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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 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.