Elsevier justifies the increases on the grounds that the number of articles being submitted increases each year, adding to the firm's costs. Each article must be peer-reviewed by fellow scientists to see if it is worthy of publication. Mr Haank added that his firm's price increases forced libraries to cut subscriptions, which in turn cut Elsevier's income, forcing them to increase prices still more. Elsevier wanted to get out of this vicious circle, he said, and was trying to get universities to sign up for electronically archived versions of its journals. But he said the price of subscription to the electronic database would still be tightly linked to the ever rising cost of the paper journals.
Somebody has to pay for the cost of the system.
Scientific research is not considered real unless it has been published in a recognised journal, and scientists' status and promotion is tied to publication. As a rule, neither the scientists who write the papers, nor their colleagues who peer review them, nor the editorial boards who vet them, are paid. While the feud over the price of journals was between libraries and publishers, the scientists stood aside, but the advent of the internet has changed everything. Powerful search engines trawling computer databases make it possible for scientists to discover groundbreaking links between different research results which would previously have taken years of trawling through a jungle of indexes. The prospect of this incredible new tool being controlled by large private corporations has jerked scientists into action.