I had to look at the date to make sure this isn’t April 1. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this week that, as writer Jennifer Howard puts it, the U. of California has told Nature Publishing “enough.” The heavyweight publisher, no doubt feeling its very existence threatened by open publishing and other affronts to old time ways of publishing science papers, is demanding that UC pay quadruple its previous rate for subscriptions. UC’s library people say that’s it, we’ll just quit Nature. Can you really do that?

Not only would the universities libraries and other outlets drop their institutional subscriptions, but faculty are to be urged to boycott Nature’s journals – no submittals of manuscripts, no peer review service, and so on. It says here UC’s faculty publishes more than 5,000 articles yearly in Nature’s stable.

The bigger, if duller, story here is not that a university library has stood up to the big arrogant publishing house, but that the world’s leading public research university is imploding  via budget cuts and inability of the state to maintain revenue for schools, roads, regulations, and lots else, and that old fashioned journal publishers are facing an economic reality similar to what has reduced so drastically the daily newspaper in American life. Hard times….

A tip of the hat to Jim Handman for being the first to relay word of this dust-up.

Aside on percentage v. multiple measurement of increase. Isn’t there a difference between a 400 percent raise, and growth to 400 percent? The CHE story says  the intent by Nature is a 400 percent cost raise. But that would literally seem to be a quintupling – a raise equal to four times the original, which added to the original equals a five times bigger pile. The numbers show it goes up by a factor of about four. Thus CHE should call it a 300 percent raise, right? (If a 100 percent raise is a doubling, then 200 percent is a tripling, etc…). Or does everybody automatically figure that a 400 percent raise means the new total is four times what it was originally?

- Charlie Petit

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