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."
Pot, meet kettle (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Create an Open Source Alternative! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:seems reasonable (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:seems reasonable (Score:3, Interesting)
That justification seems slightly strange. They're arguing that it's "entirely untrue" that NPG is increasing its prices by large amounts, and argue that instead, NPG is simply reducing its discount by large amounts. But that ends up producing the same effect, no?
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research and I don't think this stance will do their researchers any good.
It currently sure is, but interestingly things are happening in the field as well. There is a growing disagreement with the prices one has to pay for journals who nowadays mainly provide an IT platform. Various journals publication systems are open sources and this simply leads to the fact that publishers are competing with free/open source systems.
Take PlosONe, though obviously not as high as Nature, is becoming a more and more cutting edge journal collection. If anything, it shows that the classic peer-reviewed journals might get challenged by more community-driven journals.
I'm indeed not sure whether it will do any good to the researchers, but it's a strong indication that times are changing. They are the first, but hopefully not the last. And it's about time IMHO, since the current system dates from the days we did not have digital resources.
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research and I don't think this stance will do their researchers any good.
Nature isn't the only journal in the top tier. Within any given field, there are slightly more specific journals with equal 'street cred' -- Cell is seen as just as important among biologists; The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet are just as good for clinical researchers; I imagine that other fields have similar 'blockbuster' titles.
And if you're not going for Nature, then Science is their major competitor for the 'general' scientific audience. Similar impact factor, similar value on one's CV. (When the human genome was sequenced, the Human Genome Project published in Nature, while Celera simultaenously published their sequence in Science.)
And then there are the up-and-comers — the new open-access Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are both just a few years old, but already publishing a lot of cutting-edge research -- with impact factors to match. And since they are open acess (Creative Commons licensed), they don't charge any subscription fees. (And open access means that they may be cited more often, because more people can read them.)
Re:Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah--- interestingly, I've found that many of the people who themselves have Science or Nature papers have this view too. If their research is genuinely high-quality and novel in their own area, they'll often publish a second journal article specifically on the underlying technical component in a journal in their field, and that's often the one they'll cite when doing a self-cite. Now if you have that: a journal article in a top journal in your field for within-field cred, plus a high-profile article in the general-science journal for external PR, you're looking good to pretty much all relevant audiences.
Re:meh 'em (Score:2, Interesting)
The US is not trying to be the best center of education. It is trying to allow people to pursue their own goals and interests, free from compulsion by those who think they know better. At least that was the original intention. It is probably because of that that it actually is the best center of education at least when it comes to the university level education: http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2009/results [topuniversities.com] On the other hand there are countries where the government's explicit goal is to improve education by regulating it top to bottom and making it "free" (ha ha) to the students, like Germany. See how it ranks on the list above.
Re:Create an Open Source Alternative! (Score:2, Interesting)
A third model would be to have the funding agencies handle the publications directly rather than working through any kind of middleman. Things have already moved quite a distance in that direction. For example, NIH now requires that any publications arising from NIH funded research be submitted to Pub Med Central within (IIRC) one year; once they're on PMC they're publicly available free of charge. Once you've gone that far, why not just cut out the middleman? They could just as easily turn PMC into the Journal of NIH Research and require researchers receiving NIH funding submit their publications there. All the research would be available to everyone immediately, and they'd probably save some money in the long run.
There are obviously some details to be worked out. How do you deal with research that's funded by more than one agency? Would privately funded researchers be able to publish in a publicly funded journal? But those are minor points compared to the idea of requiring publicly funded research to be immediately available to the public.
pick any two (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [theatlantic.com] 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
not very realistic (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's becoming less relevant anyways (Score:3, Interesting)
No, the root of the problem is that traditional journals have largely been bought up by the last couple of decades by publishing companies which see them as a cash cow. But every journal I know of, traditional or open access, requires that the papers they publish be originals. (There may possibly be a couple of journals which specialize in reprints, I'm too lazy to go check right now.) In and of itself, this is no problem at all. Any academic who tried to pad out a CV with multiple publications of the same paper would be treated with suspicion and contempt, and rightly so.