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."
meh 'em (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh, it is relatively amusing.. old medium effectively slashing its throat
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Meanwhile the California government increases their rates 400% and nobody bats an eye
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They are gouging the shit out of taxpayers is more like it. The students in public universities only pay a fraction of the true cost. Taxpayers are the ones who should be complaining, the students should shut up and be grateful.
Re:US, Nature, and the best education (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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....Or are the UCLA academics cutting theirs?
People should understand that the Academic publishers would never have dared try a 400% rise without a strong bargaining position. The sad reality is that publishing in a journal like Nature is a huge feather in the cap/CV of any academic, earning them big kudos, faster tenure track and generally more money overall. Publishers are well aware of this and are effectively trying to call UCLAs bluff here. They're very powerful groups with many "prestigious" journals,
Not a 400% Increase (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Sure. And as long as the conclusion is the same there's no reason to get the facts right, eh?
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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.
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Re:Not a 400% Increase (Score:5, Funny)
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***
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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!
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It wasn't in the headline, true, but it was in the article. The fact that it made Slashdot's front page must have meant it was something Great and Terrible. Assuming it wasn't about dust collecting between your iphone and its case, which is the other example of a front page Slashdot story of Momentous Importance.
seems reasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [infotoday.com] things would change.
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.
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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?
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It is like insurance prices.
$75 for a test that costs you $750.
Which is the real price? The price 99% pay ($75) or the 'rack rate' that the public pays?
Rather than have a big national health care plan Obama should have just required that the uninsured could not be required to pay more than 25% over what the least expensive insurance company rate was.
Seriously, one of my gf's had a $5 charge for a "full rate $580" test recently. Just crazy.
Re:seems reasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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 m
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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
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Seriously, one of my gf's had a $5 charge for a "full rate $580" test recently. Just crazy.
Sorry to hear your gf fell for that door-to-door breast exam scam.
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But the implication that UC gets a discount far larger than anyone else muddies the waters.
I'd be curious to see what discounts other large subscribers get, and if UC's discount is really out of whack with the discounts other institutional subscribers receive.
Perhaps the larger news here is not this proposed increase for UC, but instead how much everyone else is paying for the sam
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UC was operating under a discount that NPG terms "unsustainable."
Well, that seems to be rather the heart of the matter, doesn't it?
How much is NPG's overhead, and what are their profit margins? The service they provide is solely the prestige: they are the most exclusive journal, getting the most important papers subject to (presumably) the most stringent reviews.
The price of the journal helps contribute to that prestige: anybody can open a free journal. But nearly all of it goes to profit, as they don't pay either the referees or the authors.
So, if their overhead is so
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Interesting vaguely, but mostly that just says NPG is outdated and must die.
Academic publishers do exactly jack shit, seriously like nothing, zero, zilch. Academics prepare their papers in LaTeX which unlike MS Word will easily produce print quality output. I've never once seen even so much as a spelling correction from an editor, merely bitching about uncited referenced that I'd left uncited for a reason. Referees work completely for free.
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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 rig
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Reasonable for more than just publishers (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it strike you that this is a pretty good description of a commercial Linux distribution?
Bruce
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It does. :)
So, delving deeper into the analogy, the next best thing for scientific publishers is to offer 'support'.
Maybe, in the form of an electronic forum where the author and reviewers of the paper can collaborate and respond to comments and requests for information to its subscribers.
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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
Good (Score:2)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
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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 th
car show analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 f
Re:car show analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
While I'm sure some participants are just there to show off, I think many of them are there to promote their business, which is customizing cars, and that's why they participate and pay for the privilege. While they're there showing up their fancy car with special upholstery, they're passing out business cards to spectators promoting their auto upholstery
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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
Mark Newman! PNAS! The list goes on...generally seem to be people from field X trying to stuff from field Y (where Y is often ML/statistics/algorithms, and X != math or CS).
