Guest Post: What Happens if We Call for a Boycott and No One Shows Up? | EvoEcoLab, Scientific American Blog Network

“Like many scientists, I’ve been thinking about the proposed “Research Works Act” (RWA) and its threat to public access of publicly paid for research... I want to share some thoughts on some of the proposed solutions/fallout that may occur because of this act... When one thinks about boycotting a journal, as far as I can tell, there are three primary ways one can do so: (1) refuse to review for the journal; (2) refuse to publish in the journal; (3) refuse to subscribe to the journal. I’m going to ignore the third, because most journals that we, as scientists, access are subscribed to by our university library, making a boycott less of an individualized decision.2 The first two have more interesting issues... Reviewers are donating their time for no benefit other than service to the scientific community, and reviewing is an expectation of the job, thus someone who never did reviews would be looked on unfavorably when administrative decisions such as hiring, promotion, tenure, or raises are made. While it may be relatively easy to refuse to review for all for-profit journals, cutting off non-profit journals which are closed-access becomes somewhat more difficult because many of these are part of the centerpiece of societies which you may heavily support... I have recently become an associate editor for a society-based journal which I believe is quite important, but the journal is not full open-access (it has the additional-pay option) and is currently published through a contract with a for-profit publisher (the specific publisher potentially changes every few years when contracts are renewed). Is this open or closed access? Do I view this as a for-profit company or a non-profit society? Is the semi-closed access nature enough to override support for an extremely important society? ... The most difficult issue is the second one listed, refusing to publish in a journal. There simply aren’t that many quality open access journals... PLoS ONE does not publish reviews. Or commentary. Or opinions... Maybe the solution is for PLoS ONE to open its door a bit, or maybe there needs to be a new journal called something like PLoS Reviews... In the end, this is one of the biggest problems with the call for boycott (the biggest one is simply getting enough people to sign on and stick to it). No matter how well intentioned we are, currently there simply are not enough valid options to cover all of our publishing needs ... “