366 days: Nature's 10 : Nature News & Comment

From Nature's list of "Ten people who mattered this year." "Tim Gowers is still surprised that he ended up leading a global boycott of Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant. “I’m not someone who naturally seeks to be a campaigner,” says the mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. Yet Gowers’ impatience with the publisher’s business practices had been building for years. He particularly disliked what he saw as its high prices, its habit of forcing libraries to subscribe to unwanted journals by ‘bundling’ them with the popular ones and its opposition to open-access publishing. On 21 January, Gowers let rip in a searing blogpost entitled ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall’. “Why do we allow ourselves to be messed about to this extraordinary extent,” he wrote. “I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly,” he went on — and he encouraged others to do the same. The blog caught the attention of Tyler Neylon, a software engineer in Mountain View, California, who the next day created a website (www.thecostofknowledge.com) inviting people to sign up for a boycott. More than 13,000 scientists across the world have now pledged variously not to publish with or referee or do editorial work for Elsevier. The signatories are only a tiny fraction of the world’s researchers — but the campaign was a spark in this year’s explosion of interest in open access and new visions for research publishing. In February, Elsevier, facing growing criticism, withdrew its support of the Research Works Act, a proposal to prohibit the US government from requiring open-access publication for the research it funds. In July, the UK government mandated that much of the nation’s taxpayer-funded work be published openly from April 2013. This year also saw the birth of several experimental publishing models, such as the open-access venture PeerJ, which will publish any number of an author’s papers for a one-off fee. “We’ve disagreed with a lot of what [Gowers] has claimed, but for certain he’s helped us better understand the sentiment of the maths community,” says Tom Reller, head of Elsevier’s global corporate relations. Gowers’ campaign was “a little bit accidental”, says Ben Green, a fellow Cambridge mathematician. Gowers agrees. He may have won the Fields Medal in mathematics and, this year, a knighthood, but in academic publishing he says he is an amateur. “I feel more like an individual whose views just happened to resonate with others’.”