Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because its pricing and policies restrict access to work that he feels should be much more easily available.  To read more about the boycott, check out this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Why the boycott? Reasons academics are joining the cause:

• Elsevier charges too much for its journals- it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy titles they don’t want in order to get those that they need

• Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by publicly-funded grant recipients freely available

As of Wednesday afternoon, over 2,700  people have signed up declaring not to support Elsevier journal until changes in operations are made. To join the boycott or learn more, please visit The Cost of Knowledge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Items of Potential Interest, Library Databases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.