
Scientific Community to Elsevier: Drop Dead - chrismealy
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/864.html
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zvrba
To be fair, authors publishing with Elsevier retain many rights, _including_
the right to publish post-review _personal_ version of his paper on his
personal and institutional web-site for dissemination of scholarly work (non-
commercial purposes).

<http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights>

So whoever is calling for boycott of Elseview, should also inform authors --
especially grad students who can't afford boycotting journals -- about these
facts. Use your rights and make the knowledge free.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
That's not a good thing, it's just a cumbersome pressure release-valve to try
and stop real change happening.

The public version should be automatic, automated and centralised and
available for commercial purposes too. Relying on busy academics to do web
admin busywork is crazy.

------
wycx
It is going to be tough for grad students, post docs and non-tenured
scientists to join the boycott if Elsevier publishes the top journals in their
field. Getting a job is hard enough, and impact factor matters for getting a
job.

What I would like to see is societies that have their journals published by
Elsevier remove their endorsement of those journals and start new journals not
published by Elsevier.

In my particular field I would love to see The Geochemical Society no longer
endorse the Elsevier-published Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (arguably the
premier geochemistry journal) and start a rebel open access, or at least
reasonably priced journal.

If you are a member of a society that publishes a journal with Elsevier,
contact your society's president as suggest they stop publishing with
Elsevier.

~~~
_delirium
That's happened in a few fields. Three CS examples I know of are, 1) the
association endorsing the _Journal of Logic Programming_ (Elsevier) withdrew
endorsement in 2000, and the editorial board resigned en masse to form _Theory
and Practice of Logic Programming_ ; 2) the editorial board of _Machine
Learning_ (Kluwer) resigned in 2001, moving to the newly created _Journal of
Machine Learning Research_ ; and 3) the _Journal of Algorithms_ (Elsevier)
board resigned in 2003 to form _Transactions on Algorithms_. Donald Knuth
wrote a lengthy letter that spurred that last one (<http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf>).

I think there were a few others in that era that slip my mind. Not sure why
the pace slowed down after that flurry of activity, though. Possibly effort
has gone towards more institutional initiatives like PLoS, rather than the
"editor revolt" style of initiative that was semi-popular in the early 2000s.

Physics and the social sciences (incl. law) seem to have partly sidestepped
the access problem in practice by making centralized pre-print repositories
(arXiv for physics, SSRN for social sciences) de-facto standard places to
deposit preprints. Not sure why that hasn't developed in other fields, or what
could be done to encourage it.

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DanBC
Has Elsevier made any response to all of these calls for boycott? Are they
even aware of it?

And are the other publishers looking at their business models so they can
become less bad than they are now?

~~~
CJefferson
I am tempted to say these boycotts are (as of yet) having no effect at all.

Having bought the idea up a couple of times, I believe the majority of
academics (even in computing subjects) don't know they "should" be boycotting,
and most have no intention of joining in when it is discussed with them.

I wonder if most of the noise you hear is from people attached to the 'free'
journals, who obviously have an interest in getting people away from Elsevier.

~~~
bwarp
Academics revolt by committee from experience. It takes a while.

~~~
irollboozers
Only after a review of peers, paid for by the journals too.

~~~
estevez
I think the exact point is that the journals _don't_ pay for peer review.

------
olihb
I really don't like Elsevier, but the alternatives do not really exist.

Most open Access aggregators are of dubious quality and don't provide an
interface for peer-reviewing. Even worst, the harvesting standard (OAI) is
implemented in so many different ways and no two sites/platform implement it
in a consistent way. Scopus also extract references, citations, addresses,
etc. which are necessary to compute influence and impact.

Microsoft Academic and Google Scholar are starting to look as an alternative,
but I'm wouldn't be surprised if they licensed their data from
Elsevier&Thomson.

Until these services are duplicated in the Open Access community, Elsevier
will still be needed.

