Declining Elsevier

2012-02-10T11:00:00Z

That's the screenshot of my reply to a review request from Theoretical Population Biology. It was a little uncomfortable for me to make that reply because (a) my co-author and I sent off revisions for an invited paper that will appear in a special issue¹ of TPB and (b) one of the editors was my major professor at Stanford and I shared an office with another of the editors for a year or two as a post-doc.

But as you can see, I shook off my discomfort and made a statement.

Nearly 5000 scientists have now signed the pledge.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Gareth Cook summarizes things this way:

Elsevier has settled on a business strategy of exploitation, aligning itself against the interests of the scientific community. Most of the intellectual work that goes into Elsevier's journals is provided for free, by scientists whose salaries are largely paid for by taxpayers. Then Elsevier charges exorbitant rates for its journals, with many titles running in the thousands of dollars a year. This sharply curtails the sharing of results - the fuel of scientific discovery - and makes it prohibitively expensive for the public to read what appears in its pages. Yet for Elsevier, this looks like success: In 2010 Elsevier reported revenues of about $3.2 billion, of which a whopping 36 percent were profit.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that pledging not to publish in, edit, or review for Elsevier journals is low-cost for me. TPB is about the only Elsevier journal that publishes things in my field, other than a couple of the Trends journals. For scientists in some other fields, Elsevier is dominant, and joining the boycott is much more costly.

¹It won't happen again. If I'd been thinking at the time we received the invitation, I might have declined. I say "might" instead of "would have" because my co-author is a relatively junior scientist without a permanent academic position and the opportunity for her to publish this work in an invited issue gives her CV some cachet it might not have otherwise. It's not a make or break proposition, but it may help her. That being said, I think that if we were asked now, she might also choose to decline the invitation.

Uncommon Ground

Declining Elsevier