Nature Publishing Group's entry into the nanoscience landscape is attracting particular attention from critics who worry about the proliferation of science journals. In the past 10 years, the company has started 23 journals, seven of them since the beginning of 2005.... "The benefit is a visibility of us within different markets," says [Jason N. Wilde, publisher for physical sciences at NPG]. "The goal of NPG is to be the world's premier scientific publisher." Others say it's a matter of corporate greed. "Nature has simply gone too far," wrote Robert C. Michaelson on an e-mail list for physics librarians. In an interview, Mr. Michaelson, head of the science-and-engineering library at Northwestern University, says he had subscribed to every new Nature journal as it appeared, but that he drew a line last year with Nature Physics. Nature Publishing Group is expanding "purely to increase their bottom line," he says, "and it's doing it on the backs of the scholarly community," which is facing higher publication costs that are outstripping library budgets....On the e-mail list, he called on colleagues to band together against NPG, "to do everything possible to prevent them from exploiting 'market power' to coerce subscriptions."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/12/2006 10:14:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
