Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop?
from the is-it-different-this-time? dept
It's now widely recognized that the extreme demands of SOPA/PIPA catalyzed a new activism within the Net world, epitomized by the blackout effected by sites like Wikipedia on January 18. But as Techdirt has reported, SOPA and PIPA are not the only attacks by the copyright industries on the digital commons: another is the Research Works Act (RWA), which attempts to remove the public's right to read the articles written by tax-funded researchers in open access journals form.
But, like SOPA/PIPA, RWA may have been an intellectual land-grab too far. It has provoked a rebellion by academics that might provide the final push needed to move academic publishing from its current mode, dominated by hugely-profitable corporations that require payment for most of their output, to one based around open access journals, with smaller profits, but whose articles are freely available online to all.
Things started when Peter Suber, who is widely regarded as one of the unofficial leaders of the open access movement, pledged on January 7 not to work with any publisher that accepted the Association of American Publishers' position supporting RWA. But it was a blog post two weeks later by the British mathematician and Fields Medallist (think Nobel Prize of mathematics) Tim Gowers that provided the spark for the explosion of anger that followed:
I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.
He singled out the giant publisher Elsevier (disclosure: I used to work for one of its sister companies) for three main reasons. First, for its scholarly journals' high prices; secondly, for its use of "bundling" -- forcing libraries to sign up for large collections of journals, whether they wanted them all or not; and finally, because of its support for SOPA, PIPA -- and RWA.
Gower's gesture was born of personal exasperation, but one that he knew many others shared. The question was how to mobilize people so that their collective action would have an effect. He wrote:
It occurs to me that it might help if there were a website somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not to contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. I think that some people would be encouraged to take a stand if they could see that many others were already doing so, and that it would be a good way of making that stand public.
Within a couple of days, Tyler Neylon had set up just such a site, "The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier", which repeats the three main objections that Gowers raised, and invites people to refrain from working with Elsevier. At the time of writing, nearly 2,000 academics from a wide range of disciplines have pledged their support for the boycott.
This is certainly the most visible revolt in recent years against the exorbitant profits of companies like Elsevier, and their tight control of the academic publishing process, but it's not the first or the biggest. Back in 2000, right at the dawn of open access, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was created with the same aim of making research more widely available. To achieve this, the three founders of PLoS circulated an open letter calling for "the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form", which contained the following passage:
To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, we pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published
Nearly 34,000 scientists signed that letter, but only a handful of publishers committed themselves to making their articles available as the letter requested; worse, few signatories followed through with their promised boycotts of the publishers who refused. Will things be any different this time, in the post-SOPA world?
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Filed Under: academics, boycotts, journals, open access, peter suber, publishing, tim gowers
Companies: elsevier
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Catchy Comment Title...
Given all of that grief, I think it is safe to say that I will not, to the best of my abilities, be publishing in any journal partnered with elsevier or sciencedirect. They ensnare all the content they get their hands on and severely impede the progress of science and education.
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Re: Catchy Comment Title...
Have you read Danah Boyd's 2008 article on open access publishing at the university? I've always thought this was an excellent read.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/02/06/openaccess_is_t.html
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Re: Re: Catchy Comment Title...
Second, that is why I have (almost) created the "journal of open science." I have the domains and hosting, but have yet to really put the time into establishing it as intended. I have other obligations for this Spring, but sometime soon (again, in a relative sense) I will explore gathering a team to assist me and figure things out. Once I do have the time, I will bring it online as another journal complementing both PLoS and arXiv, amongst several others out there. There is open source software specifically targeted at hosting an open journal (found here), but it is a bit clunky and immature. For now, I am looking into adapting something with a larger support base (such as WordPress or Joomla) to my needs.
Third, I do think that the current bias against online publishing is mostly a matter of PR and allowing the next generation the time to really cement it in as a competitor to "paper based" publishers.
*I have not yet read the article at the link you posted, but I will soon.
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You should check out Annotum
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Re: You should check out Annotum
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Re: Re: Re: Catchy Comment Title...
I can definitely see that there would be a difference between academic and private research and development. At least in my department, there was a heavy bias against any online publishing, but we definitely have an older department. Perhaps the graduate students just haven't been exposed yet. I know that many of the top schools are encouraging their professors to publish openly. We'll see!
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That's a little bit outdated
Academics have many options, too. The Public Library of Science (http://plos.org), mentioned above, has several journals that are well respected in their fields.
Even those academics who do feel compelled to publish in an Elsevier journal can support this boycott until the Research Works Act is pulled.
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Re: Re: Catchy Comment Title...
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Re: Catchy Comment Title...
Simply put of course !!! Those who are educated use another sysytem that is more open sourced and easier to share ideas and knowledge.
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Knowledge should never be locked up.
Just think of all the millions of hours of time lost forever because scientists and researchers wind up recreating information because it was not easily found.
My own experience is different. I went back to college for an advanced degree. The college I was at start off with us paying for our text books and we would also get access to an e-book for one price. This for me at least was the best. I don't like to read a book that is a thousand pages long on a computer screen. So I would read the text and use the electronic version to make notes and highlight, etc...
Then they switched to only e-books and we still had to pay the same price. I changed schools after that but not before making a hard push with a lot of students joining me to fight against it. The college basically said too bad. Besides myself I know of at least 14 other students that also changed.
The part that makes me the most angry. I still have the text books I paid for, but not access to the e-books that I paid the same amount of money for.
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Support the alternatives
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OT: Hollywood paying interns to get signatures for SOPA follow-up.
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Re: OT: Hollywood paying interns to get signatures for SOPA follow-up.
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https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petitions
Oppose HR3699, the Research Works Act
Probably not an effective protest but better than nothing.
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Re:
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It's only a matter of time for AIP to disentangle itself from its spell of infatuation of elsevier
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Rights
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THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY...
"Why did 34,000 researchers sign a threat in 2000 to boycott their journals unless those journals agreed to provide open access to their articles - when the researchers themselves could provide open access (OA) to their own articles by self-archiving them on their own institutional websites?"
Not only has 100% OA been reachable through self-archiving as of at least 1994, but over 90% of journals have even given author self-archiving their explicit green light. Over 60% of them, including Elsevier -- have given their green light to self-archive the refereed final draft ("postprint") immediately upon acceptance for publication...
So why are researchers again boycotting instead of keystroking?
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
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Slight error
This isn't quite right. The closed-access commercial publishers who support the RWA do not want the government to require that their non-OA journals allow for/provide OA access to the articles that had government funded research after a year or so. The research is not just in open access journals. But, they may be turning science opinion that direction with their behavior and actions.
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"unofficial" leader?
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Self-Inflicted Injury
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Major Problem with this strategy
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Re: Major Problem with this strategy
The boycott is against giving Elsevier your work so they can claim it is their intellectual property, not against citing articles they have published. Besides, how does "having all journals at one's beck and call" work at the moment? It doesn't, though Elsevier tells congresspeople that all you have to do is go to the library, so there is no access problem. They've been saying this for years in the face of the evidence.
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Re: Major Problem with this strategy
That probably requires making use of the fair use right to copy entire books for academic purposes (which exists in the US, even if courts don't usually recognize it).
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Re: Re: Major Problem with this strategy
Frankly most of the others are nearly as bad. Springer is a grasping organization which nobody should ever publish with, rather unlike when it was run by Julius Springer personally. I'm sure the others are just as bad.
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An ally in Obama?
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