The Real Fake Elsevier

“As anyone who is reading this probably already knows, the publishing giant Elsevier has recently placed itself at the center of a shitstorm of animosity from the research community, thanks in part to its vocal (and financial) support of the Research Works Act (RWA). My (very small) part in this story started a little over a week ago, when I started a parody Twitter account called “@FakeElsevier“. Since then, I’ve been posting as much Elsevier-related satire as I can manage in my free time, 140 characters at a time... I now feel compelled to add my two cents in a serious way. It has become clear to me that Elsevier, and its employees, don’t understand what exactly is pissing off everyone in the research community... It’s not about money and never has been... As far as we are concerned, publishers have ONE JOB: disseminating the results of our work to the widest possible audience... In the internet age, Elsevier is doing an unbelievably shitty job of accomplishing its ONE AND ONLY PURPOSE: to distribute our work as broadly as possible... Along the way, you’ve obscured the true flows of money both on the author-side and the subscriber-side, and you’ve set up an unwholesome set of incentives that play to scientists’ worst impulses (and to your benefit)... The obvious (to me at least) solution is that all work needs to be made available under a true open access license (think Creative Commons BY), so that anyone can access it, and funding agencies need to shoulder the costs of doing so in a much less circuitous way... Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded under these exact assumptions years ago and is making this model work... If you fail in this job and subvert the scientific literature with self-serving pay-walls, don’t be surprised that we organize against you... You see, funding agencies are perfectly happy telling us scientists what to do... Do not for a moment think that they cannot command us to only publish in journals that are open access. We would be compelled to obey, and we’d do it with a smile. This wouldn’t so much be them dictating your business model, as mooting it. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you are a effectively a government subcontractor, that takes tax-payer money to provide a distribution service for government-funded research... what if Elsevier, like most other successful and admired businesses on the planet, were actually focused on serving its customers? You’d work with authors to make their work more accessible, not less. Why can’t my colleagues read my papers and have an awesome experience on any device — epub, Kindle, smartphone, tablet? Have you seen the buzz surrounding textbooks with iBooks Author? Why aren’t you working with me to make my content more interactive, dynamic, and informative?... Somewhere there is a cancer patient trying to learn about her disease, who can’t because of paywalls everywhere (I know, because I have abused my institutional privileges to help her)... The alternatives to your model already exist (and are gaining traction), and I suspect that it is only a matter of time before funding agencies flex their muscles accordingly. FRPAA is just the first salvo... But if you work for Elsevier because you want to do something good for the world, know that you have the power to make things better. Companies are their people, and the future is coming...”