Publishers Category

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Rockefeller University Press Gives Away Copyright on Journal Articles

By
Karen Fischer
– May 29, 2008Posted in: Copyright, Publishers

It may be a first for scientific journals that are not published under an open-access philosophy: Rockefeller University Press has announced that it will allow authors to retain copyright to the papers they publish in its three journals.

Under the new policy, instead of giving up their copyrights to the journals, authors will now provide the journals with licenses to publish their papers. The authors may reuse their work any way they like, as long as they provide attribution to the journals. Six months after publication, third parties may use and redistribute the papers under a Creative Commons license.

The press places one thing off-limits: creating Web sites that mirror the contents of a journal within six months of its publication. The press hopes to retain subscribers because of that six-month delay.

In the world of scientific publishing, the three journals — The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology — may be unique in that they are maintaining subscription access but are giving up copyright. Many open-access scientific journals also allow authors to keep copyright. —Lila Guterman

The Chronicle News Blog, May 5, 2008

Emma Hill and Mike Rossner, You wrote it; you own it! Journal of Cell Biology, April 30, 2008. An editorial. Excerpt:

Authors of papers published in Rockefeller University Press journals (The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, or The Journal of General Physiology) now retain copyright to their published work. This permits authors to reuse their own work in any way, as long as they attribute it to the original publication. Third parties may use our published materials under a Creative Commons license, six months after publication….

Preying on authors’ desire to publish, and thus their willingness to sign virtually any form placed in front of them, scientific publishers have traditionally required authors to sign over the copyright to their work before publication….

At The Rockefeller University Press, we have followed this tradition in the past and obtained copyright from authors as a condition of publication. Several years ago, however, we recognized that the advent of the internet had irrevocably changed the nature and mechanisms of knowledge distribution, and we returned some of those rights to authors. Since July 2000, we have allowed our authors to freely distribute their published work by posting the final, formatted PDF version on their own websites immediately after publication.

With the growing demand for public access to published data, we recently started depositing all of our content in PubMed Central. In a further step to enhance the utility of scientific content, we have now decided to return copyright to our authors. In return, however, we require authors to make their work available for reuse by the public. Instead of relinquishing copyright, our authors will now provide us with a license to publish their work. This license, however, places no restrictions on how authors can reuse their own work; we only require them to attribute the work to its original publication. Six months after publication, third parties (that is, anyone who is not an author) can use the material we publish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License….

The Creative Commons License will apply retroactively to all work published by The Rockefeller University Press before November 1, 2007….Authors who previously assigned their copyright to the Press are now granted the right to use their own work in any way they like, as long as they acknowledge the original publication….

Full text of our new copyright policy is available here.

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Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research

By
Karen Fischer
– May 29, 2008Posted in: Other, Publishers

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29, 2008

Excerpt:

Kristin Roovers was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with a bright career ahead of her—a trusted member of a research laboratory at the medical school studying the role of cell growth in diabetes.

But when an editor of The Journal of Clinical Investigation did a spot-check of one of her images for an article in 2005, Roovers’s research proved a little too perfect.

The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing different proteins in different conditions. “As we looked at it, we realized the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands” over and over again, says Ushma S. Neill, the journal’s executive editor. In some cases a copied part of the image had been flipped or reversed to make it look like a new finding. “The closer we took a look, the more we were convinced that the data had been fabricated or manipulated in order to support the conclusions.”

As computer programs make images easier than ever to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity.

And the level of tampering they find is alarming. “The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal,” says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation. Doctored images are troubling because they can mislead scientists and even derail a search for the causes and cures of disease.

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Cost Profiles of Alternative Approaches to Journal Publishing

By
Karen Fischer
– February 5, 2008Posted in: Journal Pricing, Open Access, Publishers

First Monday, Volume 12 Number 12 – 3 December 2007

By Roger Clarke

Abstract

The digital era is having substantial impacts on journal publishing. In order to assist in analysing these impacts, a model is developed of the costs incurred in operating a refereed journal. Published information and estimates are used to apply the model to a computation of the total costs and per-article costs of various forms of journal-publishing. Particular attention is paid to the differences between print and electronic forms of journals, to the various forms of open access, and to the differences between not-for-profit and for-profit publishing undertakings.

Insight is provided into why for-profit publishing is considerably more expensive than equivalent activities undertaken by unincorporated mutuals and not-for-profit associations. Conclusions are drawn concerning the current debates among conventional approaches and the various open alternatives.

Excerpts from the Conclusion:

For–profit publishers have higher cost–profiles than not–for–profit associations, because of the additional functions that they perform, in particular their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection. The difference is particularly marked in the case of eJournals — a computed per–article cost of US$3,400 compared with US$730. This point is sufficiently significant that further examination is warranted.

