Bid to combat pricey journals

European library associations met this week to discuss setting up peer-reviewed scholarly journals in a bid to break the monopoly of commercial publishers.

Members of the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries (Sconul) and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (Curl) hope to create a European branch of the United States's Sparc initiative.

Sparc, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, publishes print and electronic journals at a fraction of the cost of those published commercially.

University libraries in the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom have expressed interest.

Toby Bainton, secretary of the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries, said that the Sparc initiative in the US was having an influence.

He said: "Price rises in periodicals have slowed because of the influence of competition. The commercial publishers do a good job, but they charge too much, more than the system can sustain. A lot of smaller journals just fold because the must-have journals gobble up the library budgets."

The UK library community strongly supports the initiative, according to Fred Friend, director of scholarly communication at University College London. He said: "UK libraries have purchased many fewer books for their students than they should because of high expenditure on journals."

Two journals, one published by the Royal Society of Chemistry and one by the Institute of Physics, are endorsed by Sparc.