Pharyngula

Posted by: jonwell | June 12, 2010 11:18 PM

I graduated from a UC just today... and I feel like I'm leaving a sinking ship in a very sad way. This is one more unfortunate blow, looks like =[

Posted by: dsmwiener | June 12, 2010 11:43 PM

What about scholarpedia, which is basically an open source, free, peer reviewed wiki? I cannot see why that is not the model for the future. I am not a scientist, but I work with plenty of them, and I cannot see why scholarpedia cannot do what the journals do, but without the cost. Any scientists care to comment?

Posted by: co | June 12, 2010 11:45 PM

Hardly anyone I know reads the print editions of journals anymore -- we all go to the electronic editions to pick and choose the papers we're interested in.

On what -- E-books?

.

.

I know, I know. I had to ask it.

I get both electronic and paper copies of a few journals. I very much prefer the paper ones if the density of good articles is high in a given month. Otherwise, yeah, the electronic versions are a lot easier to search. Though once I find what I want to read, it gets printed out.

Posted by: mel.unique | June 13, 2010 12:18 AM

The UC system looks like it ought to be big enough to publish their own journals, maybe in cooperation with some other universities. If they did make it all electronic, they could bring costs down for other subscribers.

I hope this crossed someone in UC management's mind. Even if it wasn't the end-all solution, it would generate competition. I'm sure CA state wouldn't complain; after all, CA tax dollars funded the research anyway.

Posted by: McCthulhu is taking ∞ to eat all the pi | June 13, 2010 12:38 AM

Part of the responsibility lies with publishers of Nature. I can subscribe to Science magazine for a year for $99 but Nature is $199. With the switch to electronic versions, the physical publication costs are eradicated but they still want to keep the full subscription fee at two-hundred bucks. Certainly publications such as these are a business, but there's a point where they become tools of the trade and are a necessity to researchers and students. When a magazine becomes part of the institution of science, the publishers should be able to recognize they may be pricing themselves right into oblivion by not being available to the very people who submit the articles that keep them alive.

The whole flaming dogpoo bag of blame doesn't fall at Nature's doorstep, though. The California state budget crisis means less money for university libraries and that in itself is a situation I don't see resovling itself anytime quick, despite the finger-pointing party the politicians are blowing money on. That twat from eBay (Oh, she has a real name? Meg Whitman...) that ran on the Republican primary ticket was so desperate to get into office she just pissed away $91 million of personal cash and intends to spend another $150 on the November election. Throwing money around like that is basically a full admission of having a secret agenda she's desperate to get in to office, and absolutely nothing to do with a desire for public service. If she was sincere about fixing problems in the State, a $241 million donation to state universities would have been just the thing. She could have still run on campaign donations alone. You can see from this example why the state schools are short of cash for science journals; politicians that complain about waste while oblivious to the ironies of their own crass extravagance. To be sure that's not the only reason the state is up do its head-zits in debt, but it is a prime example of the wasteful mentality of politics in this state.

Posted by: Krubozumo Nyankoye | June 13, 2010 12:55 AM

This is a particularly irksome topic to me. For one thing I recall writing grant proposals (40 odd years ago now) in which one of the line items was "publication costs". That was because to get a paper published required payment to the publisher once the paper had passed review and was accepted, that included the cost of reprints.

So, the research itself was publicly funded, the university took a big cut of that money as overhead, okay they provided facilities and other support, there was also money to defray some of the cost of publication, but then the publications themselves were not inexpensive. Almost all the journals had some advertising in them as well. But for those of us who could not possibly afford to subscribe to all the journals publishing in our field, the library was the sole source. So then you needed a fairly big budget for photocopying...

Since the research was publicly funded, technically speaking you were obligated to publish your results, and on the same technicality the resultant information should be public domain. So I always wondered how it was that publishers were able to insert themselves as referees into the equation and make a pile of money to boot.

