Thursday, October 02, 2014

AAAS, Science magazine, and figure permissions

Hello readers - As I'd mentioned previously, I've written a nano textbook that's going to come out next year.  I'd like to ask my readership, on the off-chance that someone has a suggested contact:  Please email me if you can suggest a good contact at AAAS/Science, with whom I could have a discussion regarding figure permission fees.  (I'd like to try talking to someone first before turning this into a major blogging topic.)  Thanks.
Update:  I've made contact with an actual person.  We will see what happens....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a Stanford alum, is it worth it for you to contact Donald Kennedy (former Science editor and former Stanford president) to get advice on how to get figure fees reduced. Perhaps, it's an extreme measure but I wanted to throw it out there

Anonymous said...

Assuming it's a similar case to what I did once (asking permission to reproduce in a paper in RMP):
go here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/about/permissions.xhtml#reqperm
where this address is listed for non-standard issues in this respect and provides access to a person, instead of their online process:
permissions@aaas.org

But maybe that doesn't cut it for your case as I sense you want something special?
Anyway, that would be my first route.

Douglas Natelson said...

Anan@11:01, maybe worth a long shot - thanks. Anon@6:23, if you send email to "permissions" you get a form response telling you to either use rightslink or to wait up to four weeks for a response.

The issue, for what it's worth, is that Science wants to charge a lot of money to use images from papers in a textbook, while even the notoriously profit-conscious Nature Publishing Group waives those fees (as do almost all of the professional society journals). I would like to try to argue that this is a very strange policy for an alleged non-profit that professes the importance of education. (Yes, there are work-arounds - I could contact every single author and ask them to send me slightly modified images directly, but that's very annoying, and it's the principle of the issue that ticks me off.)

Anonymous said...

(anon 6:23 here)
okay, from your language I figured something would not work.

4 weeks to wait is somewhat ridiculous.

On another note: isn't it nice to have tenure, so one can fight for principles instead of only focus on being efficient :-)

Good luck! - I am also surprised the AAAS charges more than Nature (=$0).