Academic publisher Elsevier hit with growing boycott - Technology & Science - CBC News

“To publish or not to publish? That is the question medical and science academics are asking after 6,000 of their colleagues boycotted one of the world's largest publishers. The "Cost of Knowledge" campaign was started by an international group of researchers in January after a blog post by Cambridge University math professor Timothy Gowers... Since then, thousands of researchers around the world, including several university and government researchers in Canada, have publicly committed to the protest by declaring they will not publish in Elsevier journals, peer review papers for those journals, or do editing work for them... This week a number of Australian academics joined a global protest against the scholarly publishing powerhouse. ‘The boycott is saying we are no longer going to provide our services to you for free. We are no longer going to write articles and submit them to your journals, and we are no longer going to review for your journals,’ says Danny Kingsley an expert in scholarly communication at the Australian National University's Centre for the Public Awareness of Science... "The feeling has been for some time that the research itself has been paid for by the public purse and the peer-review process and often the editorial process is also being paid for by the public purse in the form of academic salaries; and then the public purse has to again pay to get subscriptions to the work," [said Kingsley]... In 2010, Elsevier made $1.6 billion for an operating profit margin of 36 per cent. Andrew Wells from the Council of University Librarians believes Elsevier is being unfairly singled out. ‘The practices that Elsevier has both in dealing with authors and in selling scholarly content to libraries are very similar to those used by many other scholarly publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis and Springer,’ he says... Academics often submit an original research paper to their university before it goes to peer review and is published. University websites typically make these available to the public for free. Elsevier wants to change that arrangement and has thrown its support behind three bills currently before the US Congress. They could, among other things, prevent universities from holding pre-publication versions of research papers. It means Australian academics will have to pay to access research that's already been paid for... Some Australian research bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council will change their funding model later this year. They'll mandate that any work they contribute to must be available to the public for free.”