Archive for Springer Nature

The Case Against Academic Publishers

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on September 25, 2024 by telescoper

It seems appropriate to pass on news of a federal antitrust lawsuit being brought in the United States against six commercial academic publishers, including the “Big Four” (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley). The case is filed by lawyers Lieff Cabraser Heimann and Bernstein. The plaintiff is Lucina Uddin, Professor of Psychology at UCLA.

I suggest you read the full document linked to above for details, but in a nutshell the case alleges three anticompetitive practices:

  1. agreeing to “fix the price..at zero” for the labour of authors and peer reviewers;
  2. agreeing not to compete for manuscripts by forcing authors to submit to one journal at a time;
  3. agreeing to prohibit authors from sharing their work while under peer review, “a process that often takes over a year”

I’ve spoken to a few people who know a bit about US law on such matters and they all say that the plaintiff’s legal representatives have a good track record on antitrust litigation. Nevertheless, there is some doubt about whether the case is winnable but at the very least it will bring a lot of attention to the Academic Journal Racket, so is probably a good move even if it doesn’t succeed. If it does succeed, however, it might blow a hole in the entire commercial publishing industry, which would be an even better move…

As an interesting postscript (found here) is that, in 2002, the UK Office of Fair Trading reviewed complaints about anticompetitive practices in academic publishing; see here. It found market distortions but decided not to act because of the recent rise of Open Access. I quote

It is too early to assess what will be the impact of this … but there is a possibility that it will be a powerful restraint on exploiting positional advantage in the STM journals market.

Now that 22 years have passed, is it still too early?

P.S. Comments from legal experts would be especially welcome!

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Counting the Cost of Gold Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2024 by telescoper

If you’re interested in how Article Processing Charges (APCs) have changed over the past five years, the data from six major publishers are now available accompanied by a paper on the arXiv with the abstract:

This paper introduces a dataset of article processing charges (APCs) produced from the price lists of six large scholarly publishers – Elsevier, Frontiers, PLOS, MDPI, Springer Nature and Wiley – between 2019 and 2023. APC price lists were downloaded from publisher websites each year as well as via Wayback Machine snapshots to retrieve fees per journal per year. The dataset includes journal metadata, APC collection method, and annual APC price list information in several currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, CHF, JPY, CAD) for 8,712 unique journals and 36,618 journal-year combinations. The dataset was generated to allow for more precise analysis of APCs and can support library collection development and scientometric analysis estimating APCs paid in gold and hybrid OA journals.

There’s even an interactive data explorer here, at which link you can also find this very informative summary graphic:

Surprise, surprise: the vast majority have gone up!

These figures apply to Gold and Hybrid Open Access publications, but not to Diamond Open Access journals which are free to both authors and readers and avoid these rip-off charges. In my opinion research institutions would be much better off investing in Diamond Open Access publishing than sending their hard-earned cash to profiteering outfits such as Elsevier.

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Abolishing an “Industry”?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on June 2, 2023 by telescoper

A week or so ago I mentioned that the European Council had adopted a text that calls for the EU Commission and Member States to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers.

The journal Nature has responded to the news with a piece entitled EU council’s ‘no pay’ publishing model draws mixed response and the lede:

Some academics have welcomed the proposed open access plans. But publishing industry representatives warn they are unrealistic and lack detail.

It’s not really accurate to describe the response as mixed as it is completely separated: the vested interests in the academic publishing industry are against it and everyone else is for it! It’s hardly surprising to see Nature (owned by academic publishing company Springer Nature). I found this in the text of the Nature piece:

The conclusions are concerning because they support a move that would abolish an industry

Caroline Sutton, the chief executive of the STM (a membership organization of academic publishers)

Indeed, though I would argue that what the proposals would abolish is not so much an industry as a racket. I’ve been blogging here about the Academic Journal Racket since 2009. It’s nice at last to see some real movement towards its abolition. Further on, I find:

The STM is also concerned that the move would eliminate independent European publishing companies and usher in a state-defined system that could stymie academic freedom. It warns that the amount of public funds used to build repositories of academic research papers by member states or institutions is hard to quantify.

How would free open access publishing stymie academic freedom? If anything does that it’s the extortionate publishing fees levied by publishers. And it’s a very bad argument to say that the costs of repositories is hard to quantify when everyone can see your enormous profit margins!

I was thinking about the financial strife currently afflicting many UK universities. If the UK university sector has to choose over the next few years between sacking hundreds of academic staff and ditching its voluntary subsidy to the publishing industry, I know what I would pick. In this respect I’m definitely an abolitionist.

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