7 ms·

It is going to be tough for grad students, post docs and non-tenured scientists to join the boycott if Elsevier publishes the top journals in their field. Getti

by wycx 15y ago

It is going to be tough for grad students, post docs and non-tenured scientists to join the boycott if Elsevier publishes the top journals in their field. Getting a job is hard enough, and impact factor matters for getting a job. What I would like to see is societies that have their journals published by Elsevier remove their endorsement of those journals and start new journals not published by Elsevier. In my particular field I would love to see The Geochemical Society no longer endorse the Elsevier-published Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (arguably the premier geochemistry journal) and start a rebel open access, or at least reasonably priced journal. If you are a member of a society that publishes a journal with Elsevier, contact your society's president as suggest they stop publishing with Elsevier.

_delirium 15y ago
That's happened in a few fields. Three CS examples I know of are, 1) the association endorsing the Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier) withdrew endorsement in 2000, and the editorial board resigned en masse to form Theory and Practice of Logic Programming; 2) the editorial board of Machine Learning (Kluwer) resigned in 2001, moving to the newly created Journal of Machine Learning Research; and 3) the Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier) board resigned in 2003 to form Transactions on Algorithms. Donald Knuth wrote a lengthy letter that spurred that last one (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf). I think there were a few others in that era that slip my mind. Not sure why the pace slowed down after that flurry of activity, though. Possibly effort has gone towards more institutional initiatives like PLoS, rather than the "editor revolt" style of initiative that was semi-popular in the early 2000s. Physics and the social sciences (incl. law) seem to have partly sidestepped the access problem in practice by making centralized pre-print repositories (arXiv for physics, SSRN for social sciences) de-facto standard places to deposit preprints. Not sure why that hasn't developed in other fields, or what could be done to encourage it.

by wycx 15y ago

_delirium 15y ago

That's happened in a few fields. Three CS examples I know of are, 1) the association endorsing the Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier) withdrew endorsement in 2000, and the editorial board resigned en masse to form Theory and Practice of Logic Programming; 2) the editorial board of Machine Learning (Kluwer) resigned in 2001, moving to the newly created Journal of Machine Learning Research; and 3) the Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier) board resigned in 2003 to form Transactions on Algorithms. Donald Knuth wrote a lengthy letter that spurred that last one (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf). I think there were a few others in that era that slip my mind. Not sure why the pace slowed down after that flurry of activity, though. Possibly effort has gone towards more institutional initiatives like PLoS, rather than the "editor revolt" style of initiative that was semi-popular in the early 2000s. Physics and the social sciences (incl. law) seem to have partly sidestepped the access problem in practice by making centralized pre-print repositories (arXiv for physics, SSRN for social sciences) de-facto standard places to deposit preprints. Not sure why that hasn't developed in other fields, or what could be done to encourage it.