Publish or perish? Not at these prices, UC says

Contra Costa Times ^ | 06/10/2010 | Matt Krupnick

[BigBobber]

University of California librarians are urging professors not to submit research to Nature or 66 related journals to protest a 400 percent increase in the publisher's prices.

A new contract with Nature Publishing Group would raise the university's subscription costs by more than $1 million, library and faculty leaders wrote in a letter this week to professors throughout the 10-campus system. With recent budget cuts, UC libraries simply can't handle the higher price, which would take effect in 2011, the letter said.

Boycotting the Nature group would be a huge step for a university that, according to UC estimates, has provided 5,300 articles to the 67 journals in the past six years. Nearly 640 of those articles went to Nature itself, one of the world's premier scientific journals.

[snip]

"The university is forced to give away information for free and then to buy it back at a huge markup," he said. "The whole thing is just completely screwed up. The only alternative the university has is to strike back at what Nature really values."

[BigBobber]

The beginning of the end for academic publishing.

Shouldn't publicly funded research be posted for free on the Internet?

[bruinbirdman]

"University of California librarians are urging professors not to submit research to Nature or 66 related journals to protest a 400 percent increase in the publisher's prices."

Read an article about an author who convinced publishers to print up 4 or 5 of his titles over many years. I looked them up on Amazon. They are selling for about $9.99 now.

So he published his rejected titles (8 or 9) himself on Kindle for $2 a download and says he is making more than he ever did in his life.

yitbos

[HiTech RedNeck]

Micropublishing, the new trend.

[glorgau]

It will be interesting to see how librarians handle the acquisition of the myriad of micro published items that are just starting to be published.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

So he published his rejected titles (8 or 9) himself on Kindle for $2 a download and says he is making more than he ever did in his life.

In a roughly equivalent situation, the band Radiohead released their 7th album "In Rainbows" as MP3 downloads for any price customers were willing to pay. They reportedly made more money from these MP3 sales than they'd made from all of their previous album sales combined (and Radiohead is a very successful band).

There are business models with a legacy of huge profits built around the increasingly obsolete function of middle-man between creators of content and consumers of content. As content producers are increasingly able to self-publish and self-publicize, record companies, publishing companies and production companies could all go the way of the dinosaur. But not without all sorts of demands for government subsidies and bad legislation first.

[glorgau]

Very cool visualization of Journal Citation Patterns which uses the hierarchical edge bundling technique.

[elli1]

"The university is forced to give away information for free and then to buy it back at a huge markup," he said.

Interesting perspective. How does this square w/ the fact that most universities are largely underwritten by taxpayers? Or the perspective that publishing information/ research that was paid for w/ tax dollars is a matter of partial repayment of that debt?

[organicchemist]

Recent regulations require anyone publishing research funded by the NIH to post it to their digital archive no later than 12 months after publication. They have guidelines requiring the author to insist on copyright changes with publishers. Journals pretty much have to go along because all the big boys have NIH money.
All in all, I think the NIH is probably justified in going this way. Subscriptions are so high that too many little players can’t maintain a library. The current publishing house of cards looks to be collapsing.

[elli1]

Good info to know. Thank you for your reply.

[organicchemist]

You are welcome. I think the only thing that publishers actually bring to the table nowadays is the management of peer review. Some filtering out of nonsense is necessary and editorial boards do attempt that with reasonable success.
In the old days, publishers did a lot of editing, typesetting and presentation work on submitted manuscripts but modern desktop publishing software has eliminated most of the need for that.

[monkeyshine]

Correct. The information produced by the University costs a whole heck of a lot more than free. Student tuition, state and federal subsidies, and public and private grant money all contribute to research and development.

The whole scheme is upside down. Of course those who pay for work are entitled to own that work but not in academia apparently.

Nature simply takes advantage of a situation. In order for researchers to get noticed, they must publish. Nature serves that function. In turn, Nature charges universities and other researchers to read that which has been published. It is a horrible cycle that only reinforced mediocrity since being published is what generates credibility, not so much the uniqueness of the ideas, hypothesis or data created.

But we all knew that already.