I am delighted to see the UC take on Nature. Hopefully this should lead to a larger awareness that for-profit academic journals have no reason to exist. None.
See below blog and links therein http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2010/06/gauntlet_volleying.php --------------------------------snip Several of my Twitter contacts noted what they thought to be a slap at librarian research and assessment skills toward the end of NPG's statement. I can believe that reading, but I incline toward a far more cynical subtext that is actually an insult to faculty, something like "We have to get those librarians out of the way; they know too much. Let's try getting faculty to evaluate these deals—after all, we've been hoodwinking them for thirty years!" Pick your poison; there's no way to tell who's got the right reading. Or perhaps they're both right. Now then, this business of "discounts." It's—how to put this politely—hooey, and so is NPG's apparent opinion of the competitiveness of academic librarians over who's paying what to whom. Ignore list prices for journal packages. Nobody pays list. Seriously, nobody, at least nobody in UCal's league. Your library pays the best price it can manage to negotiate. Those prices vary wildly from institution to institution and vendor to vendor, "discounts" or no "discounts." We librarians know this; it's an inevitable concomitant of the secrecy we are forced to by these very same vendors. You saw NPG whinging about that, didn't you? You surely did. This is why. It's hard for us to negotiate a decent deal when black clouds of near-total secrecy keep us from knowing what a decent deal even is. NPG knows that. Of course they do. So if NPG expected librarians to get all angry at California for negotiating a good deal last time around—sorry, no, that's not how we think. We think "Nice going, California! I'll try to do better next time renewal negotiations begin; otherwise, NPG will stretch me on the rack just as they're trying to do to California now." California didn't get a "discount" in the last cycle out of the goodness of NPG's heart—they drove a hard bargain. Good on ’em for doing their job well, responsibly managing taxpayer funds. Moreover, that NPG doesn't like that last deal is hardly sufficient reason for California to knuckle meekly under and accept whatever NPG is asking for this time. One more observation: what I'm seeing right now is that NPG has no friends standing beside it. That may change; the AAP and ALPSP and the other usual suspects haven't weighed in yet. I expect they're wondering what to do. If the California labor-boycott threat is serious, and California's current pugnacious stance suggests that it is, the last thing other publishers want to do is land in the doghouse alongside NPG. Libraries discontinuing subscriptions is serious, but a large faculty labor boycott is crippling. -raghu. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
