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Univ. of California Faculty May Boycott Nature Publisher
Marian the Librarian writes "Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which publishes the prestigious journal Nature along with 67 affiliated journals, has proposed a 400% increase in the price of its license to the University of California. UC is poised to just say no to exorbitant price gouging. If UC walks, the faculty are willing to stage a boycott; they could, potentially, decline to submit papers to NPG journals, decline to review for them and resign from their editorial boards."
Sigh, it is relatively amusing.. old medium effectively slashing its throat
The current average cost for the Nature group's journals is $4,465; under the 2011 pricing scheme, that would rise to more than $17,000 per journal, according to the California Digital Library.
The new price is about four times higher than the old price, a 300% increase, not a 400% increase.
Along with its letter, the California Digital Library included a fact sheet with systemwide statistics for 2010 about the university's online journal subscriptions. The system subscribes to almost 8,000 journals online, at an average cost of between $3,000 and $7,000 per journal, depending on the publication and the field. The current average cost for the Nature group's journals is $4,465; under the 2011 pricing scheme, that would rise to more than $17,000 per journal, according to the California Digital Library.
Holy crap. 17k per journal, across 8000 journal subscriptions...
17,000 * 8,000 = 136,000,000
That's a bit of cash.
It's becoming increasingly anachronistic that a for-profit company should: 1) get their main product (the papers, in this case) produced for free by third parties who are not given any cut of the revenues; 2) have much of the intellectual work of reviewing and editing the papers also done for free by third parties; and then 3) lock up the result behind a paywall to maximize revenues, which go to people who had comparatively minor roles in actually producing the product being sold.
Perhaps if more academics did this sort of thing things would change.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If it is true that the price has gone up by 400% I can see why they are doing it but fom my point of view as a researcher not at UC, it means that there will be (slightly) less competition to get in to Nature. It also means when I go for a job interview and I am up against a UC candidate I will have the nature paper and he wont. Which will mean I will get the job. Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research and I don't think this stance will do their researchers any good.
Step 1. Scientists do research(paid for largely by a mixture of tax money, and skimming from undergrads)
Step 2. Scientists write paper, submit to journal.
Step 3. Journal has other scientists(paid for by their respective universities) peer review paper for free.
Step 4. If journal decides to publish, they frequently demand copyright on paper.
Step 5. University library shells out nontrivial dead presidents so that scientists can read the papers they and their colleagues wrote.
They poison parasites, right?
Money talks.
The one thing I don't get is why Nature is gouging their content providers and why UC is PAYING for being content providers in the first place. Peer reviewing, editorial work, actual submissions? Don't people usual GET paid for this?
Are other institutions facing the same price hike, or is this targeted specifically at the UC system (which has so much money to burn...)? I'm assuming the UC's aren't the only schools to license NPG journals.
I'd like to see a chart of NPG's "exorbitant subscription increases" and UC's tuition costs vs. time
5 will get you 10 that UC is much higher.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
UC doesn't mind gouging students.....or taxpayers.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
snarXiv is the low cost alternative to expensive journals.
http://www.snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/
Form a cooperative association. Create an on-line journal. Hire staff sufficient to cover the costs of administration. Charge dues sufficient to cover the cost of administration. Let publishers competitively bid for the right to print and sell hard copies (if any want to). Elect a board of governors sufficient to ensure that only top quality stuff gets published.
The current situation is parasitical and symbiotic--but it's becoming less symbiotic.
They should take advantage of the technology and displace the parasite.
Is NPG only increasing the price [by so much] for UC, or is it being done across the board to all who subscribe? Similarly, is UC the only entity that is opposed to the increase (or at least voicing it in such a fashion)? I wonder what NPG's reasoning for the increase is, especially if it's such a drastic increase. My guess: Both sides are bluffing to some extent and they'll end up reaching a deal somewhere in the middle because it's in both of their best interest to do so.
