Slashdot Mirror
U.C. System and Springer Agree To CC-Licensed Journal Articles
NeoSkink writes "The University of California and Springer Science+Business Media have reached an agreement to provide open access for articles submitted by UC-affiliated authors. In a press release, the UC writes: 'Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution, Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.'"
And just in case no-one can see his point, consider that pharmaceutical researchers will be required to purchase a different license to use medical research published under a CC-non-commercial license to actually make drugs that save lives. In a way, this announcement is a step backwards, as previously there was no explicit non-commercial requirement on scientific papers. In fact, it was assumed to be the opposite.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Pathetic? I'm a grad student. If I didn't come off as pathetic, I'd be putting on a good act. In all honesty, my views on open access and whatnot are of little value. I don't get to judge my own CV. When I'm a tenured professor, then I could have some choice in the matter, but right now I'm far from it. Selling my paper short (for a cause I'm pretty apathetic about anyway) would have no effect.
Out of curiosity, anonymous person, what field is your lab in?
Most of the professional societies that publish journals use the profits from journal publishing to cross subsidize annual meetings. In many cases journal profits also help to pay for unnecessarily large staffs at the society headquarters.
In my experience, the societies that are most dependent on journal subscriptions to fund the operations of the society are the ones that are most opposed to open access, allowing the posting of online preprints, and so forth- they've got the most to lose.
If I write a paper, I'm going to try to get it in the best journal I can so it looks better on my resume. Open access does not factor into it. I'm not about to sell myself short and publish in a lower impact journal, and hurt my career, just to make sure everyone can access it free of charge.
But by making an article open-access you increase its distribution*, and thus you potentially increase the rate at which it is cited. Which in turn leads to a higher impact factor for the journal hosting the article. So this is actually a smart move for Springer (especially since they are getting UC to pay for it all).
* I'm part of a university that pays for access to most academic journals, but if I can immediately access a PDF via Google Scholar (rather than the horrendous proxy handshaking required to access most digital repositories), it's more likely to get read.
When I write papers, I submit them to journals so that they can be peer-reviewed, and I can get some feedback. This is usually the second publication, since I usually put an informal write-up on a blog before I start the paper (which I can point to if someone else gets a journal paper accepted first, since I have a public record of having published it first).
Almost every journal and conference I've submitted papers to, including those owned by Springer, has allowed me to put a copy of the PDF on my own web page for anyone to read. The one exception was the Journal of Object Technology, which only allows me to link to their hosted copy (although, since that's free of charge and likely to be around longer than my departmental page, I don't mind). Springer does not let you use their style elements in the copy you put online, but this is just a matter of changing the documentclass back to article in your header and running pdflatex again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News