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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @04:27AM
Including MIT (which is virtually part of the Ivy League except for sports) and their west coast counterparts (Stanford, UCal, etc) are discussing this boycott and seriously considering whether to join it.
Remember, money talks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:31PM
The boycott won't work until they change the tenure system. Why would a junior faculty member stressing over "publish or perish" forgo publishing in a high-impact journal? It is easy for you to cry "waah, waah, open access, waah," but it isn't your career on the line and you're not the one investing seven years for a chance to grab the brass ring. The junior faculty are the ones who have to publish more, so if you want them to not publish in these journals, you need to incentivize it somehow, such as change the weight given to journal impact numbers.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 28 2016, @09:18PM
This is why the boycott must be lead by the institutions rather than the individual scientists -- which is exactly what's being discussed. And I'll add that it needs to be an actual boycott, not just a press release. If the University you want to work for is boycotting Elsevier and you need to show them that you've published ten papers, then you better have those papers published somewhere that isn't Elsevier. If the papers are only published in an Elsevier journal, then as far as the boycotting university is concerned they don't exist.
Get every Ivy League to boycott Elsevier and it means every researcher who works for or wants to work for an Ivy League institution HAS TO boycott Elsevier too.