Monday, January 30, 2012

Boycott Elsevier?

I just heard about the movement to Boycott Elsevier journals when reading Sean Carroll's blog.

Certainly the success and failure of a peer-reviewed journal depends very much on the participation of scientists, both in terms of submitting good work for publication, and for refereeing these submissions. So if this movement catches on, Elsevier would certainly be faced with quite a challenge.

In my current position, the only Elsevier journal that would be affected is the Nuclear Instrumentation and Method - A. In my "previous life" as a condensed matter physicist, I would say Physica B and Physica C, but not anymore.

So this "boycott" probably won't be affecting us that much since we can certainly bypass NIM-A for other journals.

But what about you? If you are a practicing scientist and you do send work to be published in an Elsevier journals, would you stop doing that? Would you also stop refereeing for an Elsevier journal?

Zz.

1 comment:

noddeat said...

This makes no sense. If you speak about poor countries, for them APS journal are expensive as well, as well as Nature and Science.

It would be good if we all switch to open access journals, but at the moment I don't see that scientific community want to do so.

Instead of boycotting Elsevier one can publish all his pre-prints on arxiv.org, or just provide articles on request to those, who cannot access journals (this is what I do actually).