Why Stop with Elsevier?

... “As reported in numerous sources, including LJ, there’s now a petition being signed by academics to refuse to publish, referee, or do any editorial work for Elsevier journals,,, It should make some librarians feel better that a mere 14 years after the foundation of SPARC the people who matter are finally paying attention to the problems in scholarly publishing... Maybe the inability to change a model where they get all their content and editorial work for free and then sell it back to universities for a hefty and frequently non-negotiable fee explains the comments by an Elsevier vice-president, quoted in the LJ article: ‘Access to published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever. This is a direct result of the investments publishers have made to digitize and disseminate content.  The reality is that the introduction of optional packages have added enormous access at fractions of the list prices; and resulted in reduced cost per use.’ That’s a notable quote, notable especially for the way it avoids discussing the three main charges the petition levels against Elsevier... Neither does the argument of another vice president that Elsevier allows authors to post eprints of their work in arXiv. Elsevier still charges very high prices and makes it almost impossible for libraries to negotiate lower prices by unbundling the journals... Another vice president says, ‘Our business is based on people using the journals that we publish and ensuring access to such titles is absolutely core to what we do,’ and mentions their ‘exchange of data with arXiv’ as a supporting example... But by supporting the Research Works Act, which they don’t mention, they’re trying to restrict access to publicly funded research, period... The question I have is, why Elsevier?... It’s not as if Springer, Sage, and a host of others don’t act in exactly the same way... “