… [Nature Publishing Group], which is owned by the German publishing house Georg von Holtzbrinck, …[is] trying to impose a 400% increase in its online access fee for [the University of California], a hike the university says would come to more than $1 million a year. The result is talk of a systemwide boycott of Nature publications unless the firm becomes more accommodating.
… “Why are we paying to read the results of our own research?” asks Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford’s School of Medicine. In 2000, Brown co-founded the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which today publishes seven journals on the open access model. That model charges researchers for publication of their accepted papers, but allows them to retain their copyrights and makes their work available to all users for free.
… [B]ecause of the rise in fees for scientific and technical journals, “we’ve had to decrease what we spend on books for the humanities, and that trade-off is very stark,” Farley says. “Ultimately it hurts the whole institution.”
The libraries let the academic community know that Keith Yamamoto, the executive vice dean at UC San Francisco Medical School, was willing to launch a boycott of Nature if necessary. That’s meaningful because Yamamoto was an organizer of a 2003 boycott of Reed Elsevier that resulted in that technical publisher’s rolling back a rate hike.
Yamamoto says a new boycott would look very much like the old: He would call upon faculty members to stop submitting papers to Nature publications, resign from Nature editorial and advisory board, decline to peer-review papers for the journals, and of course suspend their subscriptions.
… The UC system says it pays an average of $4,465 a year for each of the 67 Nature journals it subscribes to, a fee Nature proposes to raise to an average of $17,479…
July 7th, 2010 at 12:44PM
perhaps Nature saw these recent headlines and wanted in on some of the action the regents and chancellors at UC are getting:
# Schwarzenegger vetoes whistleblower protections for UC workers (2009)
# UC regents Schwarzenegger and Wachter – are they making a profit from university investments? (2010)
# Billion Dollar Baby: The University of California invests $53 million in two diploma mills owned by a regent.
# Sen. Yee clashes with UC, CSU over Alumni , Donor Privacy
# UCSF head has millions in Medical, Drug Stocks
# Audit demands investment reform, we hope- Daily Bruin (2010)
# UCSF Chancellor and controversial tobacco stock(2010)
# UC Regents sue UCLA radiology professor Robert Lufkin for engaging in non-UC work (2010)
# Federal Civil Rights Suit Brought Against UCLA, UC Regents For Copying Prof Lufkin’s Hard Drive (2010)
July 7th, 2010 at 1:39PM
Radical question: Why do these publishers need to exist at all? Just put the stuff up on the web. Scholarly organizations can do their own refereeing and editing, just like a well-managed group blog.
It’s extremely irritating when a media outlet reports on an interesting-sounding study, but you can’t get the study itself without being a subscriber to some journal or paying $35 for a single article. Why should this be allowed for tax-funded research?
It’s getting to the point that academic publications are *closed* in a way that few other publications are (excluding classified and proprietary business information) What sense does this make?
Sounds to me like basically, large sums of money are being paid for affiliation with brand names.
July 7th, 2010 at 3:27PM
I wonder just what David wondered, but figured that as a lowly researcher at a school that is not known for its research, it’s probably ‘received knowledge’ I’m not party to.
That, or the Emperor is naked. I don’t know which.
I do know I HATE the academic publishing game with a fury. I love doing research but trying to publish (and sometimes, even just trying to get the background articles I need to read in order to write a manuscript) makes me tear my hair out.