The fight against academic publishers is heating up as Tyler Neylon’s website continues to gain support against Elsevier. If you haven’t heard, the website is a place where you can publicly declare that you will boycott Elsevier, one of the academic publishers with particularly terrible practices. It may have been created in response to Timothy Gowers’ public boycott declaration, and it is supported by him and many other famous scientists and mathematicians. As of today there are 3867 total signatories, and 544 signatories in computer science alone.
First off, why is Elsevier (and most other academic publishers) so evil? In a nutshell, they exploit the work of academics (funded by taxpayers) to turn incredible profits without adding much value. Journals are run by volunteer editors (academics), papers are reviewed by volunteer reviewers (academics) and papers are written by academic researchers. Moreover, researchers are expected to prepare “camera-ready” versions of their papers, which makes the paper almost entirely ready for publication. Publishers charge exorbitant subscription fees for their journals, but their costs are minimal and their value-add is effectively non-existent.
But publishing companies effectively have a monopoly on the top journals that academics need to publish in to advance their careers. Alternative publishing venues haven’t caught on because publishing there doesn’t carry the same weight as publishing in elite journals like Nature and Science. The fact is that academia, as it pushes the boundaries of knowledge, is very conservative about accepting change. Thus, despite the fact that several alternatives have been proposed (i.e. this, this and maybe even the Arxiv along with several more abstract proposals), academia has been slow to adopt alternative venues/media for publication.
Movements like “The Cost of Knowledge” are designed to combat the inherent inertia in academia, in hopes that we can converge on a better method of publication. Once academics realize that the many of their colleagues are boycotting Elsevier/Springer/etc, it will become much more reasonable for them to boycott as well. And once the majority of a field boycotts one of these companies, either alternative publishing venues will gain credibility, or the company will be forced to change its policies/pricing/etc or risk going under.
To me, the only issue is that this movement has to involve academic institutions as a whole in addition to individual researchers. Institutions use impact factor of journals as a surrogate for research quality and use this metric in hiring and tenure decisions. Until this changes, young, untenured researchers are going to be reluctant to boycott publishing companies that run elite journals because of the career implications that boycott has. This is probably one of the primary reasons why I haven’t joined the boycott yet.
The public boycott does have some interesting side-effects. First, the fact that the boycott is public and supported by top researchers means that it is more likely to gain traction. The fact that there is a list of elite researchers who are boycotting may influence how institutions make hiring decisions, which could kick start a positive feedback loop resulting in a much more powerful boycott. A more indirect effect is that top researchers are now boycotting elite journals, meaning that the quality of those journals will decline. This might force institutions to rethink how they make hiring decisions while also enabling alternative publishing media to flourish.
Whether the boycott is successful or not, enough people are up in arms (in the blogosphere, etc.) about publishing that it finally seems that academics have enough traction to prompt some sort of change in the academic publishing system. Hopefully we’ll see some positive changes in the next couple of years.
akshaykrish 