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Boycott of Elsevier Exceeds 8000 Researchers
kkleiner writes with an update on the boycott of Elsevier started in January. From the article: "Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free — well, more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier's backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act. Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research."
Aside from the peer-review process, what do these journals offer the scientific community that they can't get for free on the Internet? What prevents the scientific community from conducting it's own peer review process, at minimal cost, and publishing results for free on the Internet?
You don't understand the academic journal market. You don't publish articles in prestigious journals for the sake of publishing, or to make money, you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.
There is no shortage of publishing options these days, but as I'm sure you know, most things published on the internet are crap.
The academic journals deliver an audience of readers, and that is what you want - you want other prestigious academics to read your work. And a big part of how professors are judged for tenure is how many good articles did they publish in prestigious journals.
Aside from the peer-review process, what do these journals offer the scientific community that they can't get for free on the Internet?
Unfortunately, within the academic world, the quality of publications on your CV is determined by the perceived quality of the venue (e.g., high-impact journals, low-acceptance conferences, etc.), as opposed to the quality of the actual work getting published. There's an inertia problem faced by any new publication venue or method, and the academic world is ironically slow to adapt. At the end of the day, professors need tenure, grad students need scholarships, etc., so they will continue to publish in what are currently accepted as quality venues.
Elsevier withdrew their support for the RWA three weeks ago.
Maybe an update that included that little detail would have been more useful?
Try an "Open Access" journal to see their rates.
Yes, OA journals are more expensive, because they do not collect subscription fees, but the publication costs simply become another item in our funding requests. The NIH (and other agencies) want open access, so they will accept this line item.
Subscription-based journals may continue to have a role in publishing authors' whose funding requests were denied - though even this is contingent on funding levels not being restored (currently %~7 of grants are funded, but the system is designed for a %~30 level).
.: Semper Absurda
Not even a remotely close analogy.
Car manufacturers deal in physical products. They take in raw parts an material, add the value, and sell the resulting products. This is the production of a good.
An academic researcher reads literature, thinks for a bit, and produces one copyable paper. Once that paper is produced, that's it, the research is done and paid for. This is the performing of a service.
When a researcher gives their paper over to an academic publisher, it a very real sense they have effectively performed the service on that publishers behalf. They were paid out of the public purse to provide the pubic with useful results. Instead, they too public money and then sealed those results behind a private paywall.
This is properly analogous to you paying the manufacturer for your car to be produced, and then having the manufacturer give it a car dealer who you now have to pay an additional fee to if you want the car you've already paid for.
May the Maths Be with you!
I have signed the boycott petition. It is great to have such an opportunity. The reason I signed is because I work at a State university and as such I am a public servant of the State. Doing research is what I am paid to do by the people of my State. However, once research is completed, it needs to get published. I can post it to various sites, but that does little good -- as others have noted, publication in a 'good' place matters. That is what gets visibility. So, I send a paper to a journal. The editorial assisants then send the paper out to referees. The referees are also usually other professors, frequently work at other State institutions. The referees produce reports and make recommendations about whether the paper should be published. However, referees also work for free. If the paper gets accepted, there are usually some changes that need to be made. No problem. Thus far, the whole process is State funded and nobody has made a dime, other than their salary.
The next step is where the the trouble starts. Before the paper will be given final acceptance for publication by the journal, I am required to sign over the entire copyright to the publishers! Thus, far in the process, they have done nothing. Yet, from this point on, they get to profit from my work and that of the referees.
Publishers will provide .pdf versions of off-prints to the authors. How much does that really cost? However, the .pdf files are getting increasingly limited. The .pdf of my most recent paper include my name as the person who downloaded it. I don't know whether the .pdf files will stop printing after a certain number of copies. If the is technically feasible, I bet they do.
If someone wants to read my paper, they must have access to a library with a subscription to the journal. Subscriptions to journals are massively expensive. Should a member of the people of my State want to have access to my work, if they cannot find a library with access, then they must pay the journal publishers for the right to do so.
What is laughable is that the publishers now also do things like offering an option to have the paper available on-line for free. However, to exercise this option, they want *me* to pay them a large fee. This is a crazy set up. They have added little yet get all the cash.
In all fairness, different publishers have different policies on all this. Elsevier (along with Kluwer) just happen to have both the most restrictive policies coupled with the highest prices. However, if I want to get my work out there, or get a promotion (I already have tenure), then I have to play the game the publishers run with fewer morals than a mafia protection racket.
These then are the frustrations that made me sign the anti-Elseview petition. It is makes me mad. The petition shows that I am not alone in this. Perhaps one day Congress will do something useful and outlaw the practices of the publishers. However, as the publishers use their ill gotten gains from the work of others to pay high priced lobbying firms, I doubt this will happen any time soon.
All that being said, there is one tiny plus side. We professors are pretty smart cookies. There are many ways of getting access to materials, even if the library does not have a subscription. This means that there is a thriving set of back-channels that the greed of publishers have created. More than that, I am not prepared to say.
This should have been done 15 years ago.
I know Elsevier from the other side, from managing the $40K/yr budget of a hospital's Medical Library before the turn of the century. Elsevier's charges and subscription bundling practices were rapacious then; their motto has always been "charge as much as the market will bear, and manipulate the market so we can charge even more."
On scanning my bookshelf, I see that I have picked up a number of books on Blender and 3D modeling that are published by a subsidiary of Elsevier: Focal Press. There are other ways I can get this information, so I will join the boycott and avoid buying books and magazines produced by the Elsevier octopus or any of its obvious subsidiaries.
Animating with Blender, Blender Foundations 2.6 (which is a misleading title since it is not a product of the Blender Foundation and does not describe v2.6 but some imaginary version the author thought was going to become v2.6), and Tradigital Blender are three such books. And, it turns out, all three were written by Roland Hess, whose prose style for some reason makes me sleepy even when he is describing a process I very much want to learn. Maybe avoiding Elsevier's slimy embrace will also cut down on the number of duds that end up in my reference library.
I urge other high tech hobbyists and early adopters to look at the publisher before buying that slick new book or magazine on digital photography, 3D modeling, game development, etc. And join the boycott against Elsevier. It is extremely unlikely that you will miss anything of value in doing so; there are always other sources of greater integrity that you can go to. And by joining the boycott, and talking about it, you would be helping to improve conditions for good health care and scientific research.
Will