A response to one Elsevier employee, and an open letter to the rest

“In a comment on the last post, an Elsevier employee wrote: ‘Elsevier’s support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnerships to promote access to research, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which seek to dictate how journal articles or accepted manuscripts are disseminated without involving publishers...’ First off, if the NIH pays for the research, the NIH should have a say in how the results of that research are disseminated... The NIH... The researchers... And the readers want the research results available to everyone who wants them with a minimum of hassle and ideally at no cost. The publishers–and let’s be specific here and note that we’re really talking about corporate for-profit publishers–want to maximize their profits by selling the research community’s results back to them with just enough “added value” to justify their claim of ownership of those results, and to do that by maximizing costs... I could just cite Cameron Neylon’s wonderful observation that, ‘Publishers never really did have a business model, they had a public subsidy...’ So, what do I want Elsevier to do? I want it to do what Mike suggested–throw its support behind the FRPAA–and then restructure itself as an open-access publisher. That will probably mean saying goodbye to 30+% annual profit margins, but hey, wake up. If PLoS ONE can offer no length limits, no full color figure limits, and full BOAI-compliant open access for $1350, charging $3000 for an inferior product is the definition of a broken business model... If you’re one of them, what I’d like you, personally, to do is either agitate for change from within, if you can pursue that course wholeheartedly, or go work somewhere else...”