Unfortunately the boycott is not focused on the real issue. The problem is not that the journals cost too much, but that they cost anything at all. Keeping the electronic articles behind a paygate prevents easy linking, organizing, and discussing them on the web. The ACM is as guilty of this as Elsevier.
I don't think it's accurate to group in ACM and IEEE with Elsevier. Taking from something I said last week, the ACM and IEEE are professional organizations. Their main purpose is to represent the interests of the community of professionals in computing. If they stop charging for articles, they can still exist as an organization. Their members just need to elevate the issue to the point that the larger organization changes its policy.
Elsevier, on the other hand, will cease to exist if they stop charging. Their main purpose - their business model - is to charge for access to their journals. This business model is no longer necessary, and these companies will eventually die.
(1) It is a step in the right direction, and it's a step that is small enough for more people to take. Why does thecostofknowledge.com have over 2000 names after a week, while research without walls has under 500 after several months?
I think the difference is that thecost is a focused effort that asks less from researchers. Perhaps this would / will be easier when there are more well-regarded journals using an acceptable publishing standard.
(2) I had an interesting discussion with rms about the core problem with for-profit academic publishers. He made some excellent points arguing in favor of what he called "redistributable publishing" (which we could also call "free-to-copy publishing" ?) The argument is that some definitions of "open access" do not ensure the right of any individual to pass on articles, and, as we can see with software and other electronic data, this right can make a huge difference. So, from that perspective, some aspects of open access could be said to not go far enough.
I would love to see as much access and freedom as possible for any research produced by people who want it to be free. I think the best way to do this involves a bit of understanding and pacing for those whose careers depend on how they handle this move.
The (financial) cost is not a side issue. With Elsevier bundling different journals together, the outrageous charges really hurt the libraries. The last time I recommended my library two books to purchase, they asked me to choose one since their budget was limited and the books seemed to be on similar topics and available via interlibray loan.
Being a scientist myself, I am in favor of open access, but I also think that affordable access is the next best thing. I am not compromising on this, if a publishing house that published low cost journals supported RWA, I would boycott them, too. There is no reason to be militant, though. Once open access becomes standard, people will demand it more easily. Note that one reason for Gowers's public declaration was to make this "socially acceptable". Unfortunately, it is not yet so.
Perhaps the whole landscape can be changed in one move, and we should shoot for the stars, but this has to be done by the scientists, and generally speaking they are busy doing science. An easier goal is much more realistic.
This being said, I would also like to add that I think there is an opportunity here for a startup. Just like PG et al's Viaweb, perhaps someone can come up with a store that allows a board of directors to leave a journal and setup shop easily?
I think a lot of scientists see this boycott as a beginning of that process. But even with open access, the scholarly community needs to find a way to recognize worthwhile research that is at least as effective as the current peer review system. Related to a link I gave in another comment, here's a proposal by John Baez for independent "referee boards" as a layer on top of free servers like arXiv.org:
If no money is changing hands; who's gonna edit, typeset and print them? Who is gonna manage mail, comments from readers and so on? Pimple-faced volunteering undergrads?
I think desire to have everything free is a fantasy of the open source community. Not everything can be run like open source software project. Sometimes people need to get paid.
My university actually requires that I publish my dissertation through a particular electronic publishing agency (UMI/ProQuest), who would like to put it behind a paywall. I have to pay an additional $95 fee to make my dissertation "Open Access". (Of course, I can and will put it up on my own site, but that doesn't stop the publishing organization from charging people for access to their copy.)
This is good news. As an undergrad at a liberal arts college (and a community college transfer) I'm painfully aware of how much information is locked away behind the Elsevier pay wall. In my case, I wanted to do an independent study project looking at citation analysis in early molecular phylogenetics, but so many of the relevant papers are locked away that I just gave up.
This is the second time that Elsevier et al. have tried to kill PubMed Central. I hope that this is a turning point in the OA movement.
"What publishers charge for is the distribution system. We identify emerging areas of research and support them by establishing journals. We pay editors who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers.
And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter. All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more efficient. That's the added value that we bring.
There's been a lot of discussion of this on science blogs lately, and I do think the momentum is picking up (though it's easier for us physicists than it is for people in biology and medicine). But while Elsevier really does seem to be worse than most academic publishers, the whole system needs to evolve. One proposal that I like is John Baez's idea of independent "referee boards", described here:
I don't agree with his support for the RWA, but, it could be construed as consistent with his opposition to SOPA from an anti-government perspective: keep regulations low, keep the government out of the internet (SOPA) and the private publishing business.
