Academics line up to boycott world's biggest journal publisher

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“Dozens of Australian academics have joined a growing boycott of Elsevier, one of the world’s leading publishers of academic journals, over the behemoth’s ‘extortionate efforts to extract money’ from people who wish to access their taxpayer-funded research. At least 97 academics from across the country have signed their names to a boycott of the publisher... almost 6,000 researchers across the world have pledged to withdraw the fruits of their research from Elsevier journals. Academics are typically required to pay journals an ‘article processing fee’ to cover the cost of the peer-review and editing process. They must also sign over the copyright to the published work. For their part, journals then charge up to $A42 per piece for access to the work online. Libraries that subscribe to one journal usually have to pay vastly inflated amounts for bundled services, said Dr Danny Kingsley, the Australian National University’s manager of scholarly communications and e-publishing... ‘The problem in Australia is that the research councils – the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council – award funding to academics who publish their work in the journals that are judged under a metrics system to have the most impact,’ Dr Kingsley said... Academics are also furious that Elsevier has placed its weight behind a bill in the US – the Research Works Act – that aims to make it illegal to force researchers to make their work publicly available... Dr Gavin Moodie, the principal policy advisor at RMIT University, signed his name to the boycott to register his indignation at Elsevier’s attempts to keep information out of the public domain... Dr Michael Young, a visiting fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University, joined the protest after receiving a request from Elsevier to revise a 4,000-word paper for its International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier said it could not pay him more than its standard fee: $US100... In Australia, however, the Australian Research Council has introduced rules that merely ‘encourage’ academics to add their work to open access databases. The other major funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, is planning to go further. It will amend its rules later this year to mandate that the scholarly work it helps to fund be made freely available.”

Link:

http://theconversation.edu.au/academics-line-up-to-boycott-worlds-biggest-journal-publisher-5384

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.usa oa.legislation oa.negative oa.rwa oa.nih oa.green oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.australia oa.metrics oa.impact oa.costs oa.pd oa.funding oa.fees oa.repositories oa.copyright

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 15:03

Date published:

02/16/2012, 17:12