If this came across Serials list already, I missed it and apologize.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [STS-L] Max Planck Society cancels 1,200 Springer journals
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 08:49:56 -0700
From: George Porter <george@library.caltech.edu>
To: ERIL-L <ERIL-L@LISTSERV.BINGHAMTON.EDU>, STS-L
<sts-l@ala.org>, ELDNET-L <eldnet-l@u.washington.edu>, SLAPAM-L
<PAMNET@listserv.nd.edu>
CC: Peter Suber <peters@earlham.edu>
The Max Planck Society, for those unfamiliar, operates 80 research
institutes with more than 12,000 staff members and 9,000 Ph.D. students,
post-docs, guest scientists and researchers, and student assistants.
Last week's Nobel prizes honored Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry, Fritz Haber
Institute) and the UN IPCC (Peace, Max-Planck-Institute for
Meteorology).
In US-centric terms, my interpretation is that this is roughly
equivalent to all of the National Institutes of Health, the DoE labs
(Los Alamos, Livermore, Fermi, Brookhaven, etc.), and the NASA research
centers (JPL, Dryden, Langley, Glenn, Ames, etc.) cancelling all
Springer titles for all locations.
George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 1-43, Pasadena, CA 91125-4300
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681
=====================
Richard Sietmann, Max Planck Society terminates licensing contract with
Springer publishing house
<http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/97652>, Heise Online,
October 19, 2007.
Following several fruitless rounds of talks the Max Planck
Society (MPG <http://www.mpg.de>) has, effective January 1, 2008,
terminated the online contract with the Springer publishing house which
for eight years now has given all institutes electronic access to some
1,200 scientific journals. The analysis of user statistics and
comparisons with other important publishing houses had shown that
Springer was charging twice the amount the MPG still considered
justifiable for access to the journals, the Society declared. "And that
'justifiable' rate is still higher than comparable offers of other major
publishing houses," a spokesman of the Max Planck Digital Library
<http://www.mpdl.mpg.de/> told heise online....
According to the MPG the failure of the talks with Springer
marks "what for now is the high point" in a dispute with a number of
globally operating scientific publishing houses. The soaring prices in
the scientific information domain have already caused a change of
attitude in a number of players. Thus MPG is one of the initiators of
the "Berlin Declaration
<http://oa.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html> on Open
Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities" -- the key
demand of which is open access to the results of publicly funded
research -- which to date has been signed by more than 240 scientific
organizations.
When publishing houses have the market power to charge excessive
prices and the legislator is unwilling to subject such inappropriate
behavior to any form of legal control the only course that remains is
for the scientific community to take matters into its own hands, the MPG
stated. "Even at the very last minute the Springer publishing house had
not been prepared to lower its inflated prices," MPG Vice President Kurt
Mehlhorn said. "The MPG therefore had had no other option but to
terminate the contract," he added.
--
Posted By Peter Suber to Open Access News
<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/10/max-planck-society-cancels-1
200.html> at 10/19/2007 11:22:00 A
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