Much like the way Hubble data is handled, I have thought for years that there should be a one year proprietary period for published research, and then it should become freely available, especially considering that we now have the technology to make it available to anyone anywhere at extremely low cost.

Similarly the major indicies to research should be more accessible. The last I check the BIG subscription was ~$3,000 per year. Admittedly it costs a lot to compile and edit such works, but given that they are references to publicly funded research for the most part, why should they be profit making enterprises?

One other example, some years ago I approached an academic colleague of mine with an idea to create what we called the Lunar Science Database. The idea was really fairly simple and would have been a tremendous project and a genuine asset to research. All of the Apollo missions and much of related lunar research is thoroughly documented by NASA in a publicly available form of annotated lists of all samples collected from all the Apollo traverses station by station. What we wanted to do was simply set up a database using NASA's sample numbers such that anyone could plug in the sample number and retrieve a 'complete' list of all the papers published that mentioned that particular sample. That alone might have been sufficient but we had slightly more grandiose plans, we also want to have all those publications available for download for free in suitable formats. NASA had no problem with us using their databases. We could have done a background search online to their websites, or we could purchase the same data, once only on CD or DVD and then use it as we pleased. We hit the wall though when we went to BIG about it. Even if we bought their index, we were not allowed to share it whether for free or not, they could not make up their minds whether they wanted a fee for each individual search query or each record retrieved in a search. The journals were even worse. We are talking now about paper most of which were published over 20 years ago that are a little arcane to say the least, but without exception, every journal we approached suggesting we might want to make some of their ancient content publicly available for free essentially threatened to sue us if we even tried, let alone negotiate some kind of feasible compensation mechanism for them. That is to say, we would scan, edit, proofread etc. and give them the electronic data in return for free publication. Needless to say, the idea never got off the ground except for prototyping a few scripts to pass search strings to NASA which worked quite well.

There is something fundamentally broken here, it is akin to the fact that money and "educational achievement" are strongly correlated. The US invested $30 billion in 1960s money in going to the moon and collecting 250 odd kilos of rocks. A fair amount of research has been done on those rocks but it is still, after all this time relatively difficult to find and even harder to have ready reference to.

To temper my rant just a bit I have to admit that the standards of publication for scientific journals are generally very high and that justifies some reward I think, however, the current system seems more like a metered tap on something that is really public domain. Research is expensive enough as it is. The results should be within reach of anyone with a reasonable effort.

There are more issues here, the biggest perhaps is the one of the legacy of publications going back well over 100 years in some cases. But of all fields, science should be demanding that its main outlets should be both modern and generally available. Yet it is probably one of the most poorly represented fields in terms of electronic archiving of legacy publications. (I'm just guessing on that one but just do a google scholar search).

There is one more reason I favor electronic storage for research work. It is then possible to make available not just the interpretation of results, but the raw and processed data as well.

$24 million on Nature Journals alone!? For ONE university system? That is 5% of the entire NSF budget for Geosciences.

Posted by: Owlmirror | June 13, 2010 12:59 AM

Bah. The text is there, but invisible past the comment box margin.

Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space, OM, A little FUCKING ray of sunshine | June 13, 2010 1:51 AM

Having worked to some level in scientific publishing, I can assure you that it remains a complete clusterfuck. Somehow, the MBAs or MBA wannabes (who are even worse) got hold of the field and decided it should not only support itself, but also turn a profit.

The thing is that publishing--publishing anything--is not cheap. It demands highly skilled staff and pays fuckall. And even if the reviewers work for free, the task of satisfying all parties falls to the editor, and it takes time and effort.

Nature has a lot of presteige. They do a good job of publicizing good research. Moreover they've been doing so for a very long time. That is not something that will be replaced easily by digital media.

Posted by: Haley | June 13, 2010 2:27 AM

Access to the UC library and journal subscriptions is one of the top reasons I love UC Berkeley. I just finished my freshman year, and while I'm a philosophy major that won't be doing a lot of cutting edge research, I adore the library and love that I can get on my super fast internet and have access to an exclusive library of human knowledge. I think information should be accessible to everybody, but I do love the thrill of showing my student ID and being granted permission deep into the stacks. It feels all exclusive and college-y.

