The Cost of Knowledge

February 3, 2012

Elsevier, the Dutch global publishing company, “owns” about 2,000 peer-reviewed journals, as well as 20,000 medical and science books. More important, the piratical publishing company charges libraries too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions, which forces libraries to spend extra funds to buy journals they don’t want just to gain access to the few journals they do want (and which uses up budgets otherwise available for books and other journals); and it recently supported the Research Works Act to actively prevent the open, free publication of articles written by federal grant recipients (using your tax dollars).

Timothy Gowers of Cambridge University (UK), who won the Fields Medal, the highest prize one can earn in mathematics, has had enough of “profit-making on the back of publicly-funded science” and has organized a boycott of Elsevier.

As of today, February 3, more than 3,500 scientists and scholars have pledged not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.

And Elsevier may be just the beginning, as they are not the only large publisher creating a for-profit bottleneck in the dissemination of knowledge. Benjamin R. Seyfarth, a computer science professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, notes:

“With the moves of these mega-publishers, we’re seeing the beginning of monopoly control of the scholarly record. Nearly all university research is funded by the public and should be available for free.”

(via canisfamiliaris)

2:15pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZuwNYyFqNEFM

(Notes: 35)