There comes a time when enough is quite frankly enough.
Elsevier’s business practices demand a response … why?
- They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
- They sell journals in very large “bundles,” so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
- They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.
So it is now time to take a stand … If you publish, edit, or review Elsevier journal articles, make your opinion known and sign the petition to state that you will no longer do this.
Others backing this Boycott include …
- PZ over at Pharyngula
- Jerry over at Why Evolution is True
- Henry over at the Crooked Timber
- Tim Gowers, in a blog post here
- Forbes also has an article here
You do appreciate that most of the research published in these journals comes from tax-payer funded institutions, so as you might imagine, the way these folks operate really ticks folks off. It is seriously insane, what other industry gets all their materials and the bulk of the labor done for free, then turns around and charges the institutions where those people work extortionate fees to view the material they submitted in the first place!!!
It is possible to break free, the physics community have managed because most of their articles are now freely accessible on the ArXiv, but even that is at risk. Are you aware of the Research Works Act? This, among other things, seeks to stop NIH or other governmental granting agencies from requiring their grantees to ensure that their publications appear in the open-source literature (as NIH requires after 1 year). For more about this, see Derek Lowe’s articles in “In the Pipeline” (a medicinal chemistry blog).
So go sign up.
Curious to find out more? If so, then go here.