Posted by: francesco.orsenigo | June 13, 2010 2:52 AM

There is something horribly wrong when it is necessary to pay to access publicly funded research.

Scientific articles should go in the public domain after one-two years from being published in the journals.

As a scientist myself, I am very disappointed by the current publishing system, I wish we had an alternative.

Posted by: Keren Embar | June 13, 2010 3:11 AM

Funny that.

I was just talking with my advisor about the problem journals have nowadays when people expect everything to be available on the net for free and journals and libraries are still thinking in last century terms of subscription fees and printing costs when pricing "reprints".

My advisor thinks the road clearly leads to digital format and people will expect a copy to be priced according to the cost of producing a digital copy- which is very little.

Instead libraries and journals are fighting to increase the prices of everything because fewer people subscribe and their main income is reduced.

I hope they will wake up to face the new future with clearer foresight where they realize that selling at 1% of the old price to 10000% more people, and gaining their loyalty on the way for being honest, is a better direction than to limit scientific content to the rich and snob.

Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space, OM, A little FUCKING ray of sunshine | June 13, 2010 3:44 AM

I do get tired of the canard that all publications based on publicly funded research should be available for free. The fact of the matter is that publications cost money to produce. The physics magazine I worked at lost money on every subscriber because it was sent to every member of the parent organization, that organization made only a tiny portion of dues from each subscriber available to fund publication.

The research paper is not the research. You have to pay for both if you want both.

Posted by: Ray Moscow | June 13, 2010 4:08 AM

I have access through Open University, but they are facing similar cost issues as everyone else. Nature may find that its demand is much more elastic than they expected (meaning that they will lose a lot of customers if they raise prices that much).

Posted by: Knockgoats | June 13, 2010 4:20 AM

As a_ray says, there is real work involved in turning a "raw" paper into something publishable by Nature, or other traditional-format journals. However, the journals get much of that for free: none I have reviewed for pay reviewers, and most have put increasing burdens on the authors to get the article into exactly the format that suits them - even though, for the reader, the details of how references are cited and how subheadings are numbered (for example), don't matter. Moreover, some online journals (and I can't see that the paper issues are needed any more) are free to both author and reader: the main journal in my own area, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (IJSSS) for example. The editor, Nigel Gilbert, happens to be superhuman in his capacity for work, I admit; but could not editorial collectives do this work in most cases? I would like to see a system where articles initially appear in archives such as arxiv, and the authors then, if they wish, submit the work to such a free online journal. Incidentally, "impact factors" are, currently, absurd. For several years, IJSSS had a risible "impact factor" because ISI, a private corporation with no accountability to anyone, was failing to find most of the citations of its articles, apparently because it searched for them only under an abbreviation no-one used.

Posted by: McCthulhu is taking ∞ to eat all the pi | June 13, 2010 4:26 AM

I do think it would actually be beneficial to use the lower price/wider audience model. Look at the situation in the U.S. with even the mere word 'science' under attack. If the general public had better access to the information being published, maybe access would equate to transparency and a lot of the pseudo-scientific bullshit would evaporate. Certainly suggesting that a digitized version should be almost free is inane, but does it make economic sense for the publisher of an article the general public wants to read to charge $30 and have a few hundred people read it or to charge a small fee and have thousand of people read it. Maybe an online publishing model similar to iTunes where a person was once required to buy the whole CD for $23 (remember way back when? Freakin' gougers!) but can now buy a single song for $.99. I don't think iTunes is complaining that they can't charge tens of dollars for a CD anymore. Maybe something to consider in the science article publishing business as well. And such a price is acceptable to even high school kids/parents/teachers who want to go beyond the dreck being taught to them in their Texas published schoolbooks.

