Relationships between researchers and some of the commerical journals they publish their research in have been sour for some time.

Now, however, the scientists’ disquiet may have come to a head. On 21 January Timothy Gowers, a distinguished mathematician based at Cambridge University, UK, published a statement on his blog explaining why he refused to contribute to journals published by Elsevier and inviting his colleagues to do the same.

Less than a month later, the number of signatories is now close to 6,000. Over a thousand of these are mathematicians, but many other disciplines are represented including over 800 biologists and over 300 clinicians.

Signatories may choose whether they pledge to boycott publishing in Elsevier journals, reviewing for or editing them, or all of these.

The boycott home page, http://thecostofknowledge.com/ lists three reasons why researchers should focus on Amsterdam-based Elsevier, which is owned by the transnational Reed Elsevier group. 

These are: the group charges “exorbitantly high” prices for their journals; the lowest-cost model through which academic libraries purchase those journals requires them to take “bundles” including titles they are not interested in; and they have expressed support for legal measures in the US such as the Research Works Act that are designed to slow the burgeoning growth of open-access publication.

Many researchers who support the boycott stress that their quarrel is not just with Elsevier, but that for various reasons that company’s behaviour can be considered so egregious that it is considered “a good initial focus for [their] discontent”. For example, Springer, a similar-sized commercial publisher, was spared similar treatment largely because of the goodwill it has built up in the mathematical community as a publisher of textbooks.

Elsevier is certainly one of the publishing industry’s “big boys”. In 2010, the latest year for which figures are available, it made a profit of £724 million (€864 million) on a turnover of £2 billion. It owns over 2,000 journal titles, including some of the most prestigious: Cell and the Lancet, and, in our own discipline of oncology, the European Journal of Oncology, the Lancet Oncology, and Cancer Cell. 

The parent company Reed Elsevier also owns Reed Business International, publishers of the UK’s prestigious popular science magazine, New Scientist. It is likely that biomedical scientists and clinicians who choose to join the boycott will end up restricting their publication options significantly.

While Elsevier itself has simply published a denial of the researchers’ charges – emphasising the benefits of its work for scholarship, and refuting the notion of its “excessive” charges – some individual journals’ editorial offices are taking a different stand.

The Research Works Act, which seeks to outlaw the US NIH’s popular policy of requiring its funded researchers to make their papers freely available within a year of publication, is a case in point. Elsevier has publicly defended its support for the Act, quoting its aim as ensuring that “the US government cannot enshrine in law how journal articles … are disseminated without involving publishers”. Conversely, however, the Lancet has denounced the Act on its website, calling it “a damaging threat to science” and linking itself with not-for-profit academic publishers such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science in rejecting it.    

Researchers – even those who support the Elsevier boycott – hold a wide range of opinions about the future shape of academic publishing and what the “next steps” in any campaign against over-commercial publishing might be.

Some would like to see the death of the journal altogether, with research published in open-access repositories. Others would like to see journals continuing to be published but with the growing open-access model as exclusive or predominant, and still others favour a greater role for not-for-profit publishers such as learned societies.

There are growing calls from researchers who support open access, such as Stephen Curry, a structural biologist from Imperial College, London, and a prolific blogger, for an open discussion with Elsevier, and there are some signs that the publisher is willing to talk.

A protest that began with a single blog post may come to have long-term implications for the whole business of scholarly publishing. It may not be surprising that some commentators have even compared the Elsevier boycott to the Arab Spring.

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