Terry Tao joins Elsevier boycott

“TERRY Tao, the Fields Medal winner and expatriate Australian mathematician, has joined the boycott of Elsevier, the commercial giant of scholarly publishing. Mathematics is the lead discipline among the almost 7700 academics who have posted their names on the Elsevier boycott site, The Cost of Knowledge... ‘Admittedly, I am fortunate enough to be at a stage of career in which I am not pressured to publish in a very specific set of journals, and as such, I am not making a recommendation as to what anyone else should do or not do regarding this protest,'' Professor Tao says on his blog. ‘For my own part, though I have sent about nine per cent of my papers in the past to Elsevier journals (with one or two still in press), I have now elected not to submit any further papers to these journals, nor to serve on their editorial boards, though I will continue refereeing some papers from these journals.’ Asked about this, he told the HES: ‘We do hope that more mathematicians shift their best papers from the more expensive journals to the cheaper journals as a result of this boycott... But there may still be some good papers that end up submitted to Elsevier journals that need careful refereeing, and delaying that process may hurt the authors of those papers... Because of this, I decided that I might continue to referee future papers submitted to Elsevier on a case-by-case basis... There are certainly some discussions to expand existing low-cost journal options, with an eye on making it easy for an entire editorial board to move [from an Elsevier journal] if desired, but they are still only in the planning stages.’ Professor Tao, based at the University of California Los Angeles, has also put his name to a 34-strong mathematicians' manifesto...”