Posted by: Draken | June 13, 2010 5:21 AM

#28: I do get tired of the canard that all publications based on publicly funded research should be available for free. The fact of the matter is that publications cost money to produce. (...) The research paper is not the research.

You're suggesting that public funding for scientific institutions only pays for a specific part of the scientific process, which in my definition includes the publication of results in one form or another. In your vein of reasoning, I could also move the goalposts a bit further back. "The word processing software, and the computer system we're using to register and backup our data are not the research. If you want both, you have to pay for both." Etcetera.

I'm sorry if your journal lost money, but maybe it was because their publication and dissemination model was more befitting the 18th century?

Posted by: mineralfellow | June 13, 2010 5:32 AM

@ Krubozumo Nyankoye, # 16
Did the Lunar Science Database ever go online? Even just having the list of publications/ sample would be helpful. How long ago did you try this? I am not in a lunar group, but I am in planetary. I think we would all love to have such a system.

Posted by: travcollier | June 13, 2010 5:48 AM

I agree with #10. Operating their own, more sane, publication system is exactly the sort of thing that the UC should do.

While PZ has a point about impact factors... it is a transient. If we just bend over for NPG, Elsevier, and other publishers, how will the situation improve?

Anyways, I've previously ranted about how the universities should be providing data management, archival, and other fundamental services. Publication fits right in.
The libraries seem to be the perfect people to task with this sort of stuff... it really should be their job. Figuring out how to provide these services in ever better and more clever ways should be one of the primary ways library/information sciences students get their PhDs.

Posted by: Draken | June 13, 2010 5:58 AM

I've been working in university libraries since 1992, quite some time as a programmer involved in projects to diminish or eliminate the dependence of universities on commercial publishers. The journals crisis is nothing new, and apart from paying for your own content, you even get to pay for its metadata, which is in the firm grip of Thomson/Reuters and the like, too.

Much has happened in 18 years. I read between the lines that many of you still think of the university library as a place to find stuffy books, antique articles and printed journals. But ULs have also been at the forefront of developing the software and infrastructure to enable you to publish, search and exchange scientific publications online, possibly without interference of a publisher. From the top of my head I can mention Cornell (ArXiv, Fedora), Virginia (Fedora), Simon Fraser (Public Knowledge Project), Los Alamos (Open Archive Initiative, OpenURL) and with some local modesty my employers Tilburg University (Decomate, in coop with UA Barcelona and LSE London) and DTU Library (Danish Article Database System, DTU Research Database. This is just to demonstrate that libraries have been aware of the pubisher problem, and have been actively tackling it, for quite some time. By the way, most of the software I refer to is yours to peruse under some free licence like the GPL.

So where are we now? The tools to set up a form of online system for the exchange of scientific publications are there. A select few universities or consortia offer general, free access to full scientific publications from miscellaneous contributors (like ArXiv, PLoS). Many (although I have no idea how many) universities have an institutional repository offering access to the full content of preprints of their scientific output, often freely accessible. The final version, though, still remains the domain of the publishers, and so does the peer review process and the process of putting publications in an ancient form of organisation called "journal".

Not so long ago, Elsevier finally caved in and permitted us to keep the final preprint publically accessible even after an article had gone to print. Now the next step is for universities to join in consortia to pressure publishers into the situation that scientists do no relinquish their copyright to them. This, I think, is crucial. The publishers will scream and yell, but completely surrendering the rights to something you created just-because-one-does is a custom that ought to have been choked long ago.

Another step, to be taken alongside the first one, is to figure out alternative ways of publishing and peer review. This is going to be a tough one because many researchers (yes, you!) are pig-headed conservatives: articles that have not been published in 12 pt Times Roman on glossy dead trees smelling of glue in a renowned high-impact journal, can't possibly be acceptable science, and therefore if you yourself just publish in a free online journal, you do not really count for anything. There, I've said it. Burn me.

Boycotting a single journal, though, seems only useful to get some temporary attention. Only grouping up to assert massive pressure on the commercial publishers, backed by the option that you can switch to an alternative eliminating them altogether, will ultimately yield a more desirable situation.

