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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 $17,000 per journal, according to the California Digital Library.
The new price is about four times higher than the old price, a 300% increase, not a 400% increase.
It's becoming increasingly anachronistic that a for-profit company should: 1) get their main product (the papers, in this case) produced for free by third parties who are not given any cut of the revenues; 2) have much of the intellectual work of reviewing and editing the papers also done for free by third parties; and then 3) lock up the result behind a paywall to maximize revenues, which go to people who had comparatively minor roles in actually producing the product being sold.
Perhaps if more academics did this sort of thing things would change.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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?
Depends on what area you're in. In machine learning / AI (my area), having a paper in Nature gives you huge cred with some audiences, but will get you extra scrutiny from other audiences, because there's a big trend of people with relatively crappy ML research gussying it up with some sexy applications (usually bio-related) and then publishing it in a general-readership science journal like Nature or Science in order to avoid the kind of scrutiny it'd get if they tried to publish in an actual ML or Statistics journal.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
"However, the problem is that Nature is a leader in scientific publishing..."
Thankfully the University of California system includes a number of elite universities: UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSF, UCSD, and UC Davis all come to mind as usually ranking in the top 50 schools in the country. Others in the UC system are pretty well ranked. It's too many top programs cranking out research to piss off, even for NPG. TFA states that over the last six years the UC system has published ~5,300 articles in the 67 journals, with 638 in Nature alone. Nature publishes around about 16-17 research papers per weekly issue, so in the last six years the UC system is responsible for roughly one paper in eight in Nature! Nature is in a never-ending pissing contest with Science over status of top journal. If the faculty at these universities really do tell Nature to fuck off and they stop submitting and reviewing articles and resign from the editorial boards, there will be bad hit taken in journal rankings. Those journal rankings do mean something, generally you try for the highest ranked journal you think you can get accepted by. Death spiral is hyperbole, but it's easy to see a threat since all universities are cutting subscriptions because of cost, and low ranked journals go first. NPG must really bet that the UC faculty won't hold together. Normally that'd be a safe bet since getting a handful of professors to be in the same damn room at the same damn time can take weeks of effort to pull off (familiar to all graduate students trying to get a committee meeting set up). This time with California's budget crisis, NPG might be wrong.
I'm not so sure that free market principles wouldn't jump in and sort of squash their leader position.
Think about this, they increase their price, UC school systems takes another journal and makes it home, the new home gets all of UC's published work, then they become one of the top as others schools attempt to mimic them.
Any other scientific journal could just as easily compete for this position. The buying power behind California's University system as well as the exposure to students who will be the next leaders using the materials, is huge. I think it may be so huge that UC has the power to basically appoint Nature's replacement as a leader in scientific publishing within 5-10 years.
Does it strike you that this is a pretty good description of a commercial Linux distribution?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.