…..The distinctive differences that remain in for–profit publishing are:

* higher–quality branding;
* more active marketing;
* more aggressive customer management; and,
* content protection.

But the primary beneficiaries of these features are the publisher and its owners. Only in the case of for–profit business units within not–for–profit associations are the owners closely associated with an academic community. Academic communities have little incentive to contribute to the funding of sophisticated technical features that are designed to support organistions’ strategic and marketing objectives rather than community service. In short, the ‘value–add’ that for–profit publishers offer appears to be of little or no benefit to academic communities.

For–profit publishers have long been successful intermediaries between the authors and accreditors, on the one hand, and the consumers of refereed articles and their support services, on the other. Since the advent of the public Internet, however, much has been written about the way in which it converts marketplaces to marketspaces, extends the reach of market participants, and creates the scope for disintermediation (e.g., Malone, et al., 1987; Brown, 2001; Howard, 2001). In the new context, are for–profit publishers still needed?

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University Presses Collaborate to Produce More Books

By
Karen Fischer
– February 5, 2008Posted in: Other, Publishers

Five university presses have announced a collaboration that seeks to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow more books to be released. The collaboration, created with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will set up a joint operation for copy editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures. The presses will retain complete control over book selection and distribution.

The new system is expected to yield enough savings to allow each of the presses to increase output by five books a year, meaning that over the course of the five-year project, 125 books that might not have otherwise reached readers will be released.

The collaboration is being formally announced at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, which opened in Chicago Thursday. NYU Press will manage the grant, which will also involve Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press.

Read more:
Insider Higher Ed, Dec. 28, 2007

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Max Planck Society Cancels Licensing Agreement with Springer

By
Karen Fischer
– November 16, 2007Posted in: Journal Pricing, Publishers

Press Release, October 18, 2007

Following difficult negotiations, the Max Planck Society has cancelled the licensing agreement it has had for many years with Springer Verlag.

The cancellation will take effect as of December 31, 2007. Negotiations failed because no agreement could be reached regarding an adequate ratio between price and long-term services. “Springer held to excessive demands right up until the end of the negotiations; that’s why the MPS has cancelled the agreement,” according to MPS Vice President Kurt Mehlhorn. An evaluation of usage statistics and comparisons with other important publishers made it clear Springer was demanding approximately double the price for the offered journals than the Max Planck Society regards as reasonable.

The current agreement allowed all Max Planck Institutes access to around 1,200 electronic scholarly journals published by Springer Verlag. The failure of the negotiations means Springer’s SpringerLink research interface can no longer be provided centrally for the Society’s Institutes. The Max Planck Society and the Max Planck Digital Library will develop strategies together with the Institute libraries most affected to secure the supply of essential contents on a cost-effective basis.

The failure of negotiations with Springer represents a watershed in the Society’s relationship with various globally-active scientific publishing houses. Extreme price developments in the supply of information, as well as usage restrictions, are prompting scientific organizations around the world to rethink their policies. From as early as 2003, the Max Planck Society initiated the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”, which is intended to promote greater open publication opportunities for publicly financed research.

Springer Verlag’s insistence on maintaining its negotiating position confirmed to the more than 240 scientific organizations around the world that have so far signed the “Berlin Declaration” how important their project is. What is certain is that very few publishing houses can afford to undermine the public’s interest in the broadest possible access to knowledge through excessive price structures. If publishers have the market power to effectively implement such prices and if legislators are unwilling to subject such inappropriate behavior to legal controls, the only way left open to science will be to take matters into their own hands.

Contact:

Dr. Ralf Schimmer
Max Planck Digital Library, Munich
Tel.: +49 89 38 602-255
Fax: +49 89 38 602-290
E-mail: schimmer@mpdl.mpg.de

[The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, operates 80 research institutes with more than 12,000 staff members and 9,000 Ph.D. students, post-docs, guest scientists and researchers, and student assistants. Read more about the organization at: http://www.mpg.de/english/aboutTheSociety/aboutUs/index.html]

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U of Michigan Press Keeps Link to Controversial Publisher

By
Karen Fischer
– November 16, 2007Posted in: Other, Publishers

The University of Michigan Press has faced intense criticism in the last two months for distributing a book — on behalf of a British publisher whose sales the Michigan press handles in the United States — that is highly critical of Israel. And that controversy led to a review of the relationship with the British publisher. But on Wednesday, Michigan announced that it was keeping its ties to Pluto Press and would continue to distribute its books. The case has been closely watched by academic publishers and others concerned with academic freedom, especially on the sensitive topic of criticism of Israel.

