Kiwis join global journal boycott - NZweek

“At least nine New Zealanders have joined a global boycott of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher... Employees of the universities of Auckland, Lincoln and Otago have signed the pledge as well as one staff member at NIWA... Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the USA’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the Chronicle [of Higher Education], ‘The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities. Then they charge us to read it.” Mr Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook...’ most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed US law that could prevent agencies like the US National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available. However Elsevier rejects the complaints saying, globally, the amount of research that is published is going up every year but library budgets are not keeping pace.