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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."
How fucking greedy can you get? You want OUR tax dollars to sell us what we payed for back at a profit. Fuck off Elsevier!
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.
I wonder if we could get a sense of who was boycotting out of some rough total? Or get a sense by geographic region/school affiliation. It would be fascinating.
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?
No wonder Elsevier seems worried about the future of its business model.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Elsevier withdrew their support for the RWA three weeks ago.
Maybe an update that included that little detail would have been more useful?
It's obvious that their goal is to monopolize the distribution of information paid for by the public, and if they back down now it's only because they intend to try again later when the public eye is off of them, much like the RIAA/MPAA and their attempted purchase of SOPA/PIPA.
So mentioning of an irrelevant, temporary detail is pointless.
Fan-freakin-tastic! I detest Elsevier and Wolters-Kluwer and other publishers/purveyors of medical literature. They put everything behind extremely expensive paywalls. I get around them by using my university's institutional subscription access, but still it's a PIA. Whenever anyone on my online listservs without access asks for an article, I play librarian and get it for them for free. I once asked Wolters-Kluwer for permission to cite research findings from a medical article in a free medical app I wrote. They wanted $795. I reiterated that the work I am doing is free and educational. They relented "just this once". I now never ask again for permission from large publishers who unfortunately hold the intellectual property rights to much medical literature (instead of the study authors themselves, oddly). I always ask permission from authors and researchers, but no longer from publishers, as they just want to monetize and gouge. Don't need that. -- JSt
The singularityhub.com talks a lot about open-access journals, which are a completely different thing than open access to papers. In my field (physics), most journals have no problem with authors who post their papers on arxiv.org in parallel with publication in the journal, and almost everyone does exactly that. It doesn't matter the slightest bit that Physical Review isn't open access, because essentially all the papers that appear in it these days are openly accessible on arxiv.org.
Hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition. Academia is conservative, and in fact many of the open-access journals are really of terrible quality. For instance, the Journal of Modern Physics publishes kook material like this paper, which their peer reviewers clearly weren't qualified to detect as nonsense.
The right solution is for people to refuse to publish in journals that won't let them post their own work online for free. Physicists have done this, and the battle is won -- has been, if I remember correctly, since the 90's.
The singularityhub article has a graph claiming that "open access increases citations." Well, that's kind of silly. It depends on how good, original, and important your work is, and it also depends on what venues you're comparing. There are high-quality non-free journals and there are non-free junk journals. There are high-quality open-access journals and there are open-access junk journals such as the Journal of Modern Physics. What I guarantee will increase citations is if, in addition to publishing your paper in the best (open or non-open) journal you can, you also make it available for free someplace like arxiv.org, so that your colleagues can access it easily. (Even for people who have institutional access to journals, pulling papers out of the publishers' crappy web interfaces is an extremely painful process, and every interface and database works differently.)
Open-access journals, as opposed to open access to papers, only become crucial if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where the non-open journals all actively enforce a prohibition against posting your papers online for free.
Find free books.
Members of the general public are right to be angry about having to pay twice for public work. And access to that work is crucial, not just for the edification of knowledgeable laypeople, but so that professionals such as private physicians and patient advocates can make decisions and give advice that are scientifically justified and up-to-date.
However, we in academia should be much more angry, because we have to pay many times over.
We pay...
* Nearly all institutions charge an overhead, usually around %50, on grant money. This is the manner in which well-funded researchers enrich a university. The overheads or "indirects" are meant to pay for library subscriptions, support staff, infrastructure, etc. Equipment is typically exempted, as it becomes university property.
** Most campuses have some level of subscriptions, but most are also missing access to key journals. I'm not talking about Harvard or MIT here, but state schools, foreign universities, research foundations.
.: Semper Absurda
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
to liberate and openly publish scientific research articles, wherever you find them.
Science is a joint co-operative human activity with its main goal the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of all, and its intellectual products by all rights belong in the public domain by their very nature. If you want to charge me money for binding and a glossy cover, so be it, but as to the raw content, you don't own it. A huge tree of giants standing on each others shoulders created it and humanity owns it jointly.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
America doesn't have any more greedy people than any other nation. The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries. Greedy people tend to be more successful, and hence both more visible and more influential, shaping the corporate culture you observe.
Unfortunately, it's also rare in that it can also reward effort commensurately. Often it won't, but you only have to make a few bright people very productive to bump the GNP way up.
My wife graduated top of her class in med school. After finishing her BS, so far she's been doing 60-110 hour weeks for 7 years. She'll finish just over a decade of that before she's free to practice. If the pay was under $100k/yr after all her effort, she would have quit a few years ago, cut her losses, and done interior design--low pay but she'd also find it fun and low stress. She loves medicine and her career, but it's just too much work to not have some kind of extra incentive.
Genuine business entrepeneurs often are required to make a similar sacrifice, but with a much higher risk of being broke at the end of the day, hence the ridiculously high earning potential. A 26 year old worth $30 million told me how he and his buddy finished their MS degrees in CS and wandered around for a year doing research, then worked another year or two at 80 hours a week before making a nickel. They had a great model, and it paid off big in the end. It's about 5 years later now. Many, many, many more fail, but his contribution produced many steady jobs and other economic benefits that are very real.
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it. Americans seem to think so, and we have big SUVs and large new homes to show for it. Go Team.
The rest of the world has public welfare to take care of its poor.