"A spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals."
Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. These are some of their objections:
They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential.
They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.
The key to all these issues is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details on this page.
"Two recent articles call for an openness revolution in science: one on GigaOM and the other in the Wall Street Journal. But they’ve got it all wrong. These folks are missing that the process of scientific discovery is not, at its core, an open process. It only becomes an open process at the point of publication."
The last part of this article is crap. Open Access already has a standard license and it's BY-SA. Suggesting BY-NC-ND is regressive. Academics have strong standards already against derivative works. The only market for academic publications is a bizarre artificial one that, honestly, both scholars are being exploited by. Neither NC nor ND is solving real problems. If we're going to suggest standardization, lets have it be on what we really want as opposed to what we might be able to live with.
New publishing imprint from a major publisher to use only CC works available for free on the Internet at the time of publication. Hal Abelson is on the advisory board.