Of course, given that the RWA is really trying to keep a system that charges the public twice for research they've already paid... but anyhow, that's a rationale.
I'm a strong supporter of academic Open Access whenever possible, so it should be no surprise to anyone that I rather like this. To be completely honest, I had expected this to go like many protests and boycotts do and to have minimal impact. I'm glad it appears I'm going to be wrong about that.
Knowledge has an incredibly large impact on the possibility of the betterment of human life, be it individually or socially. It is better for everyone if knowledge is more widely available, those who run businesses involved with its distribution included.
[+] [-] jacoblyles|14 years ago|reply
Open access or nothing.
[+] [-] scott_s|14 years ago|reply
Elsevier, on the other hand, will cease to exist if they stop charging. Their main purpose - their business model - is to charge for access to their journals. This business model is no longer necessary, and these companies will eventually die.
[+] [-] tylerneylon|14 years ago|reply
(1) It is a step in the right direction, and it's a step that is small enough for more people to take. Why does thecostofknowledge.com have over 2000 names after a week, while research without walls has under 500 after several months?
http://www.researchwithoutwalls.org/
I think the difference is that thecost is a focused effort that asks less from researchers. Perhaps this would / will be easier when there are more well-regarded journals using an acceptable publishing standard.
(2) I had an interesting discussion with rms about the core problem with for-profit academic publishers. He made some excellent points arguing in favor of what he called "redistributable publishing" (which we could also call "free-to-copy publishing" ?) The argument is that some definitions of "open access" do not ensure the right of any individual to pass on articles, and, as we can see with software and other electronic data, this right can make a huge difference. So, from that perspective, some aspects of open access could be said to not go far enough.
I would love to see as much access and freedom as possible for any research produced by people who want it to be free. I think the best way to do this involves a bit of understanding and pacing for those whose careers depend on how they handle this move.
[+] [-] atakan_gurkan|14 years ago|reply
Being a scientist myself, I am in favor of open access, but I also think that affordable access is the next best thing. I am not compromising on this, if a publishing house that published low cost journals supported RWA, I would boycott them, too. There is no reason to be militant, though. Once open access becomes standard, people will demand it more easily. Note that one reason for Gowers's public declaration was to make this "socially acceptable". Unfortunately, it is not yet so.
Perhaps the whole landscape can be changed in one move, and we should shoot for the stars, but this has to be done by the scientists, and generally speaking they are busy doing science. An easier goal is much more realistic.
This being said, I would also like to add that I think there is an opportunity here for a startup. Just like PG et al's Viaweb, perhaps someone can come up with a store that allows a board of directors to leave a journal and setup shop easily?
[+] [-] Bootvis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steuard|14 years ago|reply
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html
[+] [-] cop359|14 years ago|reply
I think desire to have everything free is a fantasy of the open source community. Not everything can be run like open source software project. Sometimes people need to get paid.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] estevez|14 years ago|reply
This is the second time that Elsevier et al. have tried to kill PubMed Central. I hope that this is a turning point in the OA movement.
[+] [-] ilamont|14 years ago|reply
"What publishers charge for is the distribution system. We identify emerging areas of research and support them by establishing journals. We pay editors who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers.
And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter. All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more efficient. That's the added value that we bring.
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Journal-Boycott-Grows/130600...
[+] [-] Steuard|14 years ago|reply
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-i...
There's been a lot of discussion of this on science blogs lately, and I do think the momentum is picking up (though it's easier for us physicists than it is for people in biology and medicine). But while Elsevier really does seem to be worse than most academic publishers, the whole system needs to evolve. One proposal that I like is John Baez's idea of independent "referee boards", described here:
http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/ban-elsevier/
[+] [-] itg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trauco|14 years ago|reply
Of course, given that the RWA is really trying to keep a system that charges the public twice for research they've already paid... but anyhow, that's a rationale.
[+] [-] unavoidable|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPBEggo|14 years ago|reply
Knowledge has an incredibly large impact on the possibility of the betterment of human life, be it individually or socially. It is better for everyone if knowledge is more widely available, those who run businesses involved with its distribution included.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]