Scientific Community to Elsevier: Drop Dead

"I have for years been refusing to publish in or referee for journals publisher by Elsevier; pretty much all of the commercial journal publishers are bad deals1, but they are outrageously worse than most. Since learning that Elsevier had a business line in putting out publications designed to look like peer-reviewed journals, and calling themselves journals, but actually full of paid-for BS, I have had a form letter I use for declining requests to referee, letting editors know about this, and inviting them to switch to a publisher which doesn't deliberately seek to profit by corrupting the process of scientific communication. I am thus extremely happy to learn from Michael Nielsen that Tim Gowers is organizing a general boycott of Elsevier, asking people to pledge not to contribute to its journals, referee for them, or do editorial work for them. You can sign up here, and I strongly encourage you to do so....(To head off the inevitable mis-understandings, I am not, today, calling for getting rid of journals as we know them. I am saying that Elsevier is ripping us off outrageously, that conventional journals can be published without ripping us off, and so we should not help Elsevier to rip us off.)"