Scientists boycott academic journals to protest the high cost of paywalls

It began with a frustrated blogpost by a distinguished mathematician. Tim Gowers and his colleagues had been grumbling among themselves for several years about the rising costs of academic journals.

They, like many other academics, were upset that the work produced by their peers, and funded largely by taxpayers, sat behind the paywalls of private publishing houses that charged UK universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the privilege of access.

There had been talk last year that a major scientific body might come out in public to highlight the problem and rally scientists to speak out against the publishing companies, but nothing was happening fast.

So, in January this year, Gowers wrote anarticle on his blog declaring that he would henceforth decline to submit to or review papers for any academic journal published by Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals in the world.

He was not expecting what happened next. Thousands of people read the post and hundreds left supportive comments. Within a day, one of his readers had set up a website, The Cost of Knowledge, which allowed academics to register their protest against Elsevier.

The site now has almost 9,000 signatories, all of whom have committed themselves to refuse to either peer review, submit to or undertake editorial work for Elsevier journals. “I wasn’t expecting it to make such a splash,” says Gowers. “At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up.”

Read the rest at Raw Story
Scientists boycott academic journals to protest the high cost of paywalls

by Alok Jha, The Guardian

This is a piece in an important new trend that is rising. There is a brewing war over open access versus property rights. Open access is eventually going to win, but it will likely involve a mighty struggle by TPTB to maintain control over access and erect tollgates and exact rents. When the world is against you, it is hard to win, however.