Cancellation of subscriptions to Springer journals
bib.umontreal.ca
bib.umontreal.ca
So Springer still gets all the moneys they could have gotten anyway.
I totally understand why the library has to make such a compromise, but that's not a very strong bargaining position.
“We are trying to best meet the needs of our community
despite budget cuts in the last few years, the
[greediness of commercial publishers], and the weak
Canadian dollar,” said Stéphanie Gagnon, Collections
Director."In 2008, Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to give the University a nonexclusive, irrevocable right to distribute their scholarly articles for any non-commercial purpose. In the years since, the remaining eight Harvard schools voted similar open-access (OA) policies; as of late 2015, three research centers have joined their number." [1]
"The University of California is committed to disseminating its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In particular, as a public university system, the University of California is dedicated to making its scholarship available to the people of California. Furthermore, the University of California recognizes the benefits that accrue to its authors as individual scholars and to the scholarly enterprise from such wide dissemination, including greater recognition, more thorough review, consideration, and critique, and a general increase in scientific, scholarly, and critical knowledge. The University of California further recognizes that by such policies, authors of scholarly articles can more easily and collectively reserve rights that might otherwise be signed away, often unnecessarily, in agreements with publishers. To accomplish this, authors take advantage of US copyright law to grant to the University a non-exclusive license (limited to the purpose of making the work openly available) for each scholarly article authored while employed by UC." [2]
[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/policies/
[2] http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-policy/pol...
However, I couldn't get online access for the UC system, even though they have a policy and "plan". I suspect that things just take longer at public universities due to bureaucracy.
Moreover, none of the university repositories I've found do anything close to a good job of making the articles searchable. For example, even though all of my papers are available through Caltech, google only provides links to arXiv or the actual journal. This is actually the problem: if you can't google it, it may as well not be on the open internet at all.
Is this possible? When publishing in a journal, I think you transfer your copyright to them; thereby preventing you from publishing the article any other way.
Although as far as I know many journals allow a "pre-print version" to be published by the authors on their personal website.
There are CS journals, but even there the ACM and IEEE are big players.
This is based on the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act (which specifies NIH funded research). What would be nice is if this type of act would be passed for all govt. funding agencies.
That is correct. I have done this for every publication I've ever put out (O(10)). There may be exceptions but this is certainly the dominant paradigm in the physical sciences.
My two cents: this is bigger than any University. It will require a government funding agency (likely, NIH or NSF) to take a stand vis a vi the public availability of research produced by public funding.
The only problem is that the method of open access publishing is usually to pay a few grand to the publisher for the privilege.
And that is money that should be going to research.
Any papers you plan to use in the Research Excellence Framework for 2020 (for those not acquainted, an exercise every few years where UK universities get to say "look how good we are, we published this many papers, please keep funding us") must be available as open access. It isn't necessary for these papers to have gone the gold open access route (where you pay a *!&^%-ton to the publisher), so you could instead upload the non-published version to a preprint server (which is a lot cheaper).
conversely if a for profit could effectively monetize a 100% open access journal, it would be totally fine.
Additionally, many copyright transfer agreements expressly allow an institutional archival system.
Everyone in the physical sciences uses arXiv.
See http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy
You (as a presumed grad student) are the value in the system. If you give the journals your output don't be surprised that they build walls to protect it - they're useless without you and they know it.
They'll allow whatever they have to, and nothing else.
What platform would you suggest they publish on?
It would be hilarious (at least to me!) if all Universities suddenly did this due to the outrageous pricing. Or, and this would be an interesting turn of events, they demand that they be paid for supplying free labour. They could use that payment to purchase access to the journals.
It's time for commercial publishers to realise that they are getting a free ride, and that the free ride is ending. They might complain, but the only ones who they will be able to blame are themselves for their predicament.
Not counting reviewing for commercial publishers in the tenure process might have an effect on those seeking tenure.
In general I would like to be able to refuse review requests for journals that rip off their (institutional) customers. Under the circumstances, I dare not do so, because these requests usually come from senior scientists in my field.
