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."

Comments

Public is Public

[deweyhewson]

It should be simple: what the research funded fully, or even partially, by the public? Then all the results from it should be fully available to the public. If researches don't like that, they can be free to seek private funding, in which chase a reasonable restriction would be that all privately funded research becomes available to the public after ten years, since knowledge is a public good.

This whole mentality of taking the public's money but then hiding the knowledge behind paywalls, even to the researchers themselves, is counterintuitive to the progress of the human race, and is not acceptable.

Re:Seriously

[Fluffeh]

they were the rudest bunch of people i've ever met for interviews. was told i'd be contacted for a second interview, but it never came. ..... but i was expecting to either hear that i was turned down, or given an offer to turn down myself.

I don't think that this is indicative of just this company, but a trend of many companies who are mismanaged. If the senior management is not able to ensure that senior staff are higly motivated and proactive, then this sadly cannot be passed further down the structure. I have noticed this happening in a number of companies and think it is a case of focusing too much on the unimportant (but visible/KPI-able) things and not worrying too much about the actual business/greater good. I see more and more governments/politicians/businesses thinking short term, tracking their KPIs and really having no-one at the helm or taking strong leadership. I think this trend in the last few years has become more and more visible where the measure of a person's ability to do their job is split up into little bite size chunks that can be measured - and people work on making them look good, but the overall business/government/etc suffers as there isn't really a simple KPI to measure overall performance.

I also think that this same problem lies with Elsevier. Too much focus has been placed on making sure that profits go up each quarter and too little is placed on long term viability. Being jerks like this, in the short term will generate more money as people will have less and less options to get access to data/journals, however in the long term, they are alienating their users and by the looks of it, the folks that are publishing these papers. I would bet that if you looked at individual KPIs for the folks at Elsevier, they are all meeting their targets and look fantastic on paper even though they are potentially killing the company.