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?
Looks like "how many roads must a man walk down" was a traveling salesman problem and not some humanist statement
"Ban Elsevier
Please take the pledge not to do business with Elsevier. 404 scientists have done it so far:"
Just got me thinking...
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.
There is another part to the open access. Trade associations that publish specs. They want anywhere from $100-$1000 for a specification that MUST be used to manufacture equipment. Those specs are written by employees of many businesses (users). These associations do not pay taxes.These specs should be published as e-books for a reasonable price. $35 for example. They are still living in the 50s.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
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.
Being a referee is part of being a scientist.
Being a human being with integrity is ALSO part of being a scientist.
If one wants to think one being worthy to be known as a SCIENTIST one must at least have the integrity to know that keep on feeding leeches such as Elsevier does the scientific community a dis-service
Restricting the access to information is an antithesis to scientific principle.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Sounds kinda like digg for scientific research.
Which quite honestly scares me...
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.
The problem with that is that you have to persuade other people — tenured professors, associate professors, funding agencies, etc. — that it's worth buying into your system. Once they buy in, it will work fine (modulo teething problems, of course). But if people don't believe that it counts towards your academic career, it most certainly doesn't count. Maybe that doesn't matter so much for someone with a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize as they've already shown that they merit tenure (or equivalent) anywhere in the world, but for someone earlier in their career it matters hugely.
People want to publish in top rank journals because that's how they show they are doing top ranked work. Competition is ferocious (if usually polite).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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.
If you are legally allowed to. Some journals require copyright trasnfer upon acceptance of a manuscript, which makes such things illegal.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel