Every morning I read highlights from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education and the headlines were U. of California System Threatens Boycott Over Journal Prices and  U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs.  This was a very interesting way to start the day.  According to a memo issued to all University of California Divisional Chairs and members of the faculty, the Nature Publishing Group has proposed a 400% — that is four hundred percent — increase in the cost of NPG journals in 2011. The California Digital Library, the electronic library serving all UC system schools, has responded to NPG by vowing to forgo all online subscriptions to new NPG journals. Given the sad state of public higher education budgets in California, the CDL warned that more drastic measures might be necessary.  The memo encourages UC system faculty take action by resigning from editorial and advisory boards and declining to peer review for NPG journals, and to refrain from submitting manuscripts to Nature Publishing Group journals, among others.

The UC System is certainly one of the most powerful public higher education systems in the US, and the system libraries have the clout to stand up to commercial publishers when most libraries can only wring their hands (so to speak), then pay up (by canceling other subscriptions or purchasing fewer books.  Dropping prestigious Nature Publishing Group journals is hardly an option for research intensive institutions, unless the faculty who read and publish in those journals are on board. What CDL has managed to do — brilliantly — is engage faculty in the discussion of the costs of scholarly publishing.  This is not “just” a library issue.

I will be following this story closely!

The full text of the memo can be found at http://libraries.ucsd.edu/collections/Nature_Faculty_Letter-June_2010.pdf.

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