But Elsevier has settled on a business strategy of exploitation, aligning itself against the interests of the scientific community. Most of the intellectual work that goes into Elsevier’s journals is provided for free, by scientists whose salaries are largely paid for by taxpayers. Then Elsevier charges exorbitant rates for its journals, with many titles running in the thousands of dollars a year. This sharply curtails the sharing of results - the fuel of scientific discovery - and makes it prohibitively expensive for the public to read what appears in its pages. Yet for Elsevier, this looks like success: In 2010 Elsevier reported revenues of about $3.2 billion, of which a whopping 36 percent were profit.
Now Elsevier is supporting an odious bit of legislation known as the Research Works Act. Currently, the National Institutes of Health has a rule: If the American people pay for research, then they should be able to see the results without paying again. This is simple fairness. Yet the legislation would end that policy, further boosting Elsevier’s profits by locking important biomedical research, the stuff of life and death, behind paywalls.
There has been grumbling about Elsevier for years, but a British scientist recently started an international protest. Timothy Gowers, winner of the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics, wrote a blog post declaring that he would have nothing to do with Elsevier and invited others to join his boycott. A volunteer then set up a Web page - thecostofknowledge.com - to gather signatures. More than 4,600 scientists, including some at MIT and Harvard, have signed on.
These scientists are brave because joining the boycott is not without some risk. The academic world places a great emphasis on publishing. Scientists can work for years to put together a single paper, and if it is taken by a prestigious journal, it can make a career. Publicly defying a big publisher means ruling out options. The editors of the journals, and their editorial boards, also tend to be powerful people in the community. Nobody wants to make enemies.
