The Research Works Act, open access and publisher boycotts « sharmanedit

“The open access movement has been around for decades, gradually building up, but this month there seems to have been an acceleration in the pace of change. I will try in this post to summarise the current situation as I see it. The initial driver of this recent change was the Research Works Act (RWA)... The second important event was the decision of Cambridge mathematics professor and Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers to publish a blog post on 21 January entitled ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall‘ ... This led mathematician Tyler Neylon to set up ‘The cost of knowledge‘, a page where researchers could publicly declare that they ‘will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate’... In the past week the usual trickle of blog posts about open access and Elsevier has turned into a flood. I’ll pick out a few here... Elsevier and their allies have responded [here]... So, where do I stand? I am a freelance editor, working directly or indirectly for scientists and for publishers, on both open access and closed access journals... I am sympathetic to the open access movement but am not an active advocate of it. I’m not currently in a position to refuse to work for closed access publishers... What I’d like to do is think through what effect a boycott would have on each affected journal... One way the boycott could perhaps be more effective would be if it focused on a few journals in well-defined, small fields where there is a limited pool of potential reviewers... I would hope that those refusing make their reasons clear (as in this example letter) so that in-house staff aren’t left wondering what is going on...”