UC library executives prepared the following "informational update," dated June 4, regarding "a possible UC systemwide boycott of the Nature Publishing Group." The UC library executives addressed the update to division chairs of the Academic Senate around the system, and to all other faculty members. See separate story.

Dear UC Divisional Chairs and Members of the UC Faculty,

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 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  per year.

NPG by contrast has been singularly unresponsive to the plight of libraries and has employed a "divide and conquer" strategy that directs major price increases to various institutions in different years. Their proposed new license fee is especially difficult to accept in a time of shrinking UC library budgets and with the many sacrifices we all continue to make systemwide. Capitulating to NPG now would wipe out all of the recent cost-saving measures taken by CDL and our campus libraries to reduce expenditures for electronic journals. More information about the UC Libraries’ concerns, including a history of previous unsustainable price increases from this publisher and others, is available on the CDL’s Challenges to Licensing page.

UC Libraries have already taken a stand against NPG. After recently acquiring Scientific American, NPG doubled the institutional site license fee and raised the price of an institutional print subscription seven-fold. In response, UC Libraries, along with numerous other institutions throughout the country, discontinued their license to the online version and reduced the number of print subscriptions. As a first response to the current NPG proposal, UC Libraries plan to forgo all online subscriptions to any new NPG journals. But more drastic actions may be necessary.

What can UC faculty do to help?

UC faculty and researchers author a significant percentage of all articles published in NPG journals and are a major force in shaping the prestige of its publications. In the past six years, UC authors have contributed approximately 5,300 articles to these journals, 638 of them in the flagship journal Nature. Using NPG’s own figures, an analysis by CDL suggests that UC articles published in Nature alone have contributed at least $19 million in revenue to NPG over the past 6 years — or more than $3 million per year for just that one journal. Moreover, UC faculty supply countless hours serving as reviewers, editors and advisory board members.

Many UC faculty now believe that a larger and more concerted response is necessary to counter the monopolistic tactics of NPG. Keith Yamamoto, a professor and executive vice dean at UC San Francisco (yamamoto@cmp.ucsf.edu), who helped lead a successful boycott against Elsevier and Cell Press in 2003, has begun to assemble a group of faculty that will help lead a UC systemwide boycott of NPG. This means that unless NPG is willing to maintain our current licensing agreement, UC faculty would ask the UC Libraries to suspend their online subscriptions entirely, and all UC faculty would be strongly encouraged to:

• Decline to peer-review manuscripts for journals from the Nature Publishing Group.

• Resign from Nature Publishing Group editorial and advisory boards.

• Cease to submit papers to the Nature Publishing Group.

• Refrain from advertising any open or new UC positions in Nature Publishing Group journals.

• Talk widely about Nature Publishing Group pricing tactics and business strategies with colleagues outside UC, and encourage sympathy actions such as those listed above.

We clearly recognize that the consequences of such a boycott would be complex and present hardships for individual UC researchers. But, we believe that in the end, we will all benefit if UC can achieve a sustainable and mutually rewarding relationship with NPG.

In the meantime, UC scholars can help break the monopoly that commercial and for-profit entities like NPG hold over the work that we create through positive actions such as:

• Complying with open access policies from federal funding agencies such as the NIH. publicaccess.nih.gov

• Utilizing eScholarship, an open access repository service from CDL. escholarship.org/publish_postprints.html

• Considering other high-quality research publishing outlets, including open access journals such as those published by PLoS and others.

• Insisting on language in publication agreements that allows UC authors to retain their copyrights. osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/manage/retain_copyrights.html

A full list of journals currently licensed from NPG by UC Libraries is below. We will keep you informed as this situation progresses, including the possibility of canceling all NPG titles. Please feel free to contact the university librarian on your campus with questions or concerns, or any of us. You can also communicate your concern to key contacts at NPG. The managing director of NPG, Steven Inchcoombe, and other members of the executive committee can be reached at exec@nature.com.

Sincerely,

Laine Farley
Executive Director
California Digital Library
UC Office of the President
laine.farley@ucop.edu

Richard A. Schneider
Associate Professor
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, UC San Francisco
Chair, University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication
rich.schneider@ucsf.edu

Brian E.C. Schottlaender
Audrey Geisel University Librarian, UC San Diego
Convener, University Librarians Council
becs@ucsd.edu

Nature Publishing Group

The UC Libraries license covers 67 journals: 25 Naturebranded journals, and 42 academic and specialist journals.
NPG publishes 85 journals in total.

The UC license takes in the following:

Nature
Nature Biotechnology
Nature Cell Biology
Nature Chemical Biology
Nature Genetics
Nature Geoscience
Nature Immunology
Nature Materials
Nature Medicine
Nature Methods
Nature Nanotechnology
Nature Neuroscience
Nature Photonics
Nature Physics
Nature Protocols
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
Nature Reviews Cancer
Nature Reviews Cardiology
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
Nature Reviews Genetics
Nature Reviews Immunology
Nature Reviews Microbiology
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Nature Reviews Rheumatology
American Journal of Gastroenterology
American Journal of Hypertension
Bone Marrow Transplantation
British Dental Journal
British Journal of Cancer
Cancer Gene Therapy
Cell Death & Differentiation
Cell Research
Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
EMBO Journal
EMBO reports
European Journal of Clinical Nutrition
European Journal of Human Genetics
Evidence Based Dentistry
Eye
Gene Therapy
Genes & Immunity
Heredity
Immunology and Cell Biology
International Journal of Impotence Research
International Journal of Obesity
ISME Journal
Journal of Antibiotics
Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism
Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology
Journal of Human Genetics
Journal of Human Hypertension
Journal of Investigative Dermatology
Journal of Perinatology
Kidney International
Lab Animal
Laboratory Investigation
Leukemia
Modern Pathology
Molecular Psychiatry
Molecular Therapy
Neuropsychopharmacology
Obesity
Oncogene + Oncogene Reviews
Pharmacogenomics Journal, The
Prostate Cancer & Prostatic Diseases
Spinal Cord