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."

Comments

Re:Will referee?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a vague sense of duty. For any given potential paper, there is a limited number of suitible peer reviewers. I'm trying something so odd right now I can think of less than 8 people who are are knowledgable about the materials and spectrosopic method off the top of my head. The people still willing to be a referee possibly feel that their field as a whole shouldn't suffer with suboptimal peer reviewers simple because another scientist is trying to get published in an Elsevier journal.

What's the point of journals?

[Karmashock]

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.

It is about time

[tp1024]

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.

IEEE do some of the same

[Terje Mathisen]

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