My new piece is now up the LSE Impact Blog — in which I recognise that it’s a mistake to think of Elsevier and other for-profit barrier-based publishers as evil.  The money quote: For the rest, read the article: Visibility is currency in academia but it is scarcity in publishing. The push for open access shows that academic publishers can’t serve two masters. By the way, if you read it, do leave a comment;

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog trying to determine what the terms are for Elsevier’s elective open-access articles — what they term “Sponsored Articles”.

I have discovered a new nugget of information in my ongoing quest (part 1, part 2, part 3) to discover what the licence terms are for author-pays Gold Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You will recall from way back in part 1 that Elsevier’s own “Sponsored Articles” page doesn’t include that information. A while after I posted that, they added a link to this page.

I was searching for some information — what proportion of Elsevier’s revenue is from journal subscriptions.  So far, I’ve been unsuccessful with that (can anyone help?), but along the way I stumbled across Elsevier’s Annual Reports and Financial Statements for 2011. And it makes happy reading.

This post is part three in what, astonishingly, seems now to be an ongoing series about trying to discover what Elsevier’s licenses are.  For parts one and two, see: What actually is Elsevier’s open-access licence? What have we learned about Elsevier’s open-access licence? Today I read an article that I think was meant to be encouraging, but which instead I found disturbing.

Well, I’ve had most of the day now to digest the news that Elsevier have withdrawn their support of the Research Works Act; and a few hours to get used to the idea that the Act itself is now dead.  I’ve had some time to think about what it all means. My first reaction was to be really delighted: the banner headline suggested a genuine change of direction from Elsevier, such as I had challenged them about a few weeks ago.

I just received this notification that Issa and Maloney have pulled the Research Works Act, presumably in response to Elsevier’s withdrawal of support.  So far, what’s at that link is all I know — I’ve not found a more official source for the text of the statement.  But it makes me happy that it includes language like: That represents a realism and progressiveness that I didn’t honestly expect to see from these quarters.

The story so far As we all know by now, barrier-based publishers like Elsevier and Springer sometimes offer authors a choice to upgrade their papers to open access by payment of a fee: Elsevier calls this a “sponsored article”, Springer calls it “Open Choice”, and other publishers have other names for similar facilities.

Two weeks ago, Brian Kraatz and I attended one of Edward Tufte’s workshops on presenting data and information. I’ve been meaning to blog about that, and still plan to when I get time to breathe. But something came up then that has been stuck in my head ever since.

A very quick note to let you all know that my new article is now up at Discover Magazine’s guest blog, The Crux.  Entitled It’s Not Academic: How Publishers Are Squelching Science Communication , the topic will not be unfamiliar to SV-POW! readers.