The Cost of Knowledge. Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier
- They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
- In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large “bundles”, which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential.
- They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.
La reacción de Timothy Gowers, matemático de la Universidad de Cambridge, y medallista Fields, está organizando un boicot a Elsevier:
… What about coordination between academics? What is to stop all the other editorial boards of Elsevier journals following the example of the board of the Journal of Topology? I actually don’t know the answer to that: I can only assume that not enough people on those editorial boards care to make it worth it to them to go through what is likely to be a somewhat unpleasant and time-consuming process.
If top-down approaches to the problem don’t work, then what about bottom-up approaches? Why do any of us publish papers in Elsevier journals? …
La respuesta de Graham Taylor, Director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the UK Publishers Association, en The Guardian (Branding academic publishers ‘enemies of science’ is offensive and wrong).
