The big UC/Nature spat

This pdf has been doing the bloggy rounds recently: University of California librarians are horrified at the 400% increase in fees from Nature, and are calling for a boycott. They note that UC have provided a substantial amount of content, and unpaid reviewing effort. Nature retort by saying the UC were getting an unreasonable discount, and anyway everyone knows that you have to pay for the best. Reading between the lines, Nature seems a bit put out that the actual fee paid has been made public, which may make interesting reading for other subscribers. "Nobody pays list price" but I would not be surprised to find JAMSTEC does!

Of course bypassing than the details of this case, the big elephant in the room is the whole ridiculous pay-to-read commercial journal system. Others have pointed out the irony:

It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.

The sooner the scientific world moves to open access the better. If that means commercial publishers charging a publication levy, so be it. I don't particularly wish for Nature to go out of business, but neither do I think they should be allowed to block progress towards a more open and up-to-date system. The EGU manages to run a large and growing stable of successful high-quality journals, by scientists, for scientists and the only thing that holds back the range of papers I send there is the lack of a suitable journal for most of my work. But it covers many of the bases in climate science and more broadly the geosciences. They cover costs - indeed turn a healthy profit for the EGU overall - by charging reasonable publication fees. Of course one might also ask why publication should have to turn a profit, which is a question entirely begged in Nature's reply.

As for Nature's claim "NPG adds huge amounts of value to the very best quality original research", this smells like pure unadulterated bullshit to me. I wonder what sort of value they think they add? Removing inconvenient question marks to turn interesting speculation into incorrect assertions? (Or perhaps I should say: removing inconvenient question marks to turn interesting speculation into incorrect assertions!) At best, one could perhaps argue they filter the most "exciting" research, providing a shortcut for busy scientists to keep up with what is most relevant. But actually, this seems to be a benefit primarily to journalists, who cannot possibly keep up with and filter a broad range of journals - active scientists certainly have to browse a much wider range of sources than the weekly Nature press releases. It's not even at all clear to me that Nature papers represent the best of what is new in science - the citation index may be higher than most journals, but it is hard to say how much of this is actually due to quality and how much is just due to publicity. What does seem to be widely accepted (including among people who publish there regularly) is that the only way to stand much of a chance of publishing your manuscript in Nature is to make sure that you include some co-authors who have published there before. If there is a clique in science, that is where it is to be most easily found.

Update: don't miss UC's response to Nature's press release.