The end of greedy publishers is near

Submitted by niko on Tue, 2012-01-31 10:50

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General Discussion / Free-for-All

Cambridge Mathematician and Field's medalist Timothy Gowers calls for a boycott of Elsevier journals to protest their common practice of overcharging and inflexible subscriptions:

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

Wonderful news indeed, and a move everyone should follow. Brandeis currently pays more that $500,000/year for their Elsevier package because we are forced to either take Elsevier's all-or-nothing package or we pay $20 - $30 per article, every time we require access.

One could probably include other publishers in the boycott for similar reasons (see earlier posts by Alexis and niko). For us it might be a bit difficult to implement a total boycott since our main journal (JSB) is published by Elsevier. Let's see what happens.

Alexis Thu, 2012-02-09 11:45

A very good overview of the debate surrounding scientific publishing, including competing bills in Congress, can be found here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/02/federal_r…

One thing HHMI should do perhaps is follow the example of Harvard and company and require that their researchers grant them nonexclusive rights to distribute their publications.

The open-access movement has been gathering steam. Harvard adopted an open-access policy in 2008. The policy requires faculty to grant their institution a nonexclusive right to freely distribute their scholarly articles. Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of California-Berkeley followed in September 2009; as did Princeton in September 2011. But the university policies allow their researchers to apply for waivers from the open-access requirement if publishers won’t let them make their papers available. The current NIH rule and the broader Federal Research Public Access Act have no such loophole.