An extraordinary week

“It has been an extraordinary week for open access advocates... On Monday, Elsevier issued a press release withdrawing its support for the Research Works Act...  Within hours of Elsevier’s press release, the sponsors of the RWA in the House of Representatives announced that they would not pursue passage of the bill... The announcement from Representatives Issa and Maloney contained the first extraordinary statement of the day, when they said that ‘The American people deserve to have access to the research for which they have paid...’ we must read the statement with a suspicious eye.  But on its face, it seems to acknowledge the fundamental justice behind public access policies... Elsevier followed up its withdrawal of support for the RWA with an open letter to the mathematics community.  These scholars, remember, are at the core of the boycott directed at Elsevier that has been gaining momentum for over a month and is still growing.  That letter also contained some extraordinary statements; in it the publisher seems to promise to lower some of its prices (although they base this promise on an arbitrary pricing standard that they have created) and to acknowledge that the bundling of journals into high-priced and inflexible packages (which they call ‘large discounted agreements’) is a problem... The letter to the mathematicians contains an appeal for collaboration between Elsevier and the scholarly community.  In that vein, I respectfully offer three paths that mathematicians might pursue regarding Elsevier in the coming months: [1] Talk with them, by all means, but don’t believe everything you hear.  Two principles are important to keep in mind.  First, their primary value is returning a profit to their shareholders... Second, they have no product to sell if you do not give them your intellectual property for free, so you have a lot of power here.  In a New York Times article published yesterday about the open access debate, scholars who support open access are called dishonest for continuing to submit their works to traditional journals; the boycott you have started reverses that alleged dishonesty and gives you considerable influence.  Don’t waste it. [2] Keep exploring alternative publication models... For mathematics, where grants are smaller and many scholarly societies depend on subscription revenues, a ‘flipped’ pricing model such as is being explored in physics with the SCOAP3 experiment, might make the most sense... [3] Whenever you or a colleague/student does publish with Elsevier, look carefully at the publication agreement that is offered and cross out any language that ties your right to self-archive your work to the non-existence of an open access mandate from your institution of funder (you can find a sample agreement with this language here).  This is an outrageous interference with academic freedom, and authors should not tolerate it... it is worth noting this article by Kristine Fowler from the AMS website analyzing the relative success that mathematicians have had negotiating the terms of their publication agreements... Meanwhile, all of us – mathematicians, linguists, librarians, anthropologists or whatever — should transfer the energy we put into opposing the Research Works Act toward support for the Federal Research Public Access Act... The case for FRPAA is made far better than I could put it in this essay on “Values and Scholarship” that was published by all 11 provosts of the universities that make up the CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation) in last Thursday’s edition of Inside Higher Education.  Their extraordinary, unified vision for scholarship in the digital age should provide the touchstone by which this discussion moves forward.”