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And why do you suppose it is? Impact factor [wikipedia.org]. And what affects the impact factor? Number of citations. And who generates these citations? Academic researchers.
If this boycott/controversy leads to scientists at UC (and elsewhere) disliking Nature, it'll have an impact on its impact factor which may negate whatever benefit non-UC researchers may got from reduced competition.
In any case, the academic journal publishers charging exorbitant fees are ... pot
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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-re
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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'
Fuck the publishers. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Step 5. University library shells out nontrivial dead presidents so that scientists can read the papers they and their colleagues wrote.
This also has been bothering me for a while. I never got why exactly my girlfriend, who is an undergrad in Ancient and Medieval History, and has been networking with Prof's all over North America, still insists on buying Archaeology Magazine, when she has heard most of the names in there and could probably get the un-editted articles if she sent an email. It's like 5 Degrees of Seperation max.
It absolutely baffles me.
Then again, how would she know there was a paper written if she didn't purchase the publici
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Why don't the Universities just form a non-profit group to take the place of the publisher? This group could then start a website, and organize the participants. All the papers would be published online, on the website, in PDF format. If anyone really wants a dead-tree version of an article, they can print it themselves. The articles would all be free to read for everyone, so that science is accessible to anyone who has interest. The only cost would be nominal: money for web space, perhaps a full-time
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Wow, that's bad.
But still, this whole idea that anyone should have to pay to read scientific publications just seems to fly in the face of what science is about, and it only fuels the general public's view that science is a walled garden, an ivory tower of academics jerking each other off, and not producing learning that's genuinely useful for humanity. If this data is so useful, then it should be freely available to everyone, just like Free/open-source software is. You don't see anyone claiming how great
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used to be. nowadays there's a move for open access. Some journals allow it for nothing, some require a payment. Either way, the journals get a copyright for their edition, author maintains for other use.
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At least it is mostly better than it was. You used to have to pay a per page charge to have your paper published once it was accepted, which was on the order of hundreds of dollars for a scientific paper. If you wanted a color figure, it went up to thousands. Then, if you wanted copies of your paper to send to colleagues, you had to pay for those too. I published a paper in Science, and by the time we paid the page charges and bought 1000 preprints, we had spend most of $10,000. Now that's a business m
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You used to have to pay a per page charge to have your paper published once it was accepted.
Used to? There are still several publishers (especially in the biomed fields) that still require them.
Skimming from undegrads? (Score:2)
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In this case, Profit occurred in Step 5. No step in this process is a mystery except Step 4.5: They smoke a whole bunch of ?? and decide to raise the prices.
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He means the kind of research that gets paid for by government grants.
Corporate R&D is a different kind, where they don't usually want to publish the results. They want to keep it proprietary. At least thats the impression I get.
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Companies in the research business generally want to publish (there is a prestige issue for the company, and also their employees in research want to have publication credits, they want to attract talent from academia, etc., etc., etc.)
There are clearly some things which they want to keep confidential (e.g., research which has a high probability of having value patented applications for which the company hasn't yet
Money talks. (Score:2)
Money talks.
The one thing I don't get is why Nature is gouging their content providers and why UC is PAYING for being content providers in the first place. Peer reviewing, editorial work, actual submissions? Don't people usual GET paid for this?
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.
Re:Pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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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.
Indeed, one quite striking difference I've noticed between universities in the U.S. and in other countries is that in U.S. universities, the physical plant tends to be amazingly well-maintained (and clean), even when the buildings are quite old. Universities that I've visited in other countries -- even top-ranked and famous (and often very expensive) ones -- often seem to be a bit shabby and run-down by comparison.
Talk to your representatives (Score:2)
It is also worth noting that as the government reduces its funding of university research and private organizations take up the slack the overhead chargeable by universities is greatly affected. That is private
Goose, gander, etc (Score:2)
UC doesn't mind gouging students.....or taxpayers.
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.
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It's called PLoS (http://www.plos.org/) and you pay to play there too.
