Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2014 15:49:27 +0000

Shirley,

It is perplexing. Publishers are overreaching more and more. This seems to me to be an impetus, and serves as a signal to readers and librarians, to change the system radically in order for balance to be restored. We are the publishers' "customers" as well as their suppliers of content. It seems to me that we are in a good position to demand changes. What I want is not to have to ransom my own content back to share it with colleagues, students, and the public. After a publisher has reached a level of sustainability, I do not want to contribute to outsized, perpetual profits.

Publishers confer value in that they create the so-called version-of-record, which is truly valuable (I do not ascribe to wholesale manuscript versioning). They administer peer-review, to varying degrees of quality, such as it is. But this clearly does not supersede the value we confer as authors. Also, if readers can't easily access the work, the whole system becomes ridiculous.

APCs are the craziest part of all of this. The authors create the work AND pay to have it published? Makes no sense at all. There is so much room for corruption and distortion in this model that it seems like a caricature.

Authors and readers, the intellectual players in the publishing stream, should be off to the side of the revenue stream for the most part. Government agencies, academic institutions, foundations, libraries, and publishers (in that order) should handle the financial side of things. Let authors and readers get on with the important work of knowledge exchange.

Shirley, thanks for bringing up an important question.

Sue Gardner

Sue Ann Gardner, MLS
Scholarly Communications Librarian
Discovery and Resource Management
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, Nebraska 68588-4100 USA
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________________________________________

From: Shirley Ainsworth <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 12:06:18 -0600

I guess many will have heard that Nature Communications has been
transformed from a hybrid journal to fully OA from 20th October this
year.

However I must admit that I was somewhat surprised to find out that we
are expected to renew our subscription to the journal for 2015 , and
that the price is the same as for 2014.

How does this work?

Authors pay APCs from now on, libraries have to keep paying
subscriptions, and to boot the pre-October 2014 (subscription) journal
articles will never be free and will be subject to the dread Nature
post-cancellation policy that has been discussed at some length on
this list.

Anyone else perplexed by this?

Shirley

--
Shirley Ainsworth
Bibliotecaria/Librarian
Instituto de Biotecnologia, UNAM
Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico.
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