Scientists are up in arms and are signing an online pledge to boycott Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, a publisher which sells over 2,000 academic journals such as Cryogenics, The Lancet, Cell, the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books.
At this writing there were more than 4,000 signatories, many from distinguished academics at such institutions as Harvard, Yale, McGill, Cambridge and Oxford. They promise not to submit work to Elsevier journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them. The number is growing daily.
The online pledge site, “The Cost of Knowledge,” was set up by mathematician Tyler Neylon in response to a January 21st blog post by Fields medalist Timothy Gowers, a Cambridge mathematician, outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. The site states, “The key to all these issues is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work.”
Gowers accuses Elsevier of charging too much for its products. Secondly, that it “bundles” journals, forcing libraries wishing to subscribe to a particular publication to buy it as part of a set including several others they may not want. Third, that it supports legislation such as the Research Works Act, a bill that is presently before the US Congress that would forbid the government from requiring that free access be given to taxpayer-funded research.
Elsevier says its charges are average for the industry, according to Nick Fowler, its director of global academic relations, and its price increases have been lower than those from other publishers in recent years. Fowler told The Guardian that the claim about bundles was “absolutely false.” “Elsevier allows you to buy articles at the level of the individual article, to buy a single journal, any combination of any number of journals and everything we have,” he said. “There are benefits that come from taking more, which is a very standard practice, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the choice [not to] – but then you can’t expect a discount.”
The Economist, February 4, says the petition is “symptomatic of a wider conflict between academics and their publishers—a conflict that is being thrown into sharp relief by the rise of online publishing. Academics, who live in a culture which values the free and easy movement of information (and who edit and referee papers for nothing) have long been uncomfortable bedfellows with commercial publishing companies, which want to maximize profits by charging for access to that information and who control many, though not all, of the most prestigious scientific journals.” It concludes that “publishers need academics more than academics need publishers…Beware, then, the Academic spring.”
