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."

Comments

meh 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh, it is relatively amusing.. old medium effectively slashing its throat

Re:meh 'em

[codeAlDente]

I disagree, pending clarification of your definition of 'slow'. There are still a lot of people who like to read print (in many professions) for the sweet love of not spending ALL day on the computer/microscope. Nature, for many scientists, is like the Wall Street Journal for the business and finance crowd. A lot of people read it, and provides useful, first-hand information that often can't be obtained elsewhere. A lot of academic labs buy it, because they have more money than they need, and if they don't use it all, they lose it. Lots of scientists order the print version of the journal, even though they have access to the electronic version, for which a quasi-separate bureaucratic agency usually pays. Until Depression 2.0 hits, it'll sell. That being said, I wish scientists would rise up and tell Nature to eat a tarball. I like open source for many reasons, and I see no apolitical, scientific reason to publish in a Nature journal if you could publish in PLoS (Public Library of Sciences), PNAS, arXiv, etc. Peer review (both critical and editorial) is generally a key component of good scientific articles, and that's a service that Nature currently outsources very effectively. I recently went to a Q&A presentation with a Nature editor (whom I like), and most people (not me, but mostly professors) were angry. Not because the journal is expensive, but because they use their authority (or "impact factor") is used as an excuse to cost people a lot of time and effort, with little or no justification, and with substantial risk to their reputation and future funding. Some of it was typical academic whining, but there was a lot of substance that went unrefuted. Unnecessary bureacratic inefficiency has really wasted a lot. People walked out. Nature and a few other big publishing houses enjoy an oligopoly on academic publishing, and that could lead to inefficiency. But who knows. Their antitrust solidarity may be the best thing to manage a group of generally disagreeable people, who are plenty inefficient themselves, and get them to produce more research for the good of humanity.

Not a 400% Increase

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not a 400% Increase

[GreatAntibob]

Well, that makes a HUGE difference. I'd run like hell from a 400% price increase, but a 300% price increase seems fair and equitable to me.

Re:Not a 400% Increase

[mea37]

Sure. And as long as the conclusion is the same there's no reason to get the facts right, eh?

Re:Not a 400% Increase

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. And as long as the conclusion is the same there's no reason to get the facts right, eh?

You've got a good point. We need to know, down to the smallest unit of currency, exactly how much indignant rage to express. Can't go miscalculating that, can we? I mean, obviously, we need to be exactly 50% more outraged at a man who murdered 75 people than one who murdered 50, and how angry we're supposed to be is the thing that really matters.

Re:Not a 400% Increase

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Not a 400% Increase

[Barsteward]

Ted Haggard is that you???? Welcome back from jail

Re:Not a 400% Increase

[QRDeNameland]

And when an error is repeated enough, it's no longer an error and becomes correct.

Which, for all intensive purposes, begs the question of weather we can take this for granite. Or maybe that's a mute point.

***ducks***

seems reasonable

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:seems reasonable

[masterwit]

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.

Re:seems reasonable

[LivinInSanDiego]

The whole process is incredibly biased to the point it can be argued that large company best interests are often the greater concern for acceptance of a paper versus the quality and significance of the contribution itself – but that is just one issue. Some well known scientists have argued openly with other well known scientists and as a result, their contributions (or labs contributions) have become blacklisted and are never published. This does nothing more than hurt the pursuit of science (and the scientists themselves who reputation is tied to publications) since the community is often biased towards a particular set of journals regardless. Nature can be particularly bad where this is concerned. So Nature raising fees is just another part of a broken system needing review.

Re:seems reasonable

[AK Marc]

Capitalism requires informed consumers. Most companies work very hard to prevent their consumers from being informed. "Private" negotiations for random discounts off inflated MSRP is very anti-capitalistic. A law requiring full disclosure of every customer's price would be fought by almost everyone that claims to be for the Free Market, but in fact would be helping enforce the Free Market. But then, there is a desire by those people to have the Free Market regulated by those who directly benefit by violating it (they want to have the corporations police themselves and if you don't like it, shop elsewhere, even when there is no where else to shop). But having government regulation enforcing the Free Market, while required for a Free Market, is somehow a violation of the Free Market.

