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French research organizations and universities have cancelled their subscriptions to Springer journals, due to an impasse in fee negotiations between the publisher and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
After more than a year of discussions, Couperin.org and SpringerNature, which publishes more than 2,000 scholarly journals belonging to Springer, Nature, and BioMedCentral, have failed to reach an agreement on subscriptions for its Springer journals. The publisher’s proposal includes an increase in prices, which the consortium refuses to accept.
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French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Journals
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday April 04 2018, @06:04PM (4 children)
Almost. The price of the subscription is above the value to the consortium of Universities, so they have decided not to pay. (Unless that's just a negotiating tactic.)
But the point here is value is specific as to "Valuable to whom? For what?" Different potential purchases may perceive quite different values. The value of "notes on physics" to an administrator will probably be considerably different than the value to a researcher.
Now this *is* a monopoly situation. The papers will be published in only one journal. But until the potential end-user reads the paper there is no way that anyone can assign a reasonable value to it, so the value needs to be guessed at by *ALL* parties.
Additionally, the university consortium could play hardball. They could refuse to accept publication in an Elsevier Journal as a valid academic publication. (After all, the papers aren't accessible to their faculty.) For that matter, they could start their own journals. That way the prestige of the published papers would reflect directly back to them. This might even be an optimal strategy for them, now that publication costs have dropped so. True, editorial costs are still up there, but the faculty could be required to spend a bit of time on peer review for their house journals, and the whole thing could be rolled into part of the advertising budget. Print subscriptions would, of course, be extra. Perhaps there could be extra charges to allow non-affiliated researchers to have their papers published...etc.
FWIW, the university I went to had a monthly magazine put out by the students of one of the departments, so the skills needed to produce the publication are likely to already be available in-house. Possibly the printing capabilities are no longer normally available within a university, now that the web is so prominent, but certainly one could use tools like Scribus to produce print-ready files.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday April 05 2018, @09:54AM (3 children)
In the UK, universities are assessed every few years by the Research Excellence Framework (yes, horrible name), which requires that each department enter 4 'outputs' per full-time research staff member. Outputs are typically papers (though they can be books or artefacts). To be entered, papers must be open access. They can be 'green' open access, which means that a copy of the preprint goes into an institutional repository for long-term archiving and public access. This is also a requirement for any work partially or wholly funded by a UK research council (and, I think, EU ones as well).
This also decreases the value of the journal subscriptions. If I want to find a paper published in the last 5 years or so, then I typically just grab the author's preprint either from an open access repo or from their home page, rather than trying to track it down via the official libraries. As such, there's little benefit in paying for the subscription.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday April 05 2018, @10:33AM (2 children)
The whole preprint thing is... interesting. As far as I can tell there's no real reason to assume that they're legal. It's just plain old infringement on the publisher's copyright, but everyone agrees to pretend that it's not, and publishers are expected to turn a blind eye.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:10PM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday April 05 2018, @02:16PM
Gotcha. Wasn't aware there were terms that essentially permit independent publication.