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Not all areas have pay-to-play open-access journals. In my area, JAIR [jair.org] and JMLR [mit.edu] are probably the two most prestigious journals (not just most prestigious open-access journals, but most prestigious period), and they're both entirely open access and entirely free of publication fees.
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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 thei
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The advantage, though, is that by tweaking the payment model, you can massively increase the accessibility of the research(which is arguably an ethical imperative when it is publicly funded, and a nice perk in all events), cut down on the ability of parasi
Frontiers (Score:2)
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Not really a journal: http://arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org]
Looks like nature has more to loose (Score:2)
At least on the surface it sounds like Nature has far more to loose in this venture in creative pricing than UC does. Loosing editorial staff, reviewers and submissions because you want to charge them more to provide your content just sounds rather backwards.
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That's because they didn't tie the rope tight enough.
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...
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You might want to note that the footnote at the end of the letter indicates that it isn't actually an open letter. :)
He made it public back in 2003:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news03.html [stanford.edu]
why the increase? (Score:2)
Just to be clear, what is causing this huge increase? I find it weird that there isn't some more general outcry, why is it limited to UCL? That's a huge jump, completely abnormal for a commercial entity, and TFA is oddly scant on this rather significant bit of context.
Googling around a bit I hit this [sciencemag.org], which follows the old-skool "journalism" thing of finding out what the other side has to say:
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The bigger picture is that for many years now, publishers have claimed that dead tree subscriptions by individuals have been dropping like a rock. It's not just NPG that's doing this, Elsevier has been doing this for a long time with the journals they can get away with. There is some truth to it, many scientists used to have paper subscriptions to their favorite journals. Nowadays though, you just navigate to your library's web-site and enter your id
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As much as I hate to use the phrase, it's a paradigm shift.
My father, who had a distinguished career as a professor, explained to me once that journals could never move online because their primary purpose was to fill bookshelves in the offices of professors, as an indication of senority within the tribe - the more shelf feet of journals you had, the more seriously you were to be taken. The least senior professors have little to lose by switching, however, and I suspect that's what has happened - over a ge
It's all just about money? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm no fan of the price gouging publishers are engaging in, but really - Elsevier publishes fake journals by the hundreds [slashdot.org] and there's not a peep from university or faculty. Thomson Reuters sues an open source competitor [slashdot.org] 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...
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But now it's about money and suddenly they're all up in arms with boycotts and protests...
If you own a business, and know that one of your biggest customers was having financial difficulties, that's probably a bad time to tell them they won't be getting the same discount anymore. That would go double if that same customer somehow was giving you a significant amount of the product you were selling back to them. That's the situation that nature stumbled into: they get a lot of their research from UC, UC is a major customer of their journals, and the UC system has been really hit by the state bud
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The irony of this is that I had never heard of zotero until Thomson Reuters sued, and it made it to slashdot. Now I use it, and have a half dozen colleagues using it. Best publicity ever.
Better model exists (Score:2)
What is especially strange about much of academic publishing not changing its traditional subscription model to account for the rise of Internet is that (unlike a lot of other content providers) there is a clear, economically viable alternative.
Instead of charging for subscriptions, journals should get revenue by charging authors to publish (sometimes called "page fees"). Some journals already have page fees that don't cover the cost of publication, in which case they would need to be increased.
Since in bio
It's becoming less relevant anyways (Score:4, 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: (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 s
When a 1927 article is behind a paywall... (Score:2)
When an article published in 1927 is behind a paywall, you know that the journal keeping that science hostage, is bad news.
Therefore, screw Nature.
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.
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]
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.
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I'd read his post as a hypothetical of the situation where every journal cost $17.
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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.
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But, as I understand this, it's for the entire UC system. All of the campuses, all of the people. It sounds less rapacious using that metric. Nature costs me $100 per year as an individual. Ten times that number for an entire university system sounds like an awfully low price.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 jour
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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 scient
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