Web freedoms fuel 'academic spring' journal protest - science-in-society - 13 February 2012 - New Scientist

“Inspired by a University of Cambridge mathematician, over 5000 academics have agreed to boycott publishers Elsevier, vowing not to peer-review or submit papers for any of its scientific journals. The protest comes at a time when mathematicians in particular are embracing new ways of working online, with some using web tools such as blogs and wikis both to solve proofs collectively and to distribute the results to their peers. The protest began last month when Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, wrote a blog post objecting to what he called Elsevier's ‘very high’ prices and its practice of ‘bundling’ journals, which he says prompts university libraries to spend money on titles that they may not want... Other mathematicians joined the cause, creating the website thecostofknowledge.com to declare they would no longer support Elsevier. Since then academics from other disciplines have joined the protest, and earlier this week 34 mathematicians, including Gowers, published a more formal statement explaining the reasons behind the boycott... In response to the protest, Elsevier has produced its own statement... Elsevier has also defended its support for the RWA, emphasising that there are costs to publishing research, in addition to doing the research... Although there are already other alternatives to traditional journal publishing, these suffer from their own problems. Open-access journal publishers, such as the Public Library of Science, allow anyone to read papers for free, but the costs of publishing fall to the authors. This may prevent cash-strapped academics from sharing their work. Other paper repositories, such as the physics preprint server arXiv, let users read and publish for free, but don't provide any form of peer review... Whatever the fallout from the boycott, it is clear that mathematicians are on the march...”