Where do we sign the petition/protest list?
On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
> Date: Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:10 AM
> Subject: [tt] As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
> To: tt@postbiota.org
>
> (Wiley is another candidate)
>
> http://chronicle.com/article/As-Journal-Boycott-Grows/130600/
>
> January 31, 2012 As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
>
> A petition effort to boycott Elsevier, the journal publisher, was inspired
> by
> a blog posting by Timothy Gowers (above), a prominent mathematician at the
> U.
> of Cambridge.
>
> By Josh Fischman
>
> A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal
> publisher,
> is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end
> of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to
> an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's
> journals, including refereeing papers.
>
> The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that
> Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to
> protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will
> keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.
>
> "Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the
> publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal
> access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure
> why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one
> dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."
>
> She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said
> that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40
> percent
> when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.
>
> Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing
> industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and
> we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant
> professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they
> charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after
> reading about it on Facebook.
>
> Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal
> publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some
> observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal
> content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if
> publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from
> valuable research tools.
>
> The Boycotters' Complaints
>
> According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals
> including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic
> researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company
> bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones,
> forcing
> libraries to spend money to buy things they don't want in order to get a few
> things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed
> federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies
> like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by
> grant recipients freely available.
>
> The complaints surfaced on January 21 in a blog post by Timothy Gowers, a
> prominent mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has won the
> Fields
> Medal, math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. "Why do we allow ourselves to
> be
> messed about to this extraordinary extent, when one would have thought that
> nothing would be easier than to do without them?" he wrote. "It might help
> if
> there were a Web site somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not
> to
> contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names
> electronically. I think that some people would be encouraged to take a stand
> if they could see that many others were already doing so."
>
> Within days, just such a Web site surfaced. It's called The Cost of
> Knowledge, and biologists, social scientists, and others began signing the
> pledge along with mathematicians.
>
> Sean M. Carroll, a prominent cosmologist and senior research associate at
> the
> California Institute of Technology, signed the pledge and added on his own
> blog that Elsevier charges "amazingly exorbitant prices to university
> libraries—and then makes the published papers very hard to access for anyone
> not at one of the universities."
>
> Senior scholars like him, and Mr. Gowers, arguably have little to lose by
> turning their backs on well-regarded journals. But the protest has also
> reached junior scholars like Mr. Abrahams of Albert Einstein, who has yet to
> gain tenure.
>
> "I have three papers I'm hoping to submit in the next 12 weeks. One was
> destined for Cell, and another for Neuron," also published by Elsevier, he
> said. "It would have been a real feather in my cap to publish there. But I
> won't, based on this week's discussions." His work, focused on identifying
> genes related to autism, will go other places. "There are other good
> journals. And, long term, I'd like my library to be able to use its limited
> resources to better ends" than high journal prices, he said.
>
> That could signal real problems for Elsevier, says Kevin Smith, director of
> scholarly communications at Duke University Libraries. "Librarians have long
> complained about prices and bundling journals together, and nothing has
> changed," he says. "Now it's not just the customers who are complaining.
> It's
> the suppliers."
>
> Academic librarians may buy journals, but it's the scientists who produce
> and
> submit articles that make them worth buying, he says. "If they are upset,
> there is a chance they may change the system."
>
> The Company Responds
>
> Ms. Wise, from Elsevier, says she understands why libraries complain about
> prices. "Globally, the amount of research that's published and needs to be
> read is going up every year. But library budgets are not keeping pace."
>
> That is why her company offers a variety of packages and pricing schemes to
> libraries, and negotiates discounts based on institution size, type, and
> usage patterns. And while Elsevier in the 1980s and 1990s did increase
> prices
> steeply year after year, that has stopped. "We got it wrong then. But we've
> improved and have become good citizens," she said. So much of the community
> ire comes from past reputation, not present practice, she said.
>
> Individual academics often do not have accurate notions about prices and the
> value of journals, particularly when they are sold in groups, said Thomas
> Reller, the company's vice president for global corporate relations. "They
> don't have access to library usage figures. They see journals that they
> don't
> use, and wonder why the library has them. It's because other people are
> using
> them, but the individual doesn't know that."
>
> Indeed, Mr. Gowers wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle, "I don't have
> detailed facts at my fingertips: So many people have complained about
> Elsevier that I am inclined to believe that there is something to the
> complaints." He also agreed that libraries are not forced to buy bundles of
> journals but said "that the costs of buying journals individually are so
> high
> that it's not far off compulsion."
>
> Mr. Reller counters, emphatically, that the way to look at prices is per
> use,
> or download, of the individual articles, and that viewed that way, "access
> to
> published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever."
>
> Elsevier officials declined to provide specific examples of its journal
> prices, saying they were negotiated privately with individual institutions.
>
> Ms. Wise said that it's also a misconception that publishers like Elsevier
> make scientists pay to read their own work. "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."
>
> The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment
> in those products, she added: "It's not a disavowal of the National
> Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid
> inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor
> to
> PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles, Mr. Reller
> pointed out.
>
> Those arguments, however, are lost on senior scholars like Mr. Gowers, who
> told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one
> another's
> papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a
> commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.
>
> Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr.
> Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's
> gone,"
> he said.
>
> _______________________________________________
> tt mailing list
> tt@postbiota.org
> http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt
>
>
>
> --
> - Bryan
> http://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "DIYbio" group.
> To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
--
Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
0 comments:
Post a Comment