

Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics - ilamont
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/elsevier-publishing-boycott-gathers-steam-among-academics/35216?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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jacoblyles
Unfortunately the boycott is not focused on the real issue. The problem is not
that the journals cost too much, but that they cost anything at all. Keeping
the electronic articles behind a paygate prevents easy linking, organizing,
and discussing them on the web. The ACM is as guilty of this as Elsevier.

Open access or nothing.

~~~
cop359
If no money is changing hands; who's gonna edit, typeset and print them? Who
is gonna manage mail, comments from readers and so on? Pimple-faced
volunteering undergrads?

I think desire to have everything free is a fantasy of the open source
community. Not everything can be run like open source software project.
Sometimes people need to get paid.

~~~
scott_s
If you look at the list of names, those are largely math and computer science
academics - the very people who produce such papers and articles.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how academic journals are
structured and managed. The editing, typesetting, handling of communications
and such are all done by the academics themselves. And those academics are
_not_ paid by the journals.

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JoshTriplett
My university actually requires that I publish my dissertation through a
particular electronic publishing agency (UMI/ProQuest), who would like to put
it behind a paywall. I have to pay an additional $95 fee to make my
dissertation "Open Access". (Of course, I can and will put it up on my own
site, but that doesn't stop the publishing organization from charging people
for access to their copy.)

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estevez
This is good news. As an undergrad at a liberal arts college (and a community
college transfer) I'm painfully aware of how much information is locked away
behind the Elsevier pay wall. In my case, I wanted to do an independent study
project looking at citation analysis in early molecular phylogenetics, but so
many of the relevant papers are locked away that I just gave up.

This is the second time that Elsevier et al. have tried to kill PubMed
Central. I hope that this is a turning point in the OA movement.

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ilamont
Elsevier's response:

 _"What publishers charge for is the distribution system. We identify emerging
areas of research and support them by establishing journals. We pay editors
who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals.
We identify peer reviewers._

 _And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to
each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search
engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter.
All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more
efficient. That's the added value that we bring._

[http://chronicle.com/article/As-Journal-Boycott-
Grows/130600...](http://chronicle.com/article/As-Journal-Boycott-
Grows/130600/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en)

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Steuard
The blog post by Gowers that seems to have started much of the current
activity is here:

[http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-
in-i...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-
downfall/)

There's been a lot of discussion of this on science blogs lately, and I do
think the momentum is picking up (though it's easier for us physicists than it
is for people in biology and medicine). But while Elsevier really does seem to
be worse than most academic publishers, the whole system needs to evolve. One
proposal that I like is John Baez's idea of independent "referee boards",
described here:

<http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/ban-elsevier/>

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itg
According to this article, [http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-
Published/13040...](http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-
Published/130403/) , Darrell Issa is a co-sponsor. He was one of the few that
were very vocal against SOPA so why is is sponsoring this?

~~~
trauco
I don't agree with his support for the RWA, _but_ , it could be construed as
consistent with his opposition to SOPA from an anti-government perspective:
keep regulations low, keep the government out of the internet (SOPA) and the
private publishing business.

Of course, given that the RWA is really trying to keep a system that charges
the public twice for research they've already paid... but anyhow, that's a
rationale.

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hobin
I'm a strong supporter of academic Open Access whenever possible, so it should
be no surprise to anyone that I rather like this. To be completely honest, I
had expected this to go like many protests and boycotts do and to have minimal
impact. I'm glad it appears I'm going to be wrong about that.

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HPBEggo
I couldn't agree with this more.

Knowledge has an incredibly large impact on the possibility of the betterment
of human life, be it individually or socially. It is better for everyone if
knowledge is more widely available, those who run businesses involved with its
distribution included.

