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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: 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.