The controversy focused attention on a role played by many university presses in the United States as the American distributors for small European publishers that don’t have worldwide sales networks. Similarly, many American presses work with foreign publishers to act as their distributors abroad. Under these deals, the distributing presses don’t review (or endorse) the works that have been published by another press. And that was a key factor in the way Michigan described its decision to maintain ties to Pluto — that the relationship was one of commerce, not scholarship.

“Distribution agreements are undertaken strictly as business relationships and have historically been a small part of the UM Press’s business,” said a statement announcing the unanimous decision of the press board to maintain its relations with Pluto. “Currently, the press distributes for five publishers. As is the case with all such commercial arrangements, books distributed on behalf of clients are not edited, reviewed, or produced by the UM Press, and they do not bear the imprimatur of the press or of the University of Michigan.”

….Pluto Press is an independent publisher in Britain that publishes many books by and for academics with a leftist perspective. The book that set off the furor is Overcoming Zionism, which argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the “one state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country, without a Jewish character. The book was written by Joel Kovel, distinguished professor of social studies at Bard College. While the book is not online, an interview with Kovel in the magazine Briarpatch gives a sense of both the depth and tenor of his criticism of Israel.

When pro-Israel groups found out that the Michigan press was distributing Overcoming Zionism, numerous blog postings and letters to Michigan administrators demanded that distribution be halted. Michigan briefly did so, but then resumed distribution, citing issues of academic freedom and First Amendment protections. But at that time, the university press said it would review its relationship with Pluto. The press said that it would not have published the book, and that fact raised questions about the tie to the publisher that did.

Read on: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/25/pluto

Insidehighered.com, Oct. 25, 2007

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U of Iowa Participates in Permanent Electronic Journal Archiving Service

By
Karen Fischer
– May 1, 2007Posted in: Archiving, Publishers

In late 2006, The University of Iowa Libraries became a charter member of Portico (http://www.portico.org/). Portico offers a service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.

Background:
The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. After extensive, iterative discussion in the library and publisher communities, the Portico electronic archiving service has been shaped in response to this need. Initial support for Portico is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and JSTOR.

Portico provides all libraries supporting the archive with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur, and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other source. Trigger events include:

* A publisher stops operations; or
* A publisher ceases to publish a title; or
* A publisher no longer offers back issues; or
* Upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform.

Portico also provides a reliable means to secure perpetual access, if participating publishers choose to designate Portico as a provider of post-cancellation access. In addition, select librarians at participating libraries are granted password-controlled access for verification and audit purposes only.

View current list of participating publishers (more join every month):
http://www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html

View a list of committed journal titles:
http://www.portico.org/about/committed_titles_alpha.html

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Journal Pricing Reports Released: Shows Steep Increasing Costs for Social Science Journals and Merging Publishers

By
Karen Fischer
– May 1, 2007Posted in: Journal Pricing, Publishers

Two recent studies on periodical pricing trends have been released. They include information on trends in journal publishing, including pricing, mergers, and measurements of
Serial Wars (Library Journal’s Annual Periodical Pricing Survey)
by Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6431958.html
April 15, 2007

Excerpt:
In a year filled with drama and hyperbole, the serials marketplace churned toward a future whose shape is the subject of fierce debate. Forecasts from commercial publishers touting collapse and disaster seemed oddly out of sync with the profits they enjoyed—around 25 percent on average. Nevertheless, in a market where prices continued to rise and bundled content continued to sell, some of the very publishers whose fortunes are made in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals all but declared that the open access (OA) movement is apocalyptic in scope and will lead to the end of journals as we know them.

Open access is no longer a subtext in the annals of the journals industry. It stands alone as an alternative to the existing system of journal publication, which most say is unsustainable in its current form. It can mean different things to different proponents—a shared path to many ends. Libraries want relief from journal prices that are patently outrageous and defy cost-benefit justification. Authors want impact, and OA articles get cited much more often. Scientists want faster and easier access to others’ research, but a recent paper, “UK Scholarly Journals: 2006 Baseline Report,” found that half of all researchers in Britain have problems securing access to needed articles. Universities want a better return on their investment in intellectual capital, authors, peer reviewers, and editors. Taxpayers want to be able to read the research they sponsor.

Highlights on Cost History:
Biology
Avg. cost per title: $1676
% of change ’03-’07: 39

Business & Economics
Avg. cost per title: $820
% of change ’03-’07: 33

Chemistry
Avg. cost per title: $3429
% of change ’03-’07: 30

Education
Avg. cost per title: $451
% of change ’03-’07: 46

Language and Literature
Avg. cost per title: $179
% of change ’03-’07: 39

Political Science
Avg. cost per title: $446
% of change ’03-’07: 53

Trends in Scholarly Journal Prices 2000-2006
Sonya White and Claire Creaser, Loughbourgh: LISU, 2007 http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dis/lisu/pages/publications/oup2.html
[1.00 GPB = 2.00775 USD] (4/17/07)

From the Press Release:

The research updates the previous findings on pricing for biomedical journals, and has also been extended to analyze pricing for social science titles. Findings within the report show little variation to the original data published in 2004: there are continued trends in price variance across publishers, including median price increases ranging from 42% to 104% for biomedical titles, and 47% to 120% for social science titles. Median journal prices also continue to vary widely between publishers for both these disciplines, ranging from £198 to £859 in biomedical titles, and £119 to £513 in the Social Sciences.

