

Academic publisher Elsevier hit with growing boycott - jmcgough
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/02/17/science-elsevier-journal-boycott.html

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impendia
> Andrew Wells from the Council of University Librarians believes Elsevier is
> being unfairly singled out. "The practices that Elsevier has both in dealing
> with authors and in selling scholarly content to libraries are very similar
> to those used by many other scholarly publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell and
> Taylor & Francis and Springer," he says.

Quite right. The Elsevier boycott gives us a way to make our voice heard
against the worst of the publishers. It lends urgency to the drive to change
the system, and it will hit Elsevier hard in the pocketbook, demonstrating to
publishers that we (academics) are going to stop providing them with their
free lunch.

Once we further get our act together, believe me, we will be coming after
Wiley and any other publisher who engages in exploitative, rent-seeking
behavior.

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meta0
Why haven't scientists started their own not for profit publishing/clearing
house website?

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jmcgough
This or some variant of it is most likely the future of scientific
publications, now that physical publication isn't really necessary.

A really good example is arXiv (<http://arxiv.org/>).

~~~
_delirium
There are some DIY-ish journals in some areas as well, in addition to preprint
archives. The top-ranked machine-learning journal is now run on an annual
budget of $0, on volunteer labor, print-on-demand publishing, and MIT server
space: <http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/>

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loeg
This article is almost as hilarious as the RIAA president's op-ed;
unfortunately, this one doesn't reveal the author's name.