But imagine the row when every price for every seat on an airplane is known. Or when you go to the doctor and he tells you that the average price for that test is $142.5 and your price is $750 (as 90% get it for $75 and 10% get it for $750). Or car dealerships, which are staunchly anti-Free Market have to actually tell other customers what they actually charged for cars. But, an informed consumer is *required* for the Free Market. And as long as people get the idea in their heads that negotiation is good because they are smarter than the average guy, the USA will stay as far away from a capitalistic free market as possible.

Re:seems reasonable

[zerojoker]

all theoretical free-market models make certain assumption: 1) The participants act rationally and 2) the cost of information is free.
If you take out these assumptions than the free-market model is theoretical on a weak basis, and, scientifically, not "better" or "worse" than fascism or communism or whatever.

Think of this: If you have two types of orange juice, one is cheaper and high on dioxins due to improper processing of the manufacturer and one is more expensive. Otherwise they are mostly the same. Is it rationally to buy the poisend one?

Fuck the publishers.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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?

Re:Good

[Trepidity]

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.

Pot, meet kettle

[PatPending]

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.

Re:Pot, meet kettle

[tucara]

Not that I agree with the massive tuition hikes, but the difference here is that the journal is getting most of it's content and editing for free. It would be like the UC tuition rising despite all the professors and janitors working for free. Also some journals actually charge your for publishing articles. It cost me a $1000 to publish in an IOP journal...and by me I mean the taxpayer since I work on a DOE experiment.

Re:Pot, meet kettle

[lymond01]

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).

Create an Open Source Alternative!

[MarkvW]

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.

Donald Knuth on the topic

[toxygen01]

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...

Re:Good

[je ne sais quoi]

I agree. In my discipline, a nature of science paper will get you huge attention from the university administration and bureaucrats in your funding agency. However, your colleagues who research things close to you will be suspicious because one has to simplify your findings and leave important qualifying statements out in order to have the paper be understandable by a general audience. I've seen more than one Nature or Science paper whose results were a little too convenient or cute and not surprisingy were later found to be totally bogus. It's not that bogus results don't happen in other journals, that's part of the scientific process, but when it's published in science or nature, a lot of people not in your field tend to believe it.

car show analogy

[bzipitidoo]

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.

Re:car show analogy

[takowl]

These scumbag publishers... act like the researchers should be grateful not to be charged a fee.....PLoS is where I'll be sending my work.

So, you take issue with the fact that mainstream publishers don't pay scientists (we'll ignore how that would work in a market where space in well known journals is the scarce resource), and would like to thumb your nose at them by... going with a publisher that will charge you >$2000 to publish your own material! There are good arguments for open access publishing, but your complaints contradict one another.

There is still a market for print journals, although maybe it's on the wane. Someone has to pay for printing and distribution, and the journal staff require salaries. Even online publishing needs servers and bandwidth. The traditional model is that the publishers charge the readers, and the new model is to charge the authors (i.e. the funding agencies), but either way, it can't be free for everyone.

Re:car show analogy

[Guppy]

Most car shows, participants pay, and the spectators get in for free. Which always seemed backwards to me.

Interpretation: The spectators are not the customer. They are the product being sold.

It's becoming less relevant anyways

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:It's becoming less relevant anyways

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

pick any two

[epine]

Capitalism requires NOTHING of the kind.

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

Re:US, Nature, and the best education

[TapeCutter]

The US has 5X the population of the UK and 15X the population of Australia. I don't find it at all surpising that the largest developed country in the world would also produce the bulk of the world's high quality academic research.

not very realistic

[Amanitin]

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.

Nature's response

[stillnotelf]

I haven't seen Nature's response discussed enough in the above discussion. Basically, Nature says that UC has been getting a huge discount for years because they pay the rate of one university even though they function as many universities. They also get some sort of other bulk discount. Nature wants them to pay like a collection of universities (like all the other state university systems), which will reduce their discount from 88% to 50%. This is the increase about which UC is complaining.

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