Subject: For toplist, re: journal prices From: "Dev P. Sinha" Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:34:51 -0700 I have, thankfully, finished a year's stint as our department's library representative, a year in which we continued to make major cuts including giving up print access to many titles. I wonder if people are generally aware of statistics like: Annals of Mathematics $0.12 per page JAMS $0.24 per page Inventiones $1.07 per page You can see more at: http://www.math.uni-bielefeld.de/~rehmann/BIB/AMS/Title.html I wonder where people think this is all going. Our library budget has been flat at the same time as the large publishing corporations are taking over more titles and raising prices. If the next five years are like the previous five, we would lose a significant fraction of our journal collection. Perhaps if some titles can migrate either to the society or university houses, or to places like www.mathscipub.org, we could be saved from having to sacrifice more and maybe even reverse these trends. (Migrating to mathscipub seems more likely, since societies and universities may be shy about taking on publishers.) Where is the publishing of mathematics literature headed over the next few years? Some editorial boards have been fighting a good fight*, but the progress so far isn't enough to make affordable a product (journal articles) which we as a math community supply in an essentially finished form. Physicists have insulated themselves from these cost pressures by relying almost exclusively on the arXiv, but our publishing culture is different. Does anyone see any hopeful directions? -Dev * The "Topology" editorial board negotiated a deal with Elsevier, but our library's rep was not able to take advantage of it within the context of the entire ScienceDirect negotiation.