Occupy Elsevier?

“Nearly 4,500 researchers have signed an agreement to refrain from publishing in, refereeing, and/or performing editorial services for journals produced by the science-publishing behemoth Elsevier. But the publisher... maintains that a misunderstanding of its intentions, and not unfair business practices, are fueling the boycott. The boycott was launched on January 21 when renowned Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers detailed his criticisms of the company’s business practices on his blog Gowers’s Weblog... Within days, thousands of Gowers’s fellow mathematicians and other academics had signed on to the boycott at a site—http://thecostofknowledge.com/—set up by graduate student Tyler Neylon ... Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist Brett Abrahams... said that he joined the boycott for what he considers the unsustainable nature of the subscription-based publishing model for scientific research... Younger researchers also joined the Elsevier boycott. Aspiring soil scientist and Virginia Tech grad student Nick Bonzey... added that unease with Elsevier’s ‘bundling’ practices bugged him the most... Theoretical biology PhD student Joel Adamson signed up for the boycott... ‘Seeing the names of people who had already signed up was the critical thing,’ Adamson said... the University of North Carolina grad student said that the stark distinction between Elsevier’s publishing model and that of open-access publishers was central to his support of the boycott... Elsevier maintains that the criticisms are based more on a misunderstanding of the company’s goals and strategies than a truly flawed or unethical business model. David Clark, Elsevier’s senior vice president for physical sciences,... rebutted the criticism voiced in Glowers’s blog post, starting with the claim that Elsevier’s subscription prices are too high... Clark also refuted the notion that Elsevier was forcing institutional libraries to buy bundles of journal titles and ruthlessly negotiating those deals. Clark added that libraries have the option of purchasing each of Elsevier’s publications individually if they don’t want to buy bundled packages. Clark defended the company’s decision to support the Research Works Act through its membership in the Association of American Publishers, a trade group that is lobbying for passage of the legislation... The boycott, Clark added, largely boils down to academic authors failing to understand how the business side of Elsevier... [Abrahams,] the Albert Einstein College of Medicine geneticist noted that he’d have to balance his own stance on Elsevier with the good of his students and collaborators. He admitted that if he’s in a collaborative situation in which the decision of where to publish findings is not his to make, he’ll likely voice his opinion but ultimately yield to the consensus, even if that means publishing in an Elsevier title. ‘At that point, that’s going to be a very hard decision for me,’ Abrahams said. ‘Then, I don’t think it’s in my students, or my institution’s interest to walk away.’”