Posted by: Koldito | June 13, 2010 6:32 AM

Something that my undergraduate advisor taught me is that people like to be read. All the way through grad school, postdoc, and even now as an assistant prof., my strategy to get papers that my university doesn't have access to has been the same.

********

From: Koldito
To: dr-x@some-uni.edu
Subject: paper request.

Dear Dr. X:

I'm interested in reading your article x, which appeared in the journal y, issue n, pages m-m'. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have access to this particular journal. Could you please send me a .pdf version of your paper?

Kind regards.

***********

After all these years, I've never received a reply denying me the paper in question. Sometimes I have even received more than I have asked for (as in "I'm also attaching a draft of a paper I'm working on, which you might also find interesting"). On a couple of occasions, people have even bothered to photocopy old papers and snailmail them to me.

Posted by: Abel Pharmboy | June 13, 2010 7:12 AM

@4 PZ sez:
Hardly anyone I know reads the print editions of journals anymore -- we all go to the electronic editions to pick and choose the papers we're interested in.

I know you were responding more to the issue raised by #3 but listen here, you young whippersnapper: I still derive a great deal of benefit from getting four or five print versions of journals in my general field and leafing through them. My postdoc advisor convinced me of this practice in stumbling on techniques and mechanisms I might not have otherwise considered and it's also expanded my breadth of knowledge in a manner beneficial to my teaching as well.

But you young kids, go ahead and only look at the electronic versions piecemeal. Hell, half of you only look at the abstract and claim to have read the paper.

And get offa my lawn - you know how hard it is to grow grass down here in the South?

Posted by: Fred The Hun | June 13, 2010 7:50 AM

Paul Burnett @5,

Welcome to capitalism - it's all about money.

Yep! Maybe it's time to seriously consider inventing a completely new economy from scratch.
The one we have now is on life support and its just a matter of time before we have to pull the plug!

Unfortunately most people, even rational ones will fight tooth and nail to cling to the status quo...

Posted by: loop | June 13, 2010 7:59 AM

I had to laugh yesterday when I received an email saying that I could get a paper of mine that's currently in press put up online. The charge for doing so was a tidy $3,250. I laughed and deleted the email. Seeing as they can't be charging me for putting it up online (they do that anyway) and will only be charging me for something like server costs-and a sum like that will cover server costs for several millennia! The way I see it is that (1) the most relevant people who want to see it I have already sent it to and (2) I'll put the pre-print version up on my university print server and (3) I'll put the pre-print up on my website. It really bugs me nowadays when people don't make at least the pre-prints freely available on their own websites. Most of the 'big names' seem to, so I figure I should as well...!

Posted by: Antiochus Epiphanes | June 13, 2010 9:27 AM

Yeah...that's why I don't publish in Nature. I'm not returning their calls anymore.

PLoS and BMC are good examples of how all science will be published ten years from now.

The people doing the important work (gathering data, submitting papers, and editing journals) rarely see a dime of subscription money, anyway. We can cut out the middle man, and improve access and efficiency. Why the hell wouldn't we?

Posted by: dutchdoc | June 13, 2010 9:38 AM

It's all very simple.

Just get a few prominent scientists together and start an 'open source' movement for these kind of peer reviewed publications.

Look at the software world, what THEY have accomplished! Take Linux for instance: it's wildly popular, freely available, and yet still very well and tightly controlled as to what gets done to it. (And it didn't exactly mean the end of commercial operating systems either).

Another tip: once you get a serious group of people together who are willing to make this happen: go talk to the Google founders about it! Or -even- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (They're big on education!).

With writers and reviewers working for free (or 'the honor') this all should be VERY straightforward to setup. Especially with this level of dissatisfaction and out-of-control current pricing.