Claire Creaser, Director of LISU and one of the report’s authors, commented “Serials pricing remains a key concern of librarians in all sectors. It is an area which is becoming more complex, with publishers seeking to adapt to the growing demands of authors and readers in relation to access and quality of research outputs. This report gives a valuable insight into a small part of the current debate, focusing on just two broad subjects and eleven major scholarly journal publishers. There remain many areas still to be investigated, and many factors which may affect journal pricing which are not covered here. LISU was pleased to be invited to carry out this work, and hopes to be able to take it further in the future.”
Highlights on Median Journal Prices by Publisher for Social Science Titles:

University of Chicago
median price: $238.92
% change ’00-’06: 119.7

Blackwell
median price: $528.04
% change ’00-’06: 107.1

Sage
median price: $720.78
% change ’00-’06: 100.8

Taylor & Francis
median price: $602.33
% change ’00-’06: 93.5

Springer
median price: $487.88
% change ’00-’06: 65.5

Oxford
median price: $347.34
% change ’00-’06: 65.1

Wiley
median price: $1029.98
% change ’00-’06: 62.2

Highlights on Median Journal Prices by Publisher for Biomedical Titles:

Sage
median price: $746.79
% change ’00-’06: 104.4

Blackwell
median price: $921.55
% change ’00-’06: 90.9

Taylor & Francis
median price: $831.21
% change ’00-’06: 90.0

Springer
median price: $929.59
% change ’00-’06: 83.2

Nature
median price: $1391.37
% change ’00-’06: 75.4

Cambridge Univ Press
median price: $397.53
% change ’00-’06: 72.2

Elsevier
median price: $1724.66
% change ’00-’06: 51.0

Wiley
median price: $1515.85
% change ’00-’06: 51.0

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Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?

By
Karen Fischer
– May 1, 2007Posted in: Archiving, Publishers

To help the scholarly community better understand and evaluate how open archiving might impact journal subscriptions, the Publishing Research Consortium has released the summary paper ‘Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?’.

This paper is a condensed version of the earlier analysis released in November 2006. It looks at librarian purchasing preferences, and concludes that mandating self-archiving within six months or less of publication will undermine the subscription-based peer review journal. The summary paper, together with the original report, is freely available at http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk/.

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University Presses Try to Straddle the Battle Lines in Open-Access Debate

By
Karen Fischer
– May 1, 2007Posted in: Open Access, Publishers

By JENNIFER HOWARD

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE: This winter has been colder than usual in many parts of the country, but in the open-access wars it’s been a season of heated rhetoric. In January reports circulated in the journal Nature and in Scientific American that a division of the Association of American Publishers had hired a “pit bull” PR firm to help it respond to the threat posed by open access. Argue that “public access equals government censorship,” the flaks reportedly advised.

Then, in February, an editor over at the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes open-access journals, issued a call to arms on the group’s blog: “For the sake of global scientific progress, human development, and poverty alleviation, it is surely time to end the slavery of traditional publishing.”

A noticeably milder tone prevails in the Association of American University Presses’ statement on open access, released last month. It neither embraces nor rejects the open-access revolution. Instead it calls for a broader, calmer approach, one that balances the virtues of the old and the new. And it asks that the discussion include the humanities and social sciences along with the scientific, technical, and medical fields that have been the primary focus of open-access campaigns, “lest an unfortunate new ‘digital divide’ should arise between fields and between different types of publishing.”

Read the entire article: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i28/28a02001.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 28, Page A20, March 16, 2007

Related Article:

University Presses Take Their Stand on Open Access
The open access debate is one of the hottest topics in academic publishing, with advocates for access and publishers battling for political and public support. University presses have been feeling somewhat in the middle and sometimes ignored — and they responded Tuesday with a policy paper outlining their perspective.

In many respects, the document from the Association of American University Presses focuses on potential harm that could be done to their operations by the open access model, talking about the potential for it to hurt circulation revenues, and emphasizing that university presses are not exactly wealthy institutions. But the paper also talks about the many experiments university presses are undertaking with open access or alternative pricing models — and goes one further. While the open access debate has focused on scholarly journals, the presses suggest that models that work for journals may well also work for monographs.

read the article at:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/28/open

Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 28, 2007

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