The future of academic publishing | | Independent Editor's choice Blogs

“These are the most uncertain times in living memory for academic publishing. After decades of bumping along with an antique publishing model, researchers have suddenly woken up and found that they are strong. More than 4700 have signed a pledge not to write, review or edit for Elsevier journals, in a movement that The Economist has called the Academic Spring... The immediate catalyst is the Research Works Act (RWA)... Much important new research is based on synthesis and large-scale analysis – text-mining, induction across a huge corpus of data, and so on. This is the kind of work that computers can do with astonishing efficiency when they have free access to information... History teaches us that discovery is often serendipitous. In a world full of computers analysing massive data sets for patterns no-one has yet seen, the chances are very good we’ll see breakthroughs... The sad truth is that... Researchers are used to publishing papers in traditional journals... Publishers are used to being paid every time they deliver an article to a reader. The rational response to the internet would be for the whole community to transition to a service model: instead of charging for access, publishers would provide services... Indeed some publishers do work on that model, notably PLoS (created only in 2003) and BioMed Central (founded in 2000)... What this means is that paradoxically publishers’ interests are now directly opposed to those of everyone else... What the publishers didn’t expect was that researchers would fight back. But in the face of such flagrant hostility, we had to, and we have. The Elsevier boycott has been described in some quarters as a petition. But it’s not. It’s a declaration of independence.”