[Rather than summarise what’s already been said about Elsevier and their for-excessive-profit practices in recent weeks, I’ll just lazily assume you’ve read it all… right then. Here’s what I have to add.] This post is a real-world anecdote of the problems that Elsevier’s journal bundling & excessive profiteering*** causes.

A couple of days ago, we noted that PLoS ONE publishes more open-access articles in a month than all of Elsevier’s 2637 journals put together publish in a year.  This time I would like to consider why that is. I am genuinely interested here, and I’d like to hear from people who have considered publishing their own work as open access in an Elsevier journal.

A few weeks ago, software developer and pioneering blogger Joel Spolsky made an important point about SOPA/PIPA which has stayed with me: And of course the same thing applies to the RWA.

I only became aware of the term Academic Spring the other day but I instantly loved it. The OA wars have heated up significantly in the past few weeks, and Academic Spring crystallizes a lot of what is going on. Although we always welcome new readers, and no-one who cares about science can afford to be ignorant about access to scholarly publications, we do sometimes feel that at SV-POW! we are mostly preaching to the converted.

Der “Research Works Act” , die Gesetzesinitiative, die nationalen Forschungseinrichtungen in den USA jegliches Engagement für den Grünen Weg des Open Access untersagen möchte, hat nun eine Gegenspielerin: den “Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2012” (PDF). Diese Gesetzesinitiative möchte nationale Forschungseinrichtungen verpflichten, Publikationen, die im Rahmen von geförderten Projekten entstehen,

How many open-access papers are getting published these days?  And who’s doing it?  Inspired by a tweet from @labroides (link at the end so as not to give away the punchline), I went looking for numbers. We’ll start with our old friends Elsevier, since they are the world’s largest academic publisher by volume and by revenue.

I have just sent this letter to the Editorial Office of the brand new open-access journal Biology Open, which has just published its very first issue. I feel like a bit of a jerk sending a criticism when they’re just up and running, but I think it’s the best thing in the long run.  I will let you know what they say if/when they reply. Update (28 March 2012). They did: read all about it.

I read an article on the Times Higher Education website: Research intelligence – The emeriti seizing a late licence to roam .  It’s about how many retired academics are finding that, freed from the administrative responsibilities of their university jobs, they are able to be more fruitful in their research after retirement. Interesting stuff, so I wanted to read the paper that the article is based on: Thody, Angela. 2011.

Image via Wikipedia When the history of the Research Works Act, and the reaction against it, is written that history will point at the factors that allowed smart people with significant marketing experience to walk with their eyes wide open into the teeth of a storm that thousands of people would have predicted with complete confidence. That story will detail two utterly incompatible world views of scholarly communication.

Like many scholarly publishers that work primarily on the subscription model, Elsevier allows authors to opt in to open access by paying a fee, currently $3000.  (While that’s more than twice the $1350 that PLoS ONE charges, it’s comparable to the $2900 that PLoS Biology charges, identical to Springer’s $3000 fee, and slightly less than Taylor &