Think about it: scientific information SHOULD have been the first and prime candidate for 'open source'!
And hey, the Internet was originally DESIGNED to share this kind of information! You scientists should take your info-sharing medium back!
Really, it's all just a matter of a one guy standing up and starting this. The rest are details. (And yes, It would STILL be a VERY high quality thing, ruled by very wise men, who, I suggest, were chosen to serve through a democratic process and are subject to periodic elections)

If a single university spends $2 million on these type of subscriptions, and is willing to BOYCOT these publishers, then they shouldn't have a problem with spending only SOME of that money on a group that would just do what I proposed above: Set up a high quality 'open source' (free access to all) Peer Reviewed Scientific Publication Site. (We'll come up with a fancy name later!).

Posted by: alopiasmag | June 13, 2010 9:59 AM

One would think that with all this internet, and reading online instead of print, prices should drop. Instead they rise. This can be partly because of the high cost of internet access and maintenance.

If everyone had internet access accessible, (you know, as a right) it would reduce the costs of information access tremendously.

Posted by: darbymail | June 13, 2010 10:28 AM

Am I crazy to think that if there is an area screaming for public (as in governmental) support, it's journal publishing?

If the journal section of AAAS were to become part of the National Science Foundation, how much would it cost? How much does it cost to produce any of these things?

I would think that the AAAS at least must report its costs - isn't it a tax-deductible contribution organization?

Posted by: eeanm | June 13, 2010 1:12 PM

The model of having the researchers pay to publish sounds kind of odd until you look into how the model currently works, which is totally bunk indeed.

So basically all research grants should have a bit of money in their budget to publish. The more you think about it the more it makes sense.

Open access research FTW. :)

Posted by: SarahContrara | June 13, 2010 1:52 PM

There's an interesting open access movement that seems to be quietly working its way into American universities (finally). For example, Duke:
http://opensource.com/education/10/5/defaulting-open-open-access-duke-paolo-mangiafico

PS Pharyngula got a nod in a recent article on the same site. Can't seem to find it now that I'm looking for it.

Posted by: tdcourtney | June 13, 2010 3:24 PM

I never could figure out the economics behind journals. Scientists pay the journals to sell their work to other scientists? Where are the journals' expenditures?

Posted by: edd.pastafarian | June 13, 2010 3:40 PM

This is a topic I've been interested in for some time. As a non-scientist with a healthy interest in many of the fields, I often come across articles and papers that I would love to read but I can't afford to pay for each and every one that catches my eye. I've been playing around with the idea of setting up a 'virtual library' that would subscribe to many of these publications and charge a monthly or yearly fee for a virtual 'library card.' Eventually, with enough support and contributions from members, this virtual library may even begin its own peer-reviewed publication.

What do you all think?

Posted by: Cthulhu's minion | June 13, 2010 6:20 PM

Am i correct in assuming that scientific journals do not pay royalties to the scientists who provide their content? Seems to me that after 5-10 years they should go public domain and be collected in a government funded database with a reasonable access fee.

Posted by: ivo | June 13, 2010 9:27 PM

Escherichia coli @ #53:

Thanks, I love the food: varied, ubiquitous, cheap, usually quite good, what's not to love? I only miss cheap beer. The climate... well... I'm not against saunas, but Singapore whether is like experiencing a permanent sauna punctuated by icy baths (the aircon in buses, offices, etc). And no seasons! How can you live without seasons?

And you have access, I know... My own students have access!

I'm kind of new to this, but what's wrong with free-access journals like PLoS? Why aren't the high-impact papers published there?

Draken has nailed the real problem:

...because many researchers (yes, you!) are pig-headed conservatives: articles that have not been published in 12 pt Times Roman on glossy dead trees smelling of glue in a renowned high-impact journal, can't possibly be acceptable science, and therefore if you yourself just publish in a free online journal, you do not really count for anything.

So true. But I have hope: the younger generation, those who do only read freely available preprints and only use the "official" version of an article in order to know which correct line of text to put in the Bibliography section*, don't have such automatic respect for the venerable old journals. They look so... anachronistic, after all, as many here have pointed out.