I hope I'm wrong, but will someone please correct me if this is the case? Is this becoming a general trend? Music no longer requires physical stores for distribution. Perhaps not even record labels. Books will be distributed electronically. DVDs? Don't get too attached. Want to buy something? Even physical products are easier to order online these days. Similarly, physical copies of journals are already pretty much obsolete, lessening the the role of the publisher as the middleman. Nature may not be having so many troubles, but I have to imagine that journals in general are having a harder and harder time bringing in money as people manage to find the information and papers elsewhere. Peer review will never go out of style, but it's seeming more and more impractical to hoard all of our collective knowledge behind a paywall. Am I completely turned around, or is a whole segment of the population going to become obsolete as distribution of goods and services becomes more and more efficient? Does this change result in a net loss of jobs, or is it just a transition, paving the way for a major paradigm shift and allowing us to put our energy elsewhere?
What's the reason for the price increase? Nature doesn't operate off of donations, where would the additional money go?
Read what you quote; they don't pay 17,000 each, and evidently don't want to pay 17,000 for even one.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
UC is mad that they didn't think of raising what they charge by 400% themselves. With the cost of college what they are it is hard to feel sympathetic for the gougers getting gouged.
At least on the surface it sounds like Nature has far more to loose in this venture in creative pricing than UC does. Loosing editorial staff, reviewers and submissions because you want to charge them more to provide your content just sounds rather backwards.
Few months ago I read Donald Knuth's open letter to publisher on the exact same topic - increase in price.
The letter is dated 2003, but I believe is it as actual today as it was back then.
the link to this comprehensive letter is:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/joalet.pdf
if you find it tl;dr, I can only suggest to read at least first 2 pages to get the insight on what he wanted to share with other people...
The artists (scientists) do all the work and the labels(journals) keep the money.
Sounds perfectly fair to me.
Just to be clear, what is causing this huge increase? I find it weird that there isn't some more general outcry, why is it limited to UCL? That's a huge jump, completely abnormal for a commercial entity, and TFA is oddly scant on this rather significant bit of context.
Googling around a bit I hit this, which follows the old-skool "journalism" thing of finding out what the other side has to say:
Scientific publishing is worse than car shows. Most car shows, participants pay, and the spectators get in for free. Which always seemed backwards to me. Sports games are the other way around. The audience pays the players. Except for vanity publishing, authors of fiction generally get paid for their efforts. But car shows are weird that way. Participants enter car shows to show off their rides. They want to show off so badly they'll pay to do it.
So it is with scientific publishing. Researchers don't just want to show off, they have to, to keep their jobs. These scumbag publishers take advantage of that situation to take work for nothing, and act like the researchers should be grateful not to be charged a fee. You might think they add some value with editing and reviewing, but no, they farm all that work out to other researchers-- and pay them nothing for that either. And then the publishers turn around and gouge the spectators too.
There's some serious dislocation in values here. Let's kick Nature where it hurts. They very badly need reminding who is really providing the material. Actually, forget that. Just kill Nature. I had already decided long ago to never again publish in a closed journal. PLoS is where I'll be sending my work.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I'm no fan of the price gouging publishers are engaging in, but really - Elsevier publishes fake journals by the hundreds and there's not a peep from university or faculty. Thomson Reuters sues an open source competitor for just having a filter that can read Endnote files and the reaction is zero. But now it's about money and suddenly they're all up in arms with boycotts and protests...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
What is especially strange about much of academic publishing not changing its traditional subscription model to account for the rise of Internet is that (unlike a lot of other content providers) there is a clear, economically viable alternative.
Instead of charging for subscriptions, journals should get revenue by charging authors to publish (sometimes called "page fees"). Some journals already have page fees that don't cover the cost of publication, in which case they would need to be increased.
Since in biomedical research, at least (which is the area I'm most familiar with and the majority of research published in the US), both the money that currently pays for subscriptions and the money that would pay the author fees come from grants, it should be a global wash in terms of sources and sinks of the money. Subscriptions are payed out of institutional budgets that have as part of their input "indirect costs" (a kind of overhead fee on grants) that are levied by institutions. For example, if a university's indirect cost rate is 40% and a researcher gets a $500,000 grant, $200,000 goes to the university, and the researcher only gets $300,000 to spend herself. With a change to a publication fee model, indirect costs would go down, freeing up money that the researcher could then use to pay the fees.
