Corporate publishers keep insulting scholars

“In the wake of the burgeoning Elsevier boycott, Richard Poynder asked the corporate publisher to "get out more", meaning they should start talking to the people they call their 'partners', namely the scholars who provide and review the articles they disseminate. Already their first official response was showing signs of questionable honesty and in an interview with Poynder, Elsevier's Alicia Wise still referred to scholar's works as belonging to Elsevier. This hardly constructive behavior became apparent again in the comments of a postby Mike Taylor. Liz Smith of Elsevier kept repeating the old “we want to do it, but we don’t want to be told to do it” argument with regard to their support of the Research Works Act and even well-tempered Mike was starting to lose his patience. From these past weeks it's thus become increasingly transparent that the corporate publishers, and especially Elsevier, are not interested in actually changing anything, but rather to stall the debate in a way that is starting to border on offensive. Obviously, corporate publishers stand to lose their profits of about 10 million US$ every single day, so there is quite a large incentive in stalling and protecting their interests. This strategy has taken a new turn today with several spokespeople for corporate publishers attempting to derail a discussion on a viable alternative to corporate publishing, a library-based scholarly communication system...” The blogger continues by referring and responding to a series of tweets discussing the profit margins of publishers. The tweets are made by posters to ‘The Scholarly Kitchen, a site of the Society for Scholarly Publishing,’ which the current blogger describes as ‘in practice mostly taking up the defense of corporate publishers against scholars' criticisms.’"