Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

"Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal....The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available. Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an open-publishing advocate, signed the pledge and wrote that “With the moves of these megapublishers, we [are] seeing the beginning of monopoly control of the scholarly record.” ..."

Link:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/elsevier-publishing-boycott-gathers-steam-among-academics/35216

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » Connotea Imports

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.comment oa.usa oa.legislation oa.negative oa.rwa oa.nih oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.pledges

Authors:

petersuber

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 11:47

Date published:

01/31/2012, 15:49