23 days ago by Henning Bertram
It is not at all surprising that Elsevier would be a vocal SOPA supporter… If I wanted to wax lyrically, I would say that the winds of the Arab spring are now blowing through the dusty halls of academia — but that is not correct: the whole Open Access thing started before all that. But there is a another pattern, though: Big Content, that for decades needed to do little to see revenue pouring in, suddenly notices that something is going on, that society and technology have moved on, and that their ways of doing business are beginning to become obsolete. And instead of adapting to or exploring these new ways, their impulse is to run for legal cover — merrily assisted by, it seems, US Democrats more often than not.
Universities have to pay thousands of dollars every year to read their own research online. Blame the broken economics of academic publishing. “This morning, I searched for an article about autism on JSTOR, the online database of academic journals. I have a child on the autistic spectrum, and I like to be aware of the latest research on the topic. I could not access any of the first 200 articles that contained the word “autism.” That’s because, for the most part, only individuals with a college ID card can read academic journal articles. Everyone else, including journalists, non-affiliated scholars, think tanks and curious individuals, must pay a substantial fee per article, if the articles are available at all.
I later found one article that was available for $38. I’m not sure why one twelve page article costs $38. It takes me about eight minutes to scan a twelve page article. The researcher receives no royalties. Why does it cost so much to read one article?”
Putting the nix on open access? — has links to a few open/close access discussions.
Friends Really Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals “This is a plausibly effective form of collective action, since these journals, published by a notably rapacious and demonstrably dishonest commercial enterprise, rely on a lot of volunteer work to keep going. If academics stop working for Elsevier journals for free, either because they sign up to these commitments, or because they get the broad feeling that Elsevier is bad news, then the company’s business model collapses.”
Cracking Open the Scientific Process “Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.”
Elsevier = Evil ‘Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act. This is a bill to, it says, “ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector”, where the important phrase is “private sector” — it’s purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information.’
Information wants to be free. Congress wants it to be held for ransom. “Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is trying to end taxpayer access to publicly-funded research.”
A science-centric SOPA boycott “Here’s another SOPA supporter for you to boycott: Elsevier, publisher of many medical and scientific journals. You might also remember them from a 2009 scandal where Elsevier published fake journals as covert advertisements for pharmaceutical companies.”
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The news this morning...