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 | American Physical Society Says Journal Prices Will Drop in 2009
Is the tide turning in the serials marketplace? Perhaps it’s a little early to make that proclamation, but two major scientific societies last week announced good news for library customers: price increases for their publications would be modest—and for many library subscribers to the journals of the American Physical Society (APS), prices will actually decrease. Joseph Serene, publisher and treasurer of APS, told librarians in a release that “improved APS publishing operations” will translate into reduced subscription prices for over 80 percent of APS subscribers.
APS prices its institutional subscriptions by tier according to institution size, ranging from Tier 1 (four-year colleges and smaller) to Tier 5 (large research-intensive institutions). In 2009, Tier 1 will see a decrease of eight percent; Tier 2 will have a decrease of five percent; and Tier 3 will have a decrease of three percent. Inflation, meanwhile for research-intensive institutions will drop by more than half: Tier 4 will see a modest one percent increase in price, and Tier 5 will see a two percent increase. Serene added that the reductions come even though the APS’s prestigious journals, which include Physical Review Letters and Physical Reviews A, B, C, D, E, continue to grow. The APS is the world’s largest professional body of physicists, representing over 46,000 members.
“We recently completed an ‘electronic office project’ that eliminated essentially all paper from our operations,” Serene told the LJ Academic Newswire, explaining APS’s streamlining. “This has greatly increased the efficiency of everything that we do.” Such a project is no small feat as APS now manages—entirely online—approximately 30,000 submissions a year, a database of almost 50,000 referees, and roughly 18,000 published articles. In addition, Serene said his predecessor, Thomas McIlrath, negotiated “significantly improved rates” for APS’s composition processes, the benefits of which are being passed on to subscribers. The APS, also offers an “author-pays OA option,” Free to Read, but, Serene noted, that program has had “almost no takers so far and wasn’t a significant factor in this year’s pricing.”
Meanwhile, the American Physiological Society announced this week that 2009 price increases for its 14 journals would also be below expectations: the 2.5 percent rise is a 50 percent decrease from last year. Its open access experiment, Author’s Choice, meanwhile, did play a role in that reduction, the society’s publication director and executive editor Margaret Reich told librarians in an announcement. That program, launched less than a year ago, offers authors an “author pays” open access choice for the Society’s journals. “We have chosen to use a portion of our new revenues to help offset the cost of subscriptions,” Reich noted.
Reich told the LJ Academic Newswire that the APS was pleased to see that authors were embracing its open access option. “We are certain that as the value of Author’s Choice becomes apparent to well-funded investigators, we will see more authors signing up for the service,” Reich said.
The news of two major societies reducing journal prices—or at least slowing the inflation of prices—while also experiencing efficient, growing publishing operations, is good news for librarians concerned with both managing serial inflation as well as encouraging and supporting a healthy nonprofit publishing sector. Meanwhile, could the price reductions, or at least the reduction in inflation, put pressure on commercial publishers to follow suit? “I don’t believe we are particularly unusual,” responded Serene, “except that our only mission is to ‘advance and diffuse’ the knowledge of physics.”
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Shieber To Lead Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication
One of the architects of Harvard University’s landmark open access mandate this week was named director of the university’s new Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). The OSC will be responsible for “executing the university’s open-access policy” and related activities, including the online distribution of PhD dissertations and gray literature (datasets, technical reports, lectures, etc.), support for open-access journal publishing, and sponsoring conferences. The OSC also will coordinate other university-wide open-access initiatives, such as the implementation of the mandate recently passed at the Harvard Law School. It will operate under the oversight of a faculty advisory committee.
Harvard provost Steven E. Hyman made the appointment, saying that on Shieber’s watch the school will take a lead role in “promoting open access and in moving the academic world toward a more sustainable publishing system.” Shieber was one of the driving forces behind, and the author of the Harvard open access mandate, and chaired the Provost's Committee on Scholarly Communication. He is scheduled to speak at the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA, in a program entitled “Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How To Get There.”
Shieber joined Harvard in 1989, and is a founding director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society and the faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. His primary research field is computational linguistics—the study of human languages from the perspective of computer science. In a statement, Shieber said that he hoped Harvard’s activities “in promoting scholarly communication can be exemplary for the academic community as a whole.”
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| In Stinging NY Times Critique, Lessig Blasts Orphan Works Bills
With increasingly hyperbolic and sometimes ill-informed opposition to competing orphan works bills mounting, copyright expert Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig this week offered a sober, yet stinging op-ed in the New York Times. He blasted the current bills as “amazingly onerous and inefficient” changes that would “unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.”
