Duke Scholars Join Boycott Against Elsevier | Duke Today

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-03-08

Summary:

“One of Duke's most prominent scientists has joined a protest against a leading academic publisher, adding her name to a growing list on campus and at universities elsewhere. Mathematician Ingrid Daubechies says she will no longer publish, referee or do editorial work for the Amsterdam-based academic publisher Elsevier. She joins biologists Laryssa Baldridge and Eric Butter, mathematician Mark Iwen, economist E. R. Weintraub and other Duke faculty members in publicly boycotting the publisher. They and nearly 6,000 other scholars around the world seek to draw attention to what they consider Elsevier's unfair business model and restrictions on the free exchange of information. Daubechies, who heads the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, said too many mathematicians and other scientists are ‘utterly frustrated by the enormous prices libraries are being charged for journals, when the content, the peer review that ensures quality and the scientific part of the administration are all provided by our community itself, completely or mostly on a volunteer basis...’ She recently joined The Cost of Knowledge protest in the mathematics and science community launched Jan. 21 by Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge... Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications at Duke's Perkins Library and a copyright lawyer, said Daubechies and the other mathematicians and Duke faculty have joined a fight that has been under way in various academic fields for more than a decade. These efforts, he added, may accelerate the transition to new publishing solutions ranging from open-access journals such as the Public Library of Science to entirely new systems for peer reviewing and publishing digital work. The new systems would benefit not only the academic community but also the public, which pays for most of this research in the first place, Smith said. The main issue, aside from cost, is copyright, or who owns the work. Authors of academic papers have long been expected to turn over copyright of their work to a publishing company for it to be printed and circulated, Smith said. They only receive limited rights to the material, sometimes leaving them unable to publish their findings on their own or on their institution's websites.‘A graduate student, for example, might publish a paper in a journal, use that information in her thesis, but then have to remove sections related to the published work in the library's open-access record of her dissertation,’ Smith said...”

Link:

http://today.duke.edu/2012/02/elsevierboycott

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.green oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.ir oa.peer_review oa.costs oa.duke.u oa.repositories oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

03/08/2012, 11:04

Date published:

02/16/2012, 17:22