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University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access (sciencemag.org)
The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced this week that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. From a report: Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide. The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.
These journals should be available to all.
A generation ago when the journals had to be printed and distributed then of course there had to be a hefty fee. But now, it should be placed on the web. The submitters do the research and the work writing the article (and they're not paid); reviewers aren't paid; submitters do the formatting (so there is no cost there).
The cost is almost entirely website access and data storage .
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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The people reviewing the publications are often other researchers in the field who aren't paid for their services. These journals aren't employing anyone who understands whether or not the articles are good.
Actually, in my experience, the editors-in-chief (EiC) (who usually do get paid) are chosen from researchers in the field and do understand the basic technology/science/topci, even if they aren't an expert on the specific article in question. Several times I was asked to review an article by an EiC, because he knew if the article wasn't good, I'd do a thorough job skewering it (and he suspected the article was not good.) I finally got mad and said, "You know these are junk. Can't you send me something good to review?" He laughed and said, "OK. It's just you're so good at the negative review. I have problems finding people who will take the time to fully critique a bad article."
My friend who's EiC for a journal in another field (chemistry) and I debated this. He points out, as do other posts here, there are legitimate costs that have to be covered, and being EiC takes A Lot of time. So we need a means for covering that, either by user/reader fees or by writer/contributor fees. My response is "OK, but (1) PROFIT is not a legitimate cost to be covered. (2) Administrative costs need to be minimized, and a for-profit organization has no particular incentive to do that." At that point, we pretty much agreed-to-disagree, but we did agree that the current model was not working well.
It's about time!
Elsevier has been paywalling scientific research - most, if not all of which was paid for in part or in whole by taxpayers throughout the developed world - since 1947. It's way past time that what amounts to its systematic theft of what should be completely public data came to a screeching, grinding, clattering halt.
Yes, yes, it's also been responsible for any number of unethical practices, including offering Amazon gift vouchers to researchers who agreed to give the company a 5-star rating on the platform, and publishing sham journals, but that's not the main reason it deserves to die. Nor is its campaign to persuade governments and academic institutions alike to shut down open access publication of scientific research, not just by lobbying for legislative restrictions, but by filing lawsuits against universities for allowing their academic researchers to publish open-access copies of their own research papers on their employers' servers.
No, Elsevier deserves to die because it has deliberately misused its virtual monopoly on academic publishing to prevent both researchers and the public from reading an enormous library of published studies, access to which is vital for new research to be conducted in a staggering number of disciplines. It should die because it insists on standing in the way of progress.
If the UC system doesn't allow Elsevier to bribe it into reversing its decision to divorce itself from the company's extortion-based business model, I suspect the remainder of the USA's public universities will swiftly follow its lead. I certainly hope they do - because every other college and university on the planet will undoubtedly follow suit.
The very next step after that should be that the state and national governments which provided funding for the researchers whose articles are still locked behind Elsevier's paywall demand the company surrender them to the public domain.
And fuck Elsevier's shareholders. They've been gorging at the public trough for far too long, as it stands ...
Check out my novel.