In sum, Lessig argued, the current bills fail to address fundamental problems swept into copyright law since 1978, and would create new, “unfair” burdens for those who would seek to use orphan works, such as registration and documenting a “diligent” search before use. “The uncertain standard of the bill doesn’t offer any efficient opportunity for libraries or archives to make older works available, because the cost of a ‘diligent effort’ is not going to be cheap,” Lessig argued. “The only beneficiaries would be the new class of ‘diligent effort’ searchers who would be a drain on library budgets.”
Lessig suggested a deeper reform to copyright law that would require copyright owners to register their work after an “initial and generous” term of automatic and full protection had expired. “In a digital age, knowing the law should be simple and cheap,” Lessig concluded. “Congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity, not more work for copyright experts.”
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| Ministers Continue Effort To Stop Bush Library at SMU
Just days after national archivist Allen Weinstein delivered a commencement address at Southern Methodist University (SMU), saying it was the perfect home for the George W. Bush presidential library, a faction of Methodist ministers are ramping up their effort to derail the deal. An AP story in the Houston Chronicle this week reported that a key opponent, Brooklyn-based Reverend Andrew Weaver, who organized an online petition that garnered 12,000 signatures opposing the library at SMU, has hired a public relations firm to help his cause.
The campaign will begin before a jurisdictional meeting of the United Methodist Church (which owns SMU) in Dallas, in July. The goal: to get delegates at the meeting to officially oppose the library. SMU officials, however, claim they already have the necessary approval, and church officials have said that the jurisdictional meeting and vote is “a technicality.” Weaver, who believes Bush’ policies conflict with Methodist church teachings, however, vowed to continue to apply pressure. “If people know there’s still a way to stop it, people will communicate with their bishops,” he told reporters at the Chronicle.
In his speech on May 17, Weinstein alluded to the controversy over the library, but assured SMU graduates “that the George W. Bush Presidential Library, like the 12 other libraries in the National Archives system, will be operated as a non-partisan federal facility.”
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Best Sellers in Computer Science, October 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)
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Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google
Carr, Nicholas G.
WW Norton
2008. ISBN 0393062287 [9780393062281]. $25.95
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Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
Deibert, Ronald
MIT Press
2008. ISBN 0262042452 [9780262042451]. $45.00
-
Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software
Rice, David
Addison-Wesley
2008. ISBN 0321477898 [9780321477897]. $29.99
-
Open Source: Technology and Policy
Cambridge University Press
2008. ISBN 052188103x [9780521881036]. $99.00
-
Love + Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships
Levy, David
HarperCollins
2007. ISBN 0061359750 [9780061359750]. $24.95
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Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing
Press, William H., et al.
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521880688 [9780521880688]. $80.00
-
HCI Remixed: Essays on Works that Have Influenced the HCI Community
Erickson, Thomas
MIT Press
2008. ISBN 0262050889 [9780262050883]. $40.00
-
Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning
Getoor, Lise
MIT Press
2007. ISBN 0262072882 [9780262072885]. $50.00
-
Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies, and Emerging Applications
Sears, Andrew
Lawrence Erlbaum
2008. ISBN 0805858709 [9780805858709]. $149.95
-
Algorithmic Game Theory
Nisan, Noam
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521872820 [9780521872829]. $45.00
-
Introduction to Modern Cryptography
Katz, Jonathan
Chapman & Hall CRC
2008. ISBN 1584885513 [9781584885511]. $79.95
-
Press On: Principles of Interaction Programming
Thimbleby, Harold
MIT Press
2007. ISBN 0262201704 [9780262201704]. $45.00
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Neural Networks Theory
Galushkin, Alexander I.
Springer
2007. ISBN 3540481249 [9783540481249]. $99.00
-
Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement
Soderberg, Johan
Routledge
2008. ISBN 0415955432 [9780415955430]. $95.00
-
Digital Watermarking and Steganography: Fundamentals and Techniques
Shih, Frank Y.
CRC Press
2008. ISBN 1420047574 [9781420047578]. $79.95
-
Trust, Complexity and Control: Confidence in a Convergent World
Cofta, Piotr
John Wiley
2007. ISBN 0470061308 [9780470061305]. $115.00
-
Intelligent Wearable Interfaces
Xu, Yangsheng
John Wiley
2008. ISBN 0470179279 [9780470179277]. $99.95
-
Quantum Computing Explained
McMahon, David
John Wiley
2008. ISBN 0470096993 [9780470096994]. $79.95
-
High Performance Computing in Remote Sensing
Plaza, Antonio J.
Chapman & Hall CRC
2008. ISBN 1584886625 [9781584886624]. $99.95
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Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace
Goodman, Seymour
National Academies
2007. ISBN 0309103959 [9780309103954]. $57.00
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