However, if my university had such a policy (and it was conveniently explained on a web page I could link to) it would be very easy for me to back out of reviewing for these journals without taking the blame.
Sure, some of my colleagues would continue to review for these journals, and the university would never know. But such a policy would give an out for individidual researchers who would like to support this cause.
Edit: added "for a reviewer"
"I don’t want to transfer my copyright. What should I do?
You can choose to publish your article open access in Springer’s Open Choice program or one of our SpringerOpen journals. Publishing an article with open access leaves the copyright with the author. The article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY), which allows users to read, copy, distribute and make derivative works from the material, as long as the author of the original work is cited"
The parent was suggesting that Universities bar their faculty from reviewing papers unless it was an open-access publisher. I haven't published in a Springer journal, but others have the authors make the open-access determination only after the paper was accepted. In which case, the reviewers would have no idea about if they were reviewing an open-access paper or not.
I just did this for a paper at an Elsevier journal. If the paper is accepted, the authors can choose to publish it open access, which requires paying the "open access charge" to the publisher. Once paid, though, the journal is available for free from their website.
" ... UdeM professors and researchers that are concerned about these changes are well positioned to make a difference. They can, for instance, express their disapproval (see Springer contacts for UdeM below), refuse to review articles, or support open access publishing. The greatest risk for publishers is that people start questioning their access to this free research output and volunteer workforce as well as their business model."
There have been attempts to speed up publication by offering cash bonuses ($20-$50) if you return your review in a timely fashion (as you can imagine some reviews take a really long time since there is no hard incentive to do it) but these amounts still pale in comparison to the several hours or more that you are asking of an expert's time.
Money's short, thus expenses have to be cut somewhere. Very understandable.
> UdeM Libraries will renew access to 150 of the 2,266 journals included in this collection. The price we will pay for these individual subscriptions in 2016 is the same we were willing to pay for the entire collection.
So... you save literally zero zilch nichts, except you now hold 85% less things. In other words, this whole action is meaningless.
Also,
> A survey conducted recently with the university community established that only 256 titles (or 11.6%) within the Springer collection are needed for research and teaching at UdeM.
That rubs me in a wrong way, you don't know wether you can use a paper for your own research or teaching until you've read it, meaning until your need for it has been satisfied. (edit) Lucky stumbles do happen, and I generally don't like the idea of scaling a scientific library down. Strictly speaking, UdeM's library actually continues to grow, only at 15% of the previous rate, since old issues aren't being thrown out. But we seem fine relying on (economic) growth as an accurate measure of well-being, so why not apply it here? Then remember the non-existant economic advantage (which should be around an 85% payment cut), and the whole thing stops making any sense.
Depending on which and how many branches a university has, 256 journals can mean a whole lot or ridiculously little literature about each subject. I don't know UdeM, so I can't judge them.
Add the little sentence
> Springer’s articles end up being 225% more expensive at UdeM compared to Elsevier’s.
and this whole move starts stinking like there's no tomorrow.
(edit) That last sentence may be a bit harsh, but I do believe this should not be taken at face value (something's missing).
(rewordings)
Save a few public universities, the Canadian and American universities operate just like the publishers they complain about.
We're working in a small satellite institute, and we don't have direct access to an university-level subscription.
There are some (single) journals we subscribe to, but for most of the articles we have no other option than to pay per-article. Doing background research this way is incredibly frustrating, incredibly time-consuming and you have to decide whether a paper is worth investing to just by looking at the abstract. Doing a literature review is hell.
So what we do, like everybody does, is to ask the authors privately, and copy articles whenever we can. Or ask colleagues that have access through an university subscription.
I actually don't mind for the "pay for open-access" model. On all the articles we published, we always picked this option if available. In the scheme of things, the cost of publishing is minor. In several fields (genetics), it's not even a blip on the running costs of a lab. I don't mind paying for journals that actually do a reasonable selection and review on the articles. Some journals are worth the cost of publishing.
Unfortunately, this is not as widespread as it should. Keep copying guys... nothing new here.