Harvard: Journals Too Expensive, Switch To Open Access 178
New submitter microcars writes "Harvard recently sent a memo to faculty saying, 'We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called "providers") to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.' The memo goes on to describe the situation in more detail and suggests options to faculty and students for the future that includes submitting articles to open-access journals. If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?"
Re:The system must be changed (Score:4, Informative)
Actually most researchers publish their result in technical reports or on arXiv before sending a paper to a journal.
It is streamlined in Physics and is becoming popular in Computer Science. I am not sure about other disciplines though.
Re:microseconds (Score:5, Informative)
Some are. PLoS One for instance has a pretty high impact factor. It's not up there with Nature, but it's higher than the vast majority of journals.
Re:microseconds (Score:3, Informative)
Some are. PLoS One for instance has a pretty high impact factor. It's not up there with Nature, but it's higher than the vast majority of journals.
In case people are wondering... PLoS is the Public Library of Science [plos.org].
egregious journal costs affect you, personally (Score:5, Informative)
In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.
Libraries are necessarily nonprofit organizations, and their budgets are funded through taxes and tuition. The current journal publication business model treats library budgets as little more than a vehicle to launder money that was taken from Mr. and Ms. Taxpayer.You pay to support Elsevier, ThomsonReuters, et al, in the form of taxes and tuition. Journal publishers seem to perceive library budgets the way that petroleum companies perceive oil fields. In case you think this is hyperbole, consider:
An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100.
http://www.economist.com/node/21552574 [economist.com] Given these kinds of costs, it would be cheaper for a library to fly the most prominent publishing mathematicians out for a visit and have them lecture on the topics of their latest publications.
Applying a profiteering mentality to scholarly work has predictable resulted in a systematic degradation of the quality of academic output itself. The results are demonstrable.http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/20/220201/studies-suggest-massive-increase-in-scientific-fraud [slashdot.org]
Re:The system must be changed (Score:4, Informative)
arXiv does not peer review. But the documents are cross published. many submission system in physics actually download the paper from arxiv. Once you know the name of the published paper and the authors, you can access its version on arXiv which is exactly the one used by the journal.
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Informative)
When you submit a paper to a journal you typically sign a copyright transfer agreement. These vary a bit from publisher to publisher, but all of the ones I have seen state (and I just checked the two I have in my desk):
1. That the copyright (but not related patent rights) is transferred to the publisher, but the authors retain the right to make personal copies.
2. That it is original work, not published before in any language and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
IANAL, but my understanding is that the first clause prohibits you from submitting the article to another journal and the second clause prohibits you from having already submitted it to another journal.
As far as I can tell, it's quite effective.