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Germany's DEAL project (in German), which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017.
The boycott is in response to Elsevier's refusal to adopt "transparent business models" to "make publications more openly accessible."
Elsevier is notorious even among academic publishers for its hostility to open access, but it also publishes some of the most prestigious journals in many fields. This creates a vicious cycle, where the best publicly funded research is published in Elsevier journals, which then claims ownership over the research (Elsevier, like most academic journals, requires authors to sign their copyrights over, though it does not pay them for their writing, nor does it pay for their research expenses). Then, the public institutions that are producing this research have to pay very high costs to access the journals in which it appears. Journal prices have skyrocketed over the past 40 years.
No one institution can afford to boycott Elsevier, but collectively, the institutions have great power.
Germany-wide consortium of research libraries announce boycott of Elsevier journals over open access.
No full-text access to Elsevier journals to be expected from 1 January 2017 on.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @07:58PM
If you are a scientist, show some dignity and backbone and publish in an open-access journal. The library fees will sort themselves out for older work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @10:31PM
An issue here is that as a scientist you can earn as little as $1500 a month. The publishing fees are at least this much.
So while I appreciate the layman's desire to see all scientists fight like Rambo/Rocky clones against the broken system, this is a pretty ridiculous proposition. Yes sure, if you are going to stake it all on winning the 2017 Nobel Prize, but no if you just designed a different nozzle shape for a bunsen burner or confirmed someone else's results (ha ha, just kidding).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:02PM
There are diamond open access journals that charge no publication fee either.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:10PM
I'm tired of this sort of negative advice. Don't publish with Elsevier. Boycott Elsevier. No parking allowed here. Great. What should scientists do instead? Rather hear where to publish, than where not to publish.
The choices aren't much. There's the traditional route. Turn over all copyright to some academic publisher who can paywall all the work anytime they want, and ask as much as they want for access. Elsevier is merely the evilest of these. Then "cheat", and hand out their research to anyone who wants it, and dare the publisher to complain about the copyright violation. Hope an Aaron Swartz comes along someday and liberates the works.
Now choice 2 is author pays. Authors cough up around $500 or maybe as high as $4000 to keep the copyrights so the academic publisher can't legally bar everyone from seeing the work. It's a rotten deal. Many institutions are setting up funding to pay these fees. That's great for the scientists they employ. For scientists on the outside, it stinks. They won't help just any scientists, they will only help scientists working for them.
Choice 3 is to publish on the Internet, somehow. This is disorganized. Can put research papers on http://Arxiv.org [arxiv.org] . Can post in an appropriate group on Usenet. Could even whip up their own websites and "publish" there. One problem is getting the word out. Could send links to Google Scholar.
Another problem are these questionable publishers. Predatory publishers. Setting up a journal and collecting $500 per accepted submission must seem like easy money to grifters looking for their next con. It is little wonder that such predatory journals have exploded in number. Here's a whole website about that: http://scholarlyoa.com [scholarlyoa.com] . Lovely. Another "do not park here" negative help.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:26AM
Cry me a river. Go ahead and publish that kind of stuff with Elsevier. But don't complain if nobody cites because they don't have access
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:50AM
When's that gonna happen? The great science journal war of 2023?
https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/elsevier-announces-2014-citation-impact-highlights2 [elsevier.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:20AM
Better yet, if you're a scientist on the editorial board of a journal, lobby your editors and board members to turn it into open access. Several high profile "declarations of independence" have occurred over the years. [simmons.edu]
In most cases, contractual issues will likely prevent simply moving to open access. But the reason people continue to publish in closed access journals is due to the name and reputation. If the entire board resigns en masse and forms a new journal, it can simultaneously undermine the reputation of the old journal name and give attention within the discipline to the new open access journal, which immediately establishes a level of reputation that a new journal otherwise likely won't have for many years.
The parasitic owners of these journal rights do nothing -- the reputation usually comes from the standards set up by the editors and the prestige of the editorial board. If you're on a board, you're in a position to work toward a more direct fix than simply encouraging scholars to publish elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:03AM
You vastly overestimate the power that an editorial board has. In practice the people running the journal (for money) call the shots. About the only power an editorial board has outside of choosing which articles to accept and in what form is to resign en masse. I'm on the editorial board for a journal and that would have been the only thing we could have done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:19AM
The editorial boards (not the scientific reviewers) tend to be outsourced to India to maximize publisher profits nowadays. This is how, among others, typos in article titles survive into publication.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:53AM
Ahem, the Editorial Board is not the typesetters but the group of (usually) reputable scientists who pick appropriate reviewers for the individual submissions and who have the final say when some of the reviewers want to turn down a manuscript or request major changes before publication.
Still even their resignation would probably not have an immediate impact on the fate of a journal - if you want your contributions to research to be known and recognized, you simply need to publish in one of the journals that everybody in your field reads. If you send it to some new journal or to something "exotic" that has fifteen decades of tradition but publishes in the local language, the best you can hope for is a footnote in somebody else's paper that proclaims to be "the first" to do this work some years later.