Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Organize Elsevier Boycott
An anonymous reader writes "The academic publisher Elsevier has attracted controversy for its high prices, the practice of bundling journals for sale to libraries and its support for legislation such as SOPA and the Research Works Act. Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers decided to go public with a blog post describing how he'll no longer have anything to do with Elsevier journals, and suggesting that a public website where mathematicians and scientists could register their support for an Elsevier boycott would further the cause. Such a website now exists, with hundreds of academics signing-up so far. John Baez has a nice write-up of the problem and possible solutions."
They've been asked to say that they: "1) won’t publish with them, 2) won’t referee for them, and/or 3) won’t do editorial work for them ... At least do number 2)" ... most of those signed up have gone for all three however it seems like roughly one in ten have prevaricated on the "won't referee" pledge - what is the magnetic allure of refereeing for Elsevier journals?
They seem unnecessary in the internet age. Set up some sort of social networking system for scientists.
Also keep getting disturbing reports of journals censoring works for political reasons or because they're afraid that certain factions within the science community will boycott them.
The whole thing is anti science. Create a forum where all scientists can share information freely without fear of being censored or favoritism. If other scientists don't find your work compelling then they don't have to listen to it.
It will also make disclosing all the information about a given study easier since hopefully more of the work will be within the system.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Publishing articles nowadays is terribly easy and does not cost a thing (arxiv); filtering and getting good referees however is not.
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and 'sign' those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your 'worth' goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
If a well known professor therefore signs your work, others will catch up to it. A 'good' paper will gain in publicity quickly due to being sent around a lot. One would also need to include a system of diminishing returns, as to avoid groups signing only their own papers. Ironing out these points of abuse will be the hardest part of this system.
The specification above only consists of four to five sentences and yet I would call it more robust than the currently arbitrarily chosen journals.
Go to google scholar, research anything and you'll inevitable bumb into those extortionists. What is the point of having all that knowledge theoretically at your fingertips, if people cannot have access to it? No matter what it is - an icelandic volcano erupting and you want to know what this means for your plans to fly somewhere? Well, there are plenty of papers that will tell you about ash emissions, the impact of ash on airplanes, the concentrations of ash in the air and so on and so forth.
A nuclear reactor has a problem and you want to know what engineers found out about the likely consequences or progression of the accident, or what people in this country and other countries did about mitigation? It's right there. BUT:
$30.00 for reading a paper (which more likely than not will not contain what you are looking for) just makes it impossible to research anything at all - unless you are at least a millionaire. Just having access to one research paper per day will cost you $11000 a year. That has nothing to do with copyrights or protecting intellectual property or anything else.
It is all about extortion - thank you for trying to stop it.
This makes as much sense as claiming that the only reason athletes accept an invitation to play in the all-star game is that "in general have such low esteem of themselves that they crave for the respect of their own peers in order to survive".
And this would also apply to prizes such as the fields medal and nobel prize.
To put it simply, there is a considerable difference between having a low self-esteem and receiving an honour of having our own work recognized by the community.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Last year I sent an email to IEEE saying that I would leave the organization if they continued holding research papers hostage behind pay walls.
I.e. authors were told that in order to get published they would have to assign their copyrights to IEEE and would have to remove any freely available copies on their own personal web page.
See also http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/06/30/2027226/ieee-supports-software-patents-in-wake-of-bilski and http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/15/177217/ieee-working-group-considers-kinder-gentler-drm about locking research behind DRM gates.
With very little visible change to their attitudes, I decided to leave.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
It's easy enough to sign up, and to say you hate Elsevier (so do I). But if you're in a research group at a university, and you're the PhD student, you're probably not doing yourself a favor by signing this. Your name will show up in search results, so people may know you signed (if you used your own name and institute).
In order to get your PhD, you will need to publish somewhere, and your prof will want you to get the highest "impact factor", because that's good for the whole group. You're in a way just an employee, so you better listen to the boss.
By effectively saying "screw you" to the whole system of publications, and going online to a really open system, you gamble. Better make sure the prof agrees.
But I applaud you, if you do.
Let's not forget, that Elsevier created two dozen completely fake magazines full of completely fake "articles", which were ads for pharma industry products disguised as medical studies. They then planted those in doctors' offices for doctors to read.
Doctors based their trust on that, assuming it was factually correct, and prescribed millions of pointless drugs to patients, often endangering their health.
All for the profit of the pharma industry. Which is clearly bordering on... how do you call that in English? Mass felony mayhem? Mass battery? (I mean "Massen-Körperverletzung")
Nobody will argue that that wasn't a huge crime, and that Elsevier should not be closed down and its management put in PMITA prison.