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Scholars call for boycott of Elsevier over high prices and copyright maximalism [Updated]

Mega-publisher Elsevier has been garnering some negative publicity of late. Last month it was revealed that its political action group funded the re-election campaigns of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), one of the authors of the controversial Research Works Act (H.R. 3699) that would prohibit open access to articles resulting from government-funded research.

[Update: On 2/27/2012, Elsevier announced it no longer backed the Research Works Act, and the sponsoring legislators subsequently announced they will not pursue the bill further.]

Now, thousands of scholars are signing an agreement to boycott Elsevier in protest of its high subscription prices, its practice of bundling journals (so libraries are forced to subscribe to titles they don’t want), and its support of restrictive legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act. Although members of the library community have protested such practices by Elsevier and other large publishers for years, this marks the first occasion that members of the research community–the people who write the articles and serve as peer reviewers or editors–have taken a large-scale stand.

Timothy Gowers, a prominent mathematician, wrote a blog post on January 21, 2012, in which he discussed the issues outlined above and asked, “Why can’t we just tell Elsevier that we no longer wish to publish with them?” A reader took up the challenge and created a website where scholars could register their dissatisfaction and refusal to provide free labor for Elsevier in the form of research, peer review, and editorial duties. Within its first ten days of existence, the website has collected the signatures of over 2,700 scholars worldwide.

The boycott has received a lot of media attention, perhaps especially because it has grown so exponentially in such a short period of time. And many writers are asking: because scholars are both producers and consumers of research journals, do they have the ability to disrupt the scholarly publishing system and effect lasting change?

Further reading:

Just Scan It!

If you are in Snell Library and are frantically looking for a photocopier, stop your searching. Why? Because the library is photocopier free! Yes, that’s right– the old copy machines in the Library were replaced with environmentally-friendly scanners last year.Located on floors 1-4 of the Library, these easy-to-use scanners are a green alternative to copy machines. They help save trees and reduce paper-use by allowing students to save the scanned image to their email, USB flash drive, or Google Docs account, instead of printing out unnecessary and wasteful hard copies of documents. If you still need a paper copy of the scanned document,  it can be emailed and then printed out using the printers at the Library.

And the best part? The scanners are absolutely free! Now you don’t have to suffer from a guilt trip every time you want a copy of something– just go green and use the scanning stations instead! If you haven’t yet, use one of the scanning stations today, and feel good about making copies!