Elsevier begins outreach as push-back on publisher threatens to widen - Medical Marketing and Media

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“An online protest ... has pulled the scientific publishing industry, and particularly Dutch publisher Elsevier, into an international conversation about the tug of war between publishers and the published... Professor Timothy Gower's January 21 post, titled, “Elsevier — my part in its downfall” explains why the Cambridge University mathematics instructor is angry with the publisher, which also one of the biggest publishers of medical books and journals... But, in response to the growing international imbroglio, Tom Reller, Elsevier's vice president, global corporate relations, told MM&M in an e-mail that Gowers has it wrong, and that the publisher is not the unbending corporation it is painted to be: “We know there are some areas and disciplines where there is concern about access, and we are reaching out to them to make sure we understand their concerns. The facts on which the petition is based however, are not correct... Elsevier is in the business of expanding access to content, not restricting it, for example we were the first and largest contributor to the NIH (Pubmed central).’ The Dutch Publisher also said Tuesday that it was making the full text of its SciVerse ScienceDirect Journals available to users of the WorldCat, a member-based library system... However, subscription fees are just part of the anger that's being directed at Elsevier. ‘It's been 10, 15 years of people feeling they are not getting value from the publishers,’says Brian Cody, co-founder of the journal publishing site, Scholastica... Cody says that organizations, like the publisher Public Library of Science, or PLoS, is on the right track, because everything it publishes is free. Unlike PLoS, which charges a publication fee, Scholastica charges researchers to have their work reviewed. It also provides the software that will allow journals to push their content into university systems and will take a percentage of any revenue journals receive from this distribution. In the face of this backlash, publishers are not without their supporters. The New England Journal of Medicine's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Drazen, wrote in a January 22 piece in The New York Times that there is ‘important value added by our staff editors, statisticians and graphic designers, among others...’ Cody dismisses these arguments, saying that journals themselves are self-sufficient, with copy-editing and design staff. “Every journal is able to set up the look and feel of the graphics they want and export to a pdf. Thirty years ago that was a serious value-added. That value is rapidly [dwindling] down to zero.”

Link:

http://www.mmm-online.com/elsevier-begins-outreach-as-push-back-on-publisher-threatens-to-widen/article/225855/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.medicine oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.libraries oa.costs oa.tools oa.fees oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 15:14

Date published:

02/06/2012, 14:41