As journal boycott grows, Elsevier defends its practices
Josh Fischman, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
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.
As of the afternoon of the 7th, the online pledge is up to 4,524 people.
With the rise of the internet and along with it the arXiv, the issue of free access to (publicly-funded or otherwise) scientific papers has slowly fomented and come to a head. While arXiv provides access to preprints (i.e. un-peer reviewed copies of papers) it’s difficult to find and search for the final versions of older articles. And if you do find what you’re looking for, there’s no guarantee the paper will remain there long-term.