University Times » Protest launched against journal publisher

"One British professor’s vow to cut ties to journal publishing giant Elsevier has spawned an outpouring of support from like-minded researchers worldwide... The Jan. 21 post by Cambridge University mathematics professor Tim Gowers (http://gowers.wordpress.com) criticized Elsevier’s business practices and elaborated on his refusal to publish in, referee papers for or join the editorial board of any Elsevier publication. The post, which in part cited Elsevier’s high prices and its support for U.S. legislation including the Research Works Act (HR 3699), the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), struck a chord with others in the academic community and beyond. To date, nearly 4,700  individuals, including a handful from Pitt, have signed an online declaration at www.thecostofknowledge.com... Fellow mathematicians, including Juan Manfredi, Pitt’s vice provost for Undergraduate Studies, have made up the bulk of the early signers of the declaration... Pitt mathematics professor Thomas Hales, who has joined the boycott, told the University Times that he has been displeased with the publisher’s business practices for years... Also signing was Piotr Konieczny, a Pitt PhD candidate in sociology, who labeled the traditional academic publishing model obsolete in the Internet era... University Library System director Rush Miller said, “It’s time for people to get mad about this if they care at all about the survival of scholarly communication... He said librarians have been trying to call attention to the increasingly high cost of commercially published journals for years. ‘It’s about time that faculty woke up and realized their interests aren’t different from those of the librarians,’ Miller said... ‘Over the past three or four decades, academic libraries — which make up the bulk of the market for scholarly journals — have seen double-digit price increases almost annually,’ Miller said. ‘All these companies depend on the libraries for income and they will charge whatever they think they can get. Like any manufacturer, what the market will bear. And beyond.’ Between ULS and the Health Sciences Library System, subscriptions to Elsevier’s journals and health sciences databases cost about $2 million each year — at prices that are discounted through negotiated multiple-year ‘big deal’ agreements with the publisher, Miller said. Pitt has had three such five-year contracts and is beginning negotiations this week on another, he said, noting that while the deals have reduced annual increases over the past 15 years, they also limit the University’s flexibility to decrease the number of journal subscriptions... Miller estimated it takes an increase of $500,000 each year just to maintain the status quo in journal subscriptions. ‘This University has been able to do that almost better than anyone else in the country until the last year or two,’ when cutbacks in state support put enormous pressure on Pitt’s library budgets...’”