I have to admit, I wasn’t able to keep track of a lot of library news and trends while I was in law school. So … the news that the serials crisis has reared its head again (if it ever left) is a bit surprising to me. Looks like UC libraries (and perhaps the faculty) will draw a line in the sand once again?
From UCLA’s Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog:
Informational Update on a Possible UC Systemwide Boycott of the Nature Publishing Group
UC Libraries are confronting an impending crisis in providing access to journals from the Nature Publishing Group (NPG). NPG has insisted on increasing the price of our license for Nature and its affiliated journals by 400 percent beginning in 2011, which would raise our cost for their 67 journals by well over $1 million dollars per year.
While Nature and other NPG publications are among the most prestigious of academic journals, such a price increase is of unprecedented magnitude. NPG has made their ultimatum with full knowledge that our libraries are under economic distress—a fact widely publicized in an Open Letter to Licensed Content Providers and distributed by the California Digital Library (CDL) in May 2009. In fact, CDL has worked successfully with many other publishers and content providers over the past year to address the University’s current economic challenges in a spirit of mutual problem solving, with positive results including lowering our overall costs for electronic journals by $1 million dollars per year.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed is covering this …
