Elsevier's Letter to the Mathematics Community

Elsevier announced in a press release today that it is cutting back on the cost of its mathematics journals. Clearly the on-going boycott of Elsevier is having an effect! [Thanks to Kit Baum (Economics) for forwarding this press release]

Press Release Extracts:

. . . . Mathematics journals published by Elsevier tend to be larger than those of other publishers. On a price-per-article, or price-per-page level, our prices are typically, but not always, lower than those of other mathematics publishers.

Our target is for all of our core mathematics titles to be priced at or below US$11 per article (equivalent to 50-60 cents per normal typeset page) by next year, placing us below most University presses, some societies and other commercial competitors. Where journals are more expensive than this, we will lower our prices, as we already have in recent years for journals such as the Journal of Algebra and Topology and its Applications, among others.

We realize that this is just part of the concerns about pricing –and we will seek to address concerns about the nature and composition of the large discounted agreements, through which most Universities now access journals – but addressing the base line pricing is a necessary first step. . . .