Tim Gowers replies to Elsevier's open letter | Hacker News Reader

Tim Gowers replies to Elsevier's open letter

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64 pointsColinWright9 comments

I like the way the open letter says that Elsevier supports open access to public research when Elsevier is actually lobbying against open access to public research. (e.g. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807)

All that needs to happen is that public research grants have to require you to make your paper available free of charge through a suitable system. Such a system is obviously trivial to provide on the internet.

Then we can save the time having to deal with retarded "open letters" or creating petitions like servants.

There's a bill that could do this - FRPAA = Federal Research Public Access Act:

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/index.shtml

The ethics committees that have to approve most bioscience research could also mandate open access. Fundamentally I think this is an ethical issue, particularly where people volunteer as research subjects for clinical trials.

The solution to this is sadly to revolt, en masse. Which is to say the journals cannot exist without papers, and so institutions which are providing free access to their academics papers are effectively revolting. Elsevier will not survive the transition but I do not believe it will be missed either.

At this moment in time, this instant, there is an opportunity to create an alternative to Elsevier and its journals. New journals with a reasonable policy and non-extortionate pricing. If the idea of an organizing identity makes sense then its an opportunity that won't come around again for a while.

The senior faculty need to revolt first. The junior faculty need to jump through hoops and be judged by that cohort in order to keep their jobs (i.e. get tenure). If the senior faculty really want a change to occur, all they have to do is change how they evaluate which publications "count".

New quality journals would be great. Better: new journals with known-good editors, and a way to spread the word that they exist.

There are also emerging platforms that are less traditional, and that I personally like, such as simply posting on arXiv, or things like academia.edu. But it's much easier to move the math world to new journals than to an entirely new system.

I think computer science is in a pretty good place. My impression is that most work is published at conferences that are generally pretty open about republishing (at least the papers may be hosted on the authors' websites). I'm not sure if any of the big CS journals fall under the Elsevier umbrella or not.

I haven’t tried recently, but maybe if I tried to open an Elsevier article from the computer in my departmental office I would have no trouble. But all that would say is that Elsevier didn’t have a completely stupid system for opening articles. [Edit: Since writing that paragraph I have discovered that I can open Elsevier papers with no trouble at all from my office, and with only a small amount of effort from home. But others may not be so fortunate.]

This leader of the boycott seems to know less about the details than I would expect. Maybe it doesn't change the principle of the thing.

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