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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."
I do not think that many of their papers are provided on a "free basis" (well yes mostly they are):
Obviously, there's a tradeoff for faculty, in that many of the NPG journals are recognized for their high quality, and provide a level of prestige that may be essential for advancing a researcher's career. The libraries recommend alternatives, such as the Public Library of Science journals, but those have yet to reach an equivalent level of recognition. The letter also recommends other open access policies, such as following the NIH open access guidelines, but NPG has already taken actions to support these policies.
source
They submitters also get compensated (not highly enough as some would argue). In addition I found this very interesting (from arstechnica):
Nature's take
In response to our query, Nature Publishing group provided us with a public statement in which it voices distress that what it had assumed were ongoing, confidential negotiations have been disclosed to the public. As for the assertions made along with the disclosure, NPG thinks they're misleading. "The implication that NPG is increasing its list prices by massive amounts is entirely untrue," the statement reads. According to Nature, its library subscriptions are currently capped at seven percent annually.
Where did the massive increase mentioned by the UC libraries come from? The statement argues that the price increase seems dramatic simply because UC was operating under a discount that NPG terms "unsustainable." NPG claims that it's providing the UC libraries with a discount from list of close to 90 percent, and that "other subscribers, both in the US and around the world, are subsidizing them." Even with the new pricing in place, NPG estimates that the average download of a paper would only cost UC a bit more than 50.
NPG seems convinced that cooler heads and a detailed analysis of the numbers will see the UC libraries return to the negotiating table. "We are confident that the appointment of Professor Keith Yamamoto and other scientific faculty to lead the proposed boycott," it states, "will mean they will be in a position to assess value with a rigorous and transparent methodology."
same source linked againsource
If those facts are all true, they really should be fair to the other universities...but to be honest I bet both sides are exaggerated as that is how media works.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
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...
I wish people would stop quoting large percent increases. They get the math wrong more often than not, so it is hard to tell what is intended.
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.
*COUGH* three times higher... or four times the price.... kettle, Meet pot!
Many of the professors cover their own salary through grants,
While faculty might use research grants to supplement their salary on certain occasions (summer if you're a 9-month faculty member, for example), almost all faculty salaries are paid for by department funds. The people the faculty member employs, graduate students, researchers -- these are paid through grants.
the university only provides an office and work space
That space can range from a single office to an entire building and is non-negligible in terms of cost. Administrative, computing, facilities, infrastructure -- all paid for by the university.
If the prof buys equipment, the university demands a cut of the grant in exchange for allowing the prof to buy the equipment.
Indirect Cost Return. UC charges 53% for most federal grants. If you ask for $100,000, the granting agency pays $153,000. It is income used to support the faculty in various ways (staff, infrastructure, etc, etc, etc). Tuition, state funding, and donations are other major sources of income.
we could stop university from building wasteful spaces just so some rich guy can put his name on it.
Expansion and improvement is necessary to compete in the educational market. If some rich guy is putting his name on a building, you can be certain a decent percentage of the funding for the building was contributed by that guy. Maybe 10-15%, maybe more, but when a building costs $50 million to create, it's not a sneeze.
Could the university save money? God yes and UC is going through it right now...a complete shake-up of every business process, every department. "Departments" as seen by staff no longer exist in my college. Staff support a cluster of academic departments, not individual departments. No longer do I work for, say, the Mathematics Department. I work for the Science Cluster which incorporates Math, Statistics, Physics, Chemistry, and Geology. Centralize purchasing, HR, IT...add some efficiency-creating web apps, centralized databases, streamline the processes. You can have 10 people doing what 25 used to do (and all scheme entails).
Not exactly. The NIH Public Acess Policy requires that articles based on research funded by NIH be made available to the public no more than a year after publication, by submitting the paper to PubMed. So you don't have to publish your article in both, say, Nature and BMC Biology; you just have to make sure that if the paper is published in Nature, PubMed gets a copy and posts it on their server. Alternately, the PubMed listing may link to the paper at the publisher's site if it's open-access. Wellcome Trust has a similar policy. A number of traditional journal publishers (e.g. Oxford University Press) are automatically making NIH- and/or Wellcome-funded papers available on their sites to ensure compliance -- in fact, most OUP biomedical journals just open everything up after six months to make sure. At a guess, at least three-quarters of the biomedical research published in English depends on NIH, Wellcome, or both, so this is really the easiest way to do it.
I really do believe it's possible for traditional journal publishing, open access, and other methods of disseminating research to peacefully coexist. Just a lot of folks haven't got the message yet.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.