Elsevier boycott gathers pace : Nature News & Comment

“Timothy Gowers is surprised and delighted that thousands of mathematics and other researchers have joined him in a public pledge not to have anything to do with Elsevier... He is leading a boycott because of company practices that he says hinder the dissemination of research... ‘The goal of the boycott is not to get Elsevier to change how it does things, but rather to change how we in the mathematics community behave, and in that way to rid ourselves of major commercial publishers,’ he says... Avoiding the company is unlikely to be problematic for mathematicians. ‘Elsevier doesn't have any really strong journals in mathematics,’ says Rob Kirby, a topologist at the University of California, Berkeley. But its biology and medicine journals include big-hitters such as Cell and The Lancet, so a boycott in those fields would be both a bigger blow to the company and a bigger sacrifice for the signatories. So far, around 900 people declaring themselves to be in biology or medicine have signed the pledge... In 2000–01, a similar petition forswearing contact with publishers who refused to place papers in open repositories attracted 30,000 signatories. There are no exact figures for how many signatories kept that pledge, but most did not, says Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the leaders of the campaign... The campaign did prompt Eisen and others to set up the Public Library of Science publishing venture based in San Francisco, California, to provide an open-access alternative to subscription journals. There is a similar precedent in mathematics. In 1997, Kirby wrote an open letter to Elsevier protesting the company’s high prices. The support he received inspired him and some colleagues to start their own journal, Geometry and Topology. ‘It’s become one of the top ten journals in the field, because of a lot of support from the community,’ he says. That venture spawned Mathematical Sciences Publishers, a non-profit company based in Berkeley that now publishes seven low-cost journals. Kirby thinks that other researchers should also focus on creating good non-profit journals...”