A study released Tuesday questioning the accuracy of scientific journals reports blames overzealous publicists and conflicts of interest for the problems.

But Kansas University officials say the bottom-line problem is the bottom line skyrocketing costs of scholarly journals are causing schools to drop subscriptions, which deprives many scientists quick access to publications containing state-of-the-art research.

The cost of scholarly journals continues to rise even as a new study raises questions about the accuracy of information contained in them.

“There is a connection between readily-available scholarly literature and the quality” of published reports, said Richard Fyffe, associate dean for scholarly communication with KU Libraries. “If the past research is not readily available and if scientists are under pressure, they are not going to take the time needed.”

The effect could be devastating, especially in medical research, Fyffe said. “Lives are at stake in those areas, and there have been cases where insufficient review of past literature has led to poor choices,” he said.

The latest issue of The Journal of the American Medical Assn., one of the world’s leading medical journals, took itself and competitors to task with research showing that published studies in scholarly journals are sometimes misleading and frequently fail to mention weaknesses.

Some problems can be traced to biases and conflicts of interest among peer reviewers, who are outside scientists tapped by journal editors to help decide whether a research paper should be published, according to several articles in this week’s JAMA, which was released Tuesday.

Fyffe and KU Provost David Shulenburger have long been trying to reduce the cost of scholarly publications, which they see as the root of several problems in the research world.

Fyffe said the business of publishing scholarly journals, once done by nonprofit scholarly groups, has been taken over by commercial publishers seeking larger and larger profits.

Annual increases in the 10 percent range for subscriptions are not unusual, and some of these scholarly journals have five-figure subscription rates.

For example, KU scientists must have a journal called “Brain Research,” Fyffe said. The journal has increased from $16,344 per year in 2000 to $18,578 per year now, a 13.7 percent increase over two years.

Some journals simply are not renewed. Fyffe said this year KU stopped 155 subscriptions, the majority of which were canceled for budgetary reasons.

Profits made by the journal publishers simply are not justified, Fyffe said, since most of the material is based on publicly funded research and made available to the publisher for free.

Several solutions are being worked on, he said. KU has teamed with a scholarly society called the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Greater Western Library Alliance and Lawrence-based Allen Press to put out a publication called BioOne.

“This is a model where we are selling subscriptions but working closely with the scholarly society to publish electronically at a fairly low cost without having to sell to a commercial publisher,” Fyffe said. BioOne can be accessed at www.bioone.org.

He said there are other innovative ways being tried to get scholarly literature out to more researchers at a cheaper price.

“I think this is healthy. What it is pointing toward is a real dissatisfaction where subscriptions are going up fairly rapidly when it just isn’t reasonable for library budgets to increase at that level,” he said.