Univ. of California Faculty May Boycott Nature Publisher 277
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."
From TFA (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Not a 400% Increase (Score:1, Informative)
~280% increase. Actually it says MORE than $17,000 per journal... so it could actually be 400%.
Re:seems reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
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 [arstechnica.com]
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 [arstechnica.com]
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.
mod parent Overrated (Score:2, Informative)
Read what you quote; they don't pay 17,000 each, and evidently don't want to pay 17,000 for even one.
Re:Create an Open Source Alternative! (Score:2, Informative)
It's called PLoS (http://www.plos.org/) and you pay to play there too.
Donald Knuth on the topic (Score:5, Informative)
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 [stanford.edu]
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:From TFA (Score:3, Informative)
Not all the 8000 journals are supplied by Nature however. The summary says that NAture's group publishes 67 journals. It is safe to say that UC subscribes to all of them. So the more correct math would be:
67*17000= 1 139 000 just for the 67 Nature publications.
However, the problem is that Nature is a leader in scientific publishing, so if they succeed in quadrupling their prices, many other scientific journals will do the same.
Re:Create an Open Source Alternative! (Score:1, Informative)
To provide open access, PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For PLoS Biology the publication fee is US$2900. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee.
We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.
For further information, see our Publication Fee FAQ.
Re:Pot, meet kettle (Score:1, Informative)
Most of the tuition increases are to offset cuts in state funding to the UC system, and much of the remainder is used as financial aid (taking from affluent students to support poor ones). In terms of inflation adjusted dollars, the state funding per UC student has been reduced over 50% since 1990.
Re:Not a 400% Increase (Score:5, Informative)
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:Create an Open Source Alternative! (Score:2, Informative)
PLoS is not free. It just shifts the costs from the readers to the authors, who must pay substantial fees ($1350 for PLoS One [plosone.org], for instance) to get their articles published. I think that's a better system overall- it lets anyone who's interested read the articles, it's relatively straightforward for authors to include publication costs in their grants, and it encourages authors to concentrate on quality over quantity- but it's not free.
Re:car show analogy (Score:3, Informative)
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 [plos.org] >$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:Pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Informative)
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).
It's becoming less relevant anyways (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Looks like nature has more to loose (Score:3, Informative)
That's because they didn't tie the rope tight enough.
Re:Fuck the publishers. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's becoming less relevant anyways (Score:5, Informative)
Not exactly. The NIH Public Acess Policy [nih.gov] 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.
Re:seems reasonable (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed, that's one reason that even Adam Smith supported some limited kinds of government intervention as necessary for a free market to operate. In particular, he supported laws against attempts to inject misinformation into markets, like fraud and false advertising. In a particularly interesting example, he also supported a law that would require employers to pay their employees in cash, not in either: 1) IOUs; or 2) goods.
His argument on that latter one was that requiring employers to pay cash makes it more likely that a transparent market will develop, by not tying one transaction (the employment one) to another one in a way that could make it easy to slip in fraud and deceit. For example, an employer paying with a bunch of IOUs might not intend to honor them, so hopes to get a bunch of free labor they never plan to pay for. An employer paying with goods might misrepresent their value, and given the employer/employee relationship, the employee may be in a bad position to question that. Requiring the transactions to be split (pay the employee in cash, and then let them buy goods separately if they want) reduces that risk.
Clearly the free-market fundamentalists would hate restrictions like that, but folks more in the Adam-Smith tradition don't have any religious belief that markets automatically produce ideal solutions; rather, they think market mechanisms are generally efficient ways of allocating resources, and support government intervention mainly aimed at the limited goal of keeping markets transparent and competitive.
Re:seems reasonable (Score:3, Informative)
I sat on a libraries committee at a UC a few years ago while this "deal" with Nature was being negotiated.
This idea that the UC is getting a discount is absolute BS. We paid (and are paying) extra so that UC libraries are allowed to locally store electronic copies of the online articles, something which Nature is now required to allow us to do (for free) for NIH sponsored research. Go ahead and go to the Nature website and look at the institution subscription price. I just checked again and Nature is right now $3095 for an institution subscription. That's $1370 *less* than the negotiated UC rate. That 90% discount comment is absolutely fabricated, UC pays above market. To suggest charging UC ~$17000 per journal is insulting.
Re:seems reasonable (Score:3, Informative)
Don't believe your highschool math teacher (Score:1, Informative)
"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".
Re:US, Nature, and the best education (Score:3, Informative)
To add to your comment. US Researchers are better paid than for example franch or belgian ones. Resulting in some of the best French and Belgian researcher 'flee' to the US to continue their research and then publish as US result.
Re:meh 'em (Score:2, Informative)
That was true a few decades ago. I work at a large state university. The state pays less than 10 percent of our budget.
Re:Reasonable for more than just publishers (Score:3, Informative)
Only up to the moment when the customers get their hands on the distribution. At this point the Open Source licenses guarantee the right to re-distribution, and anyone who feels motivated enough can re-publish the softeware at a price of his choice.
The only thing distributors can do about this is trademark based:
They can place restrictions on using the product name. But the users can still change the name and logo and re-distribute the cosmetically changed product. Examples include
-The Iceweasel browser in debian, which is a rebranded Firefox.
-The CentOS Linux distribution, which is essentially Red hat Enterprise with the serial numbers filed off.
If the same would apply to articles from Nature, any subscriber to the electronic version could legally copy the articles to his own homepage. He probably would have to remove the publisher's name to avoid being sued over trademarks, but that is all.
Nature's response (Score:3, Informative)
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 [sciencemag.org]
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cdl.html [nature.com]