U.C. System and Springer Agree To CC-Licensed Journal Articles 54
NeoSkink writes "The University of California and Springer Science+Business Media have reached an agreement to provide open access for articles submitted by UC-affiliated authors. In a press release, the UC writes: 'Under the terms of the agreement, articles by UC-affiliated authors accepted for publication in a Springer journal beginning in 2009 will be published using Springer Open Choice with full and immediate open access. There will be no separate per-article charges, since costs have been factored into the overall license. Articles will be released under a license compatible with the Creative Commons (by-nc: Attribution, Non-commercial) license. In addition to access via the Springer platform, final published articles will also be deposited in the California Digital Library's eScholarship Repository.'"
Re:Non-Free license (Score:3, Interesting)
And just in case no-one can see his point, consider that pharmaceutical researchers will be required to purchase a different license to use medical research published under a CC-non-commercial license to actually make drugs that save lives. In a way, this announcement is a step backwards, as previously there was no explicit non-commercial requirement on scientific papers. In fact, it was assumed to be the opposite.
Re:change is a comin' (Score:1, Interesting)
I think that seems short-sighted - even petty. I prefer to look at it from a different point of view.
I'd rather my papers be read & cited by more people, than that they have some fancy brand-name associated with them.
So, unless you're talking about the top tier journals like Science or Nature, I'd rather publish in PLoS [plos.org] or similar open journals, so that I can distribute my papers as widely as possible.
I'm interested in doing good science - not labels - or packing my resume. Sorry, but your first sentence really comes off as pathetic. I hope I never have someone with that point of view in my laboratory.
rho
Re:change is a comin' (Score:3, Interesting)
Pathetic? I'm a grad student. If I didn't come off as pathetic, I'd be putting on a good act. In all honesty, my views on open access and whatnot are of little value. I don't get to judge my own CV. When I'm a tenured professor, then I could have some choice in the matter, but right now I'm far from it. Selling my paper short (for a cause I'm pretty apathetic about anyway) would have no effect.
Out of curiosity, anonymous person, what field is your lab in?
Re:Non-Free license (Score:1, Interesting)
Wow! The only conclusion I can come to after reading that is that you are simply not a scientist and have absolutely no familiarity with the modern scientific process.
I'm a post-doc at a major university biochem lab. If I did what you just described, the ethics committee would have me out the door in a heartbeat and I'd probably never work in my field again.
What you described is basically plagiarism.
We do NOT take someone's paper and extend, edit & republish it as our own.
We read papers - 10s, 100s of papers in ours and related fields. We may (and do) duplicate someone's experiment in detail in the lab to verify their results -- particularly if our work depends & builds directly on theirs and their results are novel. We perform our own original research/experiments and write & submit papers describing what we did & explaining our results. And we cite the papers which we based our work on.
And NONE of that depends on the copyright license of the papers we read. Copyright only relates to the distribution of the papers - not the use of the subject material.
rho
Re:change is a comin' (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm a biochem post-doc working in a molecular-microbiology lab. We're studying E.coli O157:H7 and attempting to inhibit intimin formation.
intimin is a protein on the surface of the cell membrane which allows the bacteria to adhere. no intimin and the bacteria stay in solution, therefore no more quorum sensing, no more bio-film and no infection! voila!
Sounds easy, right? Those little critters just won't cooperate though!
But, back to papers. At the institutions I've been at it's quantity first, quality 2nd, and brand-name distant 3rd. Quantity is easy. Quality is harder - it's best judged over time by the number of cites. If your peers cite your papers as the basis for their work, you're doing something right. Scientists are being rated [wikipedia.org] by their citations now.
As for brand - no one really cares if you publish in Cell [cell.com], Journal of Bacteriology [asm.org], Molecular Microbiology [wiley.com] or PLoS Pathogens [plospathogens.org]. (unless, of course it's top-tier Science/Nature/PNAS, etc. any guess as to what percentage of submitted papers those top tiers represent?)
Why would you give your work away to some publisher so they can make a buck? What do you get out of it? You give them your paper. Signing the copyright over to them. You work for them for free, peer-reviewing papers so they can have a peer-reviewed journal. And then they make $$$ money selling them, restricting their audience, and give you nothing. That seems right to you? Just so you can say your insignificant little paper [>90% are] was published in XXX journal?
I don't care if I never make a major discovery, but if the guy/gal who "cures" EHEC cites my work on intimin formation my scientific dreams would have been fulfilled. I will have participated in what Newton described with "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".
rho
Re:Academic Publishing is backwards and crooked (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the professional societies that publish journals use the profits from journal publishing to cross subsidize annual meetings. In many cases journal profits also help to pay for unnecessarily large staffs at the society headquarters.
In my experience, the societies that are most dependent on journal subscriptions to fund the operations of the society are the ones that are most opposed to open access, allowing the posting of online preprints, and so forth- they've got the most to lose.
Re:change is a comin' (Score:2, Interesting)
If I write a paper, I'm going to try to get it in the best journal I can so it looks better on my resume. Open access does not factor into it. I'm not about to sell myself short and publish in a lower impact journal, and hurt my career, just to make sure everyone can access it free of charge.
But by making an article open-access you increase its distribution*, and thus you potentially increase the rate at which it is cited. Which in turn leads to a higher impact factor for the journal hosting the article. So this is actually a smart move for Springer (especially since they are getting UC to pay for it all).
* I'm part of a university that pays for access to most academic journals, but if I can immediately access a PDF via Google Scholar (rather than the horrendous proxy handshaking required to access most digital repositories), it's more likely to get read.
Re:change is a comin' (Score:3, Interesting)
When I write papers, I submit them to journals so that they can be peer-reviewed, and I can get some feedback. This is usually the second publication, since I usually put an informal write-up on a blog before I start the paper (which I can point to if someone else gets a journal paper accepted first, since I have a public record of having published it first).
Almost every journal and conference I've submitted papers to, including those owned by Springer, has allowed me to put a copy of the PDF on my own web page for anyone to read. The one exception was the Journal of Object Technology, which only allows me to link to their hosted copy (although, since that's free of charge and likely to be around longer than my departmental page, I don't mind). Springer does not let you use their style elements in the copy you put online, but this is just a matter of changing the documentclass back to article in your header and running pdflatex again.