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Articles: Another battle begins in the war against archaic publishers

Posted by paustian on Jul 13, 2010 - 07:26 PM

This website and its accompany book at lulu is a small shot across the bow of the publishing houses that charge ridiculous fees for student textbooks. A similar and related battle is brewing in the journal publishing racket. Nature is proposing a more than 400% increase in the subscription fee they charge the University of California. And we are not talking chump change. The current fee is $4,465 and Nature wants to raise its feel to $17,479 per journal. That amounts to over $1 million dollars a year in subscription fees for the campus.
This points out how archaic the current business model is in academic publishing. Scientists use federal and industrial grants to perform the research, they write up their papers and submit them to the journals for free, whose editors (scientists working for free) send the papers out for review to other scientists (also working for free). If your paper is accepted, then you pay a large page charge, in the thousands of dollars to have it published. Then, it is put behind a pay wall and the only people who can read your article are again, people who pay large subscription fees. Nice huh?

Well I think Nature finally pushed this too far, a boycott is being organized and if they don't back off, Nature will cease to be an important publication. Scientists don't need the publishers to do and report good science. As a case in point, new publishing models are coming up such as the Public Library of Science that are based on the open access model. Scientist are still required to pay a page charge to have their article published, but the article itself is open to anyone who cares to read it, including the general public. The quality of the articles written is just as good as any other quality journal the impact factors of these free journals is rising.

I myself am contributing to this little war by only reading and referencing journal articles that are open access. With the sophisticated tools at PubMed it is very easy to restrict your searches to only open access and free journals. The days of exorbitant subscription fees for journals are numbered.