It seems the California Digital Library (CDL) which manages subscriptions for the University of  California has been getting a deal on its Nature journal subscriptions and now the publisher, Nature Publishing Group (NPG), has raised their subscription price by approximately 400 percent. Predictably the librarians are protesting the rate hike. Less predictably, they are calling for a boycott.

The Pasco Phronesis blog notes,

The negotiations continue via press releases. Independent of the claims both sides are making, this fight brings out the point that journal subscription rates have continually increased at rates that challenge many universities to keep up. NPG is not the only company charging high rates, it’s just that the long-standing agreement with the CDL has become no longer sustainable for NPG. Given the continuing budget problems California faces, it seems quite likely that the CDL may no longer find NPG subscriptions sustainable.

The article by Jennifer Howard for the Chronicle of Higher Education offers some details about the proposed boycott. In addition to canceling subscriptions,

The voluntary boycott would “strongly encourage” researchers not to contribute papers to those journals or review manuscripts for them. It would urge them to resign from Nature’s editorial boards and to encourage similar “sympathy actions” among colleagues outside the University of California system.

The boycott’s impact on faculty is not something that immediately occurred to me but Dr. Free-Ride at Adventures in Ethics and Science notes,

One bullet point that I think ought to be included above — something that I hope UC faculty and administrators will consider seriously — is that hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion decisions within the UC system should not unfairly penalize those who have opted to publish their scholarly work elsewhere, including in peer-reviewed journals that may not currently have the impact factor (or whatever other metric that evaluators lean on so as not to have to evaluate the quality of scholarly output themselves) that the NPG journals do. Otherwise, there’s a serious career incentive for faculty to knuckle under to NPG rather than honoring the boycott.

There is both support and precedent for such a boycott according to Howard’s article,

Keith Yamamoto is a professor of molecular biology and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at UC-San Francisco. He stands ready to help organize a boycott, if necessary, a tactic he and other researchers used successfully in 2003 when another big commercial publisher, Elsevier, bought Cell Press and tried to raise its journal prices.

After the letter went out on Tuesday, Mr. Yamamoto received an “overwhelmingly positive” response from other university researchers. He said he’s confident that there will be broad support for a boycott among the faculty if the Nature Group doesn’t negotiate, even if it means some hardships for individual researchers.

“There’s a strong feeling that this is an irresponsible action on the part of NPG,” he told The Chronicle. That feeling is fueled by what he called “a broad awareness in the scientific community that the world is changing rather rapidly with respect to scholarly publication.”

Although researchers still have “a very strong tie to traditional journals” like Nature, he said, scientific publishing has evolved in the seven years since the Elsevier boycott. “In many ways it doesn’t matter where the work’s published, because scientists will be able to find it,” Mr. Yamamoto said.

I feel sympathy for both sides as neither side is doing well economically these days. I do have to wonder at the decision to quadruple the subscription rates overnight as it smacks of a negotiating tactic in a situation where the CDL had come to expect a significantly lowered subscription rate. With this tactic there’s the potential for a perceived win-win situation. The CDL will triumphantly negotiate a lower subscription rate and the publisher will get the increase they wanted in the first place. That’s my theory.