Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop? | Techdirt
Connotea Imports 2012-07-31
Summary:
"[L]ike SOPA/PIPA, RWA may have been an intellectual land-grab too far. It has provoked a rebellion by academics that might provide the final push needed to move academic publishing from its current mode, dominated by hugely-profitable corporations that require payment for most of their output, to one based around open access journals, with smaller profits, but whose articles are freely available online to all.
Things started when Peter Suber, who is widely regarded as one of the unofficial leaders of the open access movement, pledged on January 7 not to work with any publisher that accepted the Association of American Publishers' position supporting RWA. But it was a blog post two weeks later by the British mathematician and Fields Medallist (think Nobel Prize of mathematics) Tim Gowers that provided the spark for the explosion of anger that followed....Within a couple of days, Tyler Neylon had set up just such a site, "The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier", which repeats the three main objections that Gowers raised, and invites people to refrain from working with Elsevier. At the time of writing, nearly 2,000 academics from a wide range of disciplines have pledged their support for the boycott...."