Most Oberlin students are aware of some of the larger costs that the College has to deal with, such as scholarships, faculty and new buildings. The cost of scholastic journals should be included on the list as well.

Since the commercial takeover of scholastic journals in 1986, the price has risen 227 percent. This is not just an issue for private colleges and their students, but one that affects everyone. Tax dollars pay for libraries’ journalistic acquisitions in big libraries.

In the summer of 2004, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations approved a bill that would make material published by the National Institutes of Health open to the public for free. They stated in The Economist magazine that the rising price of journals and lack of public access were “contrary to the best interests of the U.S. taxpayers who paid for this research.” Each year, over 2,000 publishers produce around 1.2 million articles and 16,000 journals in the fields of science, technology and medicine. These are all scholarly journals, meaning that they are peer reviewed or backed by other scientific minds. Material on the internet is free because it doesn’t have to go through such a process.

Subscriptions to some journals that the Oberlin College library hold cost more than one year’s tuition to the College. Some cost even more than that.

“The library’s acquisitions budget for the current year is $1,978,045. Last year we spent $946,750 on periodicals, $534,177 for print, $412,573 for electronic,” said Ray English, director of libraries at Oberlin.

He reported that in 2002, 295 titles were cut. In 2004, 262 more were cut.

“I want to emphasize that the problem of increasing costs for journals is not as bad at Oberlin as it is for academic libraries around the country,” English explained. “That’s because of OhioLINK, which bargains with publishers for all the academic libraries in the state. The OhioLINK electronic journal agreements have enabled us to hold down the rate of cost increase for journals, while also expanding access to titles that we don’t receive in print. Most American academic libraries aren’t so fortunate.”

There is, however, a solution in sight. Open access publishing companies such as the Public Library of Science and Biomed Central hope to keep scholastic journals on the internet for lower costs. In order to accomplish this, they ask the authors of research for a fee. Most authors agree to this condition, because they want their findings to be accessible to everyone.