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University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access (sciencemag.org)
The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced this week that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. From a report: Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide. The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.
One less food source for a parasite.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
I totally get the idea of open access. And it's laudable. It's also a choice. You have approximately three choices when you publish: 1.
publish in an open access journal, and pay it's editorial and compositional page charges,
2. Publish in a pay-for access journal, which may have lower compositional page charges
3. publish in some open and free journal (are there any good ones?)
If you go to a pay-for-access journal and ask them to make all of your author's papers free to access you are basically insane. Sure you can ask but you are asking the journal to go bankrupt or at a minimum work at cost. If you add onto that a request to reduce page charges too, well .... At this point you should just ask for a pony as well.
One could imagine that journals should pay authors for their articles. THat makes some logical sense but it just shifts the cost to the access.
I like the pay-to-publish model myself because if there is barrier it can, if used correctly and not as a vanity press, result in a journal I'm more likely to want to read and more proud to publish in too.
The right argument is if in the age of digital publishing we could not find some less expensive process. But that's not what UC is asking.
But the key thing to keep sight of is that the editorial process should try to stamp out crap. That's the whole reason I'm willing to pay. I can't read everything and if every search term has a load of crap then it's useless.
However that's not hopeless. Google ate alta vista's lunch because it provided more relevant searches. So it is possible to beat down the cost and still beat down crap. However, when it comes to science articles I still prefer peer review to key term search as a way to beat down the crap.
Finally, UC should consider just requiring it's authors to put their articles in a non-copyrighted form on Xarciv before sending them to elsevier. They won't save money but if they genuinely want free access to all UC author pubs it's already available to them. I think it's all about money and not about free access
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.