* I'm kind of exaggerating here

Posted by: laundrybox | June 14, 2010 1:07 AM

Several things.

First, California does have their own journals program. It's called eScholarship. I believe everything there is open access, operated by the California Digital Library, another UC property. I give enormous credit to Cal for refusing Nature's fee hike. With luck, it will drive UC researchers to consider programs like eScholarship.

(That's in addition to the journals program at UC Press. Though like many non-profit academic publishers, a quick look at their site suggests they're humanities-centric.)

Second, STM publishing (that's industry speak for Science-Technical-Medical) is indeed screwed up. And it's your fault! If researchers weren't so obsessed with the vanity of the almighty Impact Factor, these journals could never get away with their current extortion machine. Instead, the MBAs caught on. Now all STM is wrapped up by enormous commercial publishers that don't care a lick about your science.

Third, lots of people here seem to think publishers will soon be irrelevant. The world is full of journals that once shared that same idea. Where are they now? With publishers. The expertise and time required to do serious publishing is prohibitive. That's why journals pay good money for publishing services. And it's not wasted money. The package often includes: manuscript tracking, asset management, and peer review systems, editors and designers, fulfillment (print) and customer services, archival processes, sophisticated online hosting, copyright, reprints, and permissions support, advertising support, and the list goes on and on. Digital is likely to make these services *more* essential, not less. Did any of you really want to write the 1000 page XSL-FO script required to do print-on-demand? I didn't think so.

I'm not trying to justify Nature's fees. That's crazy. I'm just saying there will always be a place for publishers in this space.

Fourth, I propose a quick way to make our planet much better: herd all the world's MBAs into one place and execute half of 'em by lottery.

Posted by: Moveable Type | June 14, 2010 2:33 PM

I know that a camel is defined as 'a horse designed by a committee', but could not the Universities get together and take over the entire production system of papers, as a charity, and circulate/make available at a minimal cost?

Posted by: sexycelticlady | June 14, 2010 4:23 PM

In response to similar price hikes a few years ago a group of academics, including my supervisor at the time, decided to put together a completely open access and free to publish journal with no restrictions on number of images etc. as it is all online, there is no printing costs. What little costs they have were covered by industry sponsership. The journal is European Cells and Materials. It is still small but doing well, has some excellent research and yearly conferences. After a few years of publishing and getting some of the larger names in the field to submit articles to support it, eventually it was searchable on pubmed and about three years later was finally awarded an imapct factor. Not high like Nature but very similar to the more sought after journals in its fields. Last I checked it was 4.28 I think.

It can be done. The trouble with imapct factors is that it is important for universities to employ PI's with publications in high impact factor journals. In the UK at least, the funding situation for universities is influenced by its research rating, which in turn is influenced by things like journal publications and impact factors. It is catch 22 situation and in order to really stop the hold such institutions as Nature doing price hikes of this type, the whole way in which quality of research and dissemination of data is evalutated needs to be overhauled.

In the meantime, I encourage people to support open access and free to publish journals that adhere to good peer review practices. Also, those who wish to start their own journals in certain fields, it can be done. :)

Posted by: adrian.cockcroft | June 16, 2010 11:23 AM

The iTunes business model for scientific papers that McCthulu talks about already exists - check out Deepdyve, where you can search for and read scientific papers for 99c, with a two week free trial or a monthly subscription.

I'm an advisor to Deepdyve, they have done a lot of deals with publishers, but due to the glacial speed of the publishing industry, it is often taking a very long time to get the publishers to change their own web sites to highlight the Deepdyve option.

In the end, there is a much higher take-up of readers at Deepdyve prices, so the publishers make more over-all, than they would at the higher prices that very few people pay.

Posted by: paulmurray | June 18, 2010 1:03 AM

Well, there *is* a world-wide standard for publishing any sort of content. It's called hypertext transfer protocol. It was built with academic publishing in mind.