There would be some redistribution of costs among groups in an institution and between institutions, but in general costs would be shifted to groups that were most successful at publishing, and thus should be in the best position to bear those costs.
One of the biggest advantages of this scheme is that if articles were not behind paywalls, it would be much more feasible to develop automated tools to index, search and analyze them. This hopefully would improve the ability of researchers to keep up with the huge amount that is published even in specialty areas.
NIH funding - which covers most of the research published my American researchers in Nature - now requires that work funded by NIH money is also submitted to an open journal, even if it is also accepted to a top-shelf journal. This applies to all new grants and all renewed grants from the NIH, so the impact of Nature's subscription fees is slowly being grandfathered out with regards to new research.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's already happening - have a look at frontiersin.org. You pay to publish, access is free to anyone.
Does it strike you that this is a pretty good description of a commercial Linux distribution?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I have no idea what research you are doing but in my field undergrads are clearly there to learn and you spend far more time helping them do simple tasks than you benefit from their work. Graduate students on the other hand are paid virtually nothing (20k/year) for 50 hrs/week work.
The UC has to raise tuition over time because the funding from the state has decreased and it costs more to keep good research Professors at the University teaching and (something that can be cut) pay administrators. But overall the UC costs have risen and the tuition is compensating for that rise.
It is also worth noting that as the government reduces its funding of university research and private organizations take up the slack the overhead chargeable by universities is greatly affected. That is private funds often come with restrictions as to how much the university can take from the top, universities have long benefited greatly by their researchers bringing in funding and taking a LARGE percentage from it to supplement their funds.
When an article published in 1927 is behind a paywall, you know that the journal keeping that science hostage, is bad news.
Therefore, screw Nature.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I misread you the first time. Completely agree, in fact. Unfortunately, now that everyone is required to have "insurance" (which may be worthless) this issue is now dead ( but man are we OT). :)
I recently took issue with an editorial in Nature, and ran some numbers on the country of origin of the articles they publish. In 2008, 59% of the articles originated from the US. The UK, the journal's home, came in second at 9% of the articles. Most (but not quite all) of the articles tallied were peer-reviewed research articles. If you accept that Nature publishes world-class research, these numbers suggest that the U.S. is generating the vast majority of quality research. Assuming a high correlation between the quality of research produced by an academic institution and the quality of the education provided there, then yes, the US is the best center of university level education.
Shouldn't all online publishing be free?
God spoke to me.
I am still amazed at the over-the-barrel reaming that scientists tolerate just for a publication.
How can people who are amazingly brilliant at mathematics, engineering, and science be completely unable to think critically about the scientific publishing process?
Nature, Science and the AGU journals long ago abandoned ... gasp ... Science, for the taudriness of astrology and character assination, and political (religous) appeasement.
All of the above mentioned are a pittyfull lot indeed; better not be associated with these murderers and thieves who have no honor.
How did that retort get moderated insightful? It's far more clueless than the post he's responding to, which as least has its heart in the right place. Every second podcast at Econtalk has a long seventh inning stretch on a Hayekian view of capitalism cut _exactly_ from this mold.
If you're taking the grand view of what capitalism requires, small government is not on the list. Twenty years ago it used to be said that Russians understood capitalism better than Americans, because they could actually define it, and list the institutions it entails (in a negative light).
These days no one actively debates the grand view of capitalism. The active debate is about capitalism as a mainspring of wealth creation and the role of government to A) abet or B) hinder the golden goose. In the blue trunks: free market fundamentalism. In the red trunks: liberal society and justice for all.
Its a dearly held tenant of the invisible-hand contingent that markets are able to solve allocation problems though the pricing system that a centralized system could never properly manage, because the required information can't be collected at a central point, unless one waves a magic wand to approximate the utility function of people not present to speak for themselves. That kind of sucks.
It was Stiglitz who showed that the magical ability of markets to solve allocation problems through the price mechanism breaks down under conditions of asymmetrical information. *If* you have price transparency (and a few other things) markets can do an excellent job where government can't.
