence 
on publisher's pricing policies, it is well known that other societies 
are driving library prices up as a result of competitive negotiations 
with publishers. 

I fear that underfinanced central libraries of universities with
two-tiered library systems will be increasingly forced or tempted to 
leave it to departments or institutes to buy EMBO publications 
themselves if they get so expensive. Many already do, but the existing
institute's subscriptions often are based on a membership or will be
converted to such given this price increase. Of course, this is not an
optimal solution as more print issues will get distributed than 
necessary and there will be no possibility to get a site license. 

Hopefully, more and more EMBO authors will self-archive their 
publications on institutional servers in order to bridge the 12 months 
gap between publishing date and free availability at the publishers
website or discipline-based repositories like E-BioSci or Pubmed Central 
so that articles become openly accessible to as many scientists and as
early as possible. 

Several other questions come to mind: 

1. What will happen to the free back issues policy readers of both 
journals enjoyed at the HighWire site (EMBO Journals: free 12 months 
after publication, EMBO Reports: free after 1 year every January)? 
Hopefully this policy will be maintained as it has been decided to
establish dual platform hosting for both journals.

2. Will EMBO Journal continue to be included in Pubmed Central as a PMC
PubLink Journal, an option that requires full submission of published
material to PMC, but allows redirects for actual viewing of full-text 
to the publisher's site? PMC Policies and Guidelines also require that
primary research articles must be made available with open access 
within one year from publication date. (Note that the PMC National
Advisory Committee has recently suggested to eliminate the PubLink 
option for new participating publishers, returning to the original PMC
model. Current PubLink journals will be asked to consider allowing all
content to be viewable within PMC, cf. the Minutes of the June 25, 2003
meeting.

3. In which form will content of EMBO publications become available to
scientists on the future E-BioSci platform? What about open access 
policy at this site?

4. As open access is an article property (cf. the Bethesda Principles),
will authors of EMBO journal be offered the choice to pay for open 
access to their article (through their funding bodies)?

Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

--
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Dipl.-Physiker, Bibl.-Rat Fachreferent für 
Physik und Koordination elektronischer Ressourcen 
Universitätsbibliothek Stuttgart, Postfach 104941, 70043 Stuttgart 
Tel +49 711 685-4780, Fax +49 711 685-3502, [log in to unmask]