Elsevier Boycott

9535 researchers (so far) have signed a petition to boycott the publisher Elsevier, which publishes academic journals.  The reasons for this: Elsevier charge a very high price for individual journal titles.  In order to get a fair price for the titles you want, you have to subscribe to ‘bundles’ (this is when you subscribe to a number of different titles, some of which might be no use to you at all).  Secondly, Elsevier support measures like SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) which aim to restrict the free exchange of information.  (See the website Cost of Knowledge).  Two issues arise here: publishing models and internet privacy.

The problem is not only with Elsevier but with a publishing model that sees academic researchers creating research, taxpayers’ money often funding it, and other researchers reviewing the work, often for free – but publishers charging a high price to make it available.  That means that research departments and libraries like this one spend the greater part of their budgets gaining access to the research. 

There is another way!  The Open Access Model sees authors choosing to make their articles freely available, either by publishing in an open access journal, or in an open access repository, or on a private web page (like a blog, for example).  If you’ve ever found a good academic article on Google Scholar and noticed with relief the link to the side taking you through to a pdf file that you can read online straightaway, you know what I’m talking about.

These issues are further complicated by the efforts of various governments to come up with legislation that will tighten up on online copyright.  The most famous examples of these are SOPA and PIPA mentioned above.  They have been put on hold in the US, I understand, but a similar law has already been passed in Ireland.  The reason why these laws are creating problems for people is that it means that an open access website, such as a blog or YouTube, would itself be held accountable for what people reply or upload.  One well-known example was the case of MegaUpload being taken down recently, in the spirit of these new initiatives.

Bringing it all back home: the library subscribes to the database Science Direct, which is provided by Elsevier, but we don’t subscribe to any of their bundles.  We have an institutional repository where researchers can make their research freely available, and the Higher Education Authority states that any research they fund must be placed in such a repository as soon as possible after publication. 

It’s impossible for this blog post to even mention all the issues raised and there are no easy answers.  The model is still evolving, and the debate is open and heated.  For more info and comment visit the Guardian website. What do you think?  Should information be free?  Should media be free?