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Hug It Out

Aug 27, 2010

The University of California is no longer considering a full-fledged boycott of Nature, USA Today reports. In June, UC and Nature exchanged letters expressing their discontent with the potential publication price hikes and a potential boycott from UC researchers, respectively. Nature's The Great Beyond blog has posted the full text of a joint statement from both groups, which reads:

Our two organizations have agreed to work together in the coming months to address our mutual short- and long-term challenges, including an exploration of potential new approaches and evolving publishing models. We look forward to a successful planning and experimentation process that results in mutual agreement that serves all stakeholder groups — NPG, the UC libraries, and the scholar community — thus avoiding the need for the boycott that had been discussed at an earlier stage.

Laine Farley, who directs UC's California Digital Library, tells USA Today that the current journal model, under which researchers "contribute the labor to produce the articles that go into these journals, they do the peer review, they often are editors, and then the institution has to buy back the access to the output of their research," is not acceptable, and "needs to change."

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