« Scalzi vs. Franzen on E-Books |
Main
| If I Can't Share, I Can't Dance »
January 31, 2012
Tyler Neylon on What Elsevier Should Do
Posted by Alan Wexelblat
Yesterday I published an entry around "The Cost of Knowledge" petition organized by Neylon. In the entry I noted that the petition did not call for specific action on Elsevier's part.
Neylon very kindly responded in comments, but his item was caught by our overzealous spam filters. I've now published the comment and would like to draw attention both to it and to what it links to, which includes a link to a blog entry by Tim Gowers on what to do next.
The blog post mostly seems to be "rah rah electronic journals in math" which is all well and good. Yay electronic journals. But it misses points I thought I'd raised in my first blog post, which I'll try to summarize here:
- What do you expect Elsevier to do? For example, asking them to join the forces opposing the abomination that is ACTA would be a good step in showing they understand why their support of SOPA/PIPA was a mistake.
- How do you expect a move to publication in electronic journals to impact the all-important tenure and promotion cases that academics must make? I believe it's the tight binding of sci/tech publications to these key career steps that gives companies like Elsevier extraordinary leverage. Until academics themselves work to break those ties I don't think much is going to change.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Culture
POST A COMMENT
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Oh and by the Way
- › Tor Sees No Increase In Illegal Copies After One Year DRM-Free
- › Free Publication on "Seismic Shift" in CA Copyright Law
- › EFF Challenges Bad Patent Filings - But There's a Bigger Issue
- › Video Game Development Game Ironic Piracy
- › British Photo Copyright Orphans' Concern
- › Mike Masnick Curb-Stomps Jaron Lanier
- › Microsoft Appears Ready to Relent on Xbox DRM
1. Stevan Harnad on February 2, 2012 7:11 PM writes...
POGO: WHY ARE RESEARCHERS YET AGAIN BOYCOTTING INSTEAD OF KEYSTROKING?
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/869-.html
While the worldwide researcher community is again busy working itself up into an indignant lather with yet another publisher boycott threat, I am still haunted by a “keystroke koanâ€:
“Why did 34,000 researchers sign a threat in 2000 to boycott their journals unless those journals agreed to provide open access to their articles – when the researchers themselves could provide open access (OA) to their own articles by self-archiving them on their own institutional websites?â€
Not only has 100% OA been reachable through author self-archiving as of at least 1994, but over 90% of all refereed journals (published by 65% of all refereed journal publishers) have already given their explicit green light to some form of author self-archiving — with over 60% of all journals, including Elsevier’s — giving their authors the green light to self-archive their refereed final drafts (“postprintâ€) immediately upon acceptance for publication…
So why are researchers yet again boycotting instead of keystroking, with yet another dozen years of needlessly lost research access and impact already behind us?
We have met the enemy, Pogo, and it’s not Elsevier.
(And this is why keystroke mandates are necessary; just keying out boycott threats to publishers is not enough.)
Permalink to Comment2. Kai on February 5, 2012 3:17 PM writes...
Stevan, I think you're too complacent on what has been achieved. Elsevier is one of several big anti-science publishers who are fighting open-access mandates tooth and nail, not just via RWA but also individually acting against open access policies such as MIT's. Elsevier is requiring MIT authors to opt out of our OA policy (cf. http://libraries.mit.edu/sites/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-access-at-mit/mit-open-access-policy/publishers-and-the-mit-faculty-open-access-policy/).
Permalink to Comment