RE: un-Nature-al (beware of rant below)

["Osterbur, David L." <David_Osterbur@hms.harvard.edu>]

The more people who peruse it in the library the fewer people who will buy it. 
The loss of a few library subscriptions is worth it to Nature but this is
another illustration of the ways that scholarly communication and profit-making
do not mix.

David L. Osterbur, Ph.D.
Access and Public Services Librarian
Countway Medical Library
Harvard Medical School
10 Shattuck Street
Boston, MA   02115
Voice: 617 432-2636
Fax:  617 432-4739
E-Mail: david_osterbur@hms.harvard.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of David Thibodeau
Sent: Thursday, October 01, 2009 2:58 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: un-Nature-al (beware of rant below)

This year our subscription to Scientific American went up from $39.95/year to
$299.00/year.  As a result of Scientific American becoming a wholy owned and
operated entity within Nature Publishing Group in April they are now subject to
their tier pricing scam.  While SciAm was nice to have around for the last 150
years plus, it is a magazine and not a necessary part of our academic
collection.  It did, however, have a place in academia, primarily on the
display rack for our humanities students.  What are the folks over at Nature
thinking???  A modest price increase would have been tolerable but this is
absurd.  Surely the title was still profitable, does anyone know differntly?
I am not a sentimentalist and I am all for online news but this is more
disturbing than the collapse of the print newspaper industry.



----- End forwarded message -----