Old tricks in new wineskins | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-10-06

Summary:

"It’s been a while since we checked in on our old friends Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley — collectively, the big legacy publishers who still dominate scholarly publishing. Like every publisher, they have realised which way the wind is blowing, and flipped their rhetoric to pro-open access — a far cry from the days when they were hiring PR “pit bulls” to smear open access. These days, it’s clear that open access is winning. In fact, I’ll go further: open access has won and now we’re just mopping up the remaining pockets of resistance. We’ve had our D-Day. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still lots of work to get through before we arrive at our VE-Day, but it’s coming. And the legacy publishers, having recognised that the old journal-subscriptions gravy train is coasting to a halt, are keen to get big slices of the OA pie. Does this change in strategy reflect a change of heart in these organization? Reader, it does not. Just in the last few days, these three stories have come up: Elsevier has raised the price of access to its chemical database Reaxys from £13,500 per institution to £38,000: an increase of 181% in four years, or 29.5% per year cumulative. UK universities are quite rightly considering not renewing their subscription. Springer has started demanding colour charges for online-only papers, as though “colour pixels cost more money” — this despite the Springer website saying that no such charges should be levied. Swansea University Library Research Support is quite rightly telling researchers to push back on these unacceptable charges — but they shouldn’t have to. Most egregiously, Wiley suddenly removed 1,380 textbooks from one of its bundles, leaving at least one professor “to reorganize her entire syllabus to prevent her students from having to pay out of pocket for their required class textbook”. Others of course will quite understandably not bother, leaving students hundreds of dollars out of pocket...."

Link:

https://svpow.com/2022/10/06/old-tricks-in-new-wineskins/

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.elsevier in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.wiley oa.springer_nature oa.publishers oa.progress oa.new oa.negative oa.elsevier oa.elsevier

Date tagged:

10/06/2022, 11:39

Date published:

10/06/2022, 07:39