Starting around 2012, Timothy Gowers had much to say about the practices of Elsevier. Very roughly speaking, he argued that Elsevier made research articles expensive to access and profited heavily from the volunteer work of peer reviewers. Sympathetic individuals established a website called "The Cost of Knowledge", which hosts the electronic signatures of over 15,000 academics who have agreed to boycott Elsevier to some degree.
Things are relatively quiet now compared to the flurry of activity that followed Gowers' series of posts. The most recent information I can find is Greg Martin's letter of resignation from the editorial board of Elsevier's "Journal of Number Theory", which was posted to Gowers' blog in May of 2013. In it, Martin writes (emphasis mine):
As far as I can tell, Elsevier’s responses to our concerns ended up being limited to a slight easing off of support for legislation limiting access to our research, together with a nominal reduction in individual journal prices. Regarding the latter, however, Elsevier’s “bundling” practice remains in place, making individual journals’ prices essentially irrelevant. Their (aggressively defended) lack of pricing transparency from one institution to another also speaks volumes, in my mind, to the limits of their desire to seriously address our pricing concerns.
My feeling is that not much has changed in the past two years, particularly since I would expect to hear an update from Gowers if any major victories had been won.
Can anyone provide more up-to-date information about Elsevier's pricing, bundling, and access practices?
Answer
(converted from a comment on request).
I don't think much has changed about pricing, but Elsevier has made open access all the content of their journals in mathematics after a 48 month embargo (source). This was a very appreciated move: mathematicians often rely on old articles for their research, so 4 years isn't too long to wait (for some), for this discipline. It is also a shrewd move from Elsevier, since it pleases their audience but doesn't cut into their main source of income, which are yearly subscription access deals with university libraries.
Maybe this will encourage academics from other fields to consider a similar protest to obtain the same boon...
No comments:
Post a Comment