What you end up with is a system where the vigorous new enterprise favours price transparency (which permits greater economic mobility) while the incumbent corporations do everything in their power to debase price transparency (telecoms industry, media industry, to name just a few).
I don't trust the views of anyone who doesn't think that information transparency leads to a more effective and vigorous market economy. But then I believe that wealth should be earned rather than squatted upon. I know, it's a radical idea.
I was reading some commentary on the media business, including How to Save the News which is interesting, but didn't impress me. One of the articles mentioned Bertrand competition, which suggests that in the absence of product differentiation, the product will end up selling at marginal production cost. (I'm not an economist, so sue me if I didn't get that phrase quite right.)
The Atlantic article goes on an on without mentioning the core point: why do people volunteer themselves to have their purchasing preferences manipulated by visual images in the first place? If ad revenue represents 80% of a newspaper's income, how does the effect the nature of the story reported? Is it to inform the reader, or to create a warm context for associated display ads? The theory of advertising impressions is that you get the viewer into a receptive emotional state, and then burn your image into the viewers amygdala while under the influence of the warm glow. Hence all the Superbowl ads, which are beamed at men awash in vicarious sexual potency. Not such a good model for funding an insightful report on genocide in Somalia.
I'm all for a world with far greater price transparency. It would weed out many of the people who wish to live fat lifestyles without ever creating much of value. Opportunities for value creation have never been better. Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing more of the carpet baggers bagging carpets until they change their ways.
I think a marketplace which maximizes informed choice on *both* sides of every transactions could work small economic miracles. Big business believes in such a market until they don't. Big business believes in small government until they require a big bailout. This is just wealthy peopl
"Four times higher" is idiomatic and mathematically correct. The word "times" indicates that the comparison is by a ratio and not by a difference. "Four times higher" means: "higher so that y = 4x".
The formula works also in the opposite direction: "four times smaller/lower/younger" means: "smaller/lower/younger so that x = 4y".
I am in a mid size biotech company.
In our field there are around 15-20 must-have titles. I was in charge of getting quotes for those titles, from 3 publishers.
The bottomline was upwards of 45000 $. Per annum. Electronic access only.
We declined.
We ask authors directly to send us a copy.
university studies you.
... at least the UC is providing a valuable service. Nature provides almost nothing - the labor is almost entirely done by other people/organizations for free (or close to it). Nature simply publishes the results. Why should they expect to make enormous amounts of money when they're doing almost nothing to add value?
As a former University and College student the idea of either getting bend out of shape about the cost of publications is too funny.
Now I never went to the University of California, however if it is like any post secondary institution I have even known, they gouge their own students every freaking year on "publications", otherwise known as textbooks. Considering they come out with a new "addition" each year just so they can sell the bloody things again for 100$ a shot, they might as well be thought of a periodicals. The sad thing, apart from a few exceptions 95% of the textbooks content hasn't changed, sometimes in hundreds of years. I mean do the principles of Calculus change so much in a given year that a new 120-150$ textbook must be used each year?
Anyway I have zero pity and no empathy at all in this matter. Call it karma, or lack thereof. The only sad part about the story, is that likely they will just pass the cost onto the students anyway, who already are getting hosed.
I strongly suspect most of the anger at UC is budget-concerned folk in the library system, not the rank-and-file researchers. They probably recognize a Nature boycott is likely bad for them and want this to not happen.
Here's a couple more links, to the ScienceInsider coverage (from Nature's primary competitor) and Nature itself:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/06/university-of-california-conside.html#more
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html
Here are some organizations that have been working to provide alternatives to authors and libraries, the rapid success of PLOS: Biology has certainly demonstrated that the traditional publishing models can be changed
SPARC - Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition Group affiliated with the American Research Libraries organization
http://www.arl.org/sparc/
Highwire Press A major non-profit publishing initiative linked to Stanford University
http://highwire.stanford.edu/
Create Change Organization working to inform authors/researchers about their options in publishing
http://www.createchange.org/