The Cost of Knowledge is a protest by academics against the business practices of academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests were a call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to information. The main work of the project was to ask researchers to sign a statement committing not to support Elsevier journals by publishing, performing peer review, or providing editorial services for these journals.
Before the advent of the Internet, it was difficult for scholars to distribute articles giving their research results. [1] Historically, publishers performed services including proofreading, typesetting, copyediting, printing, and worldwide distribution. [1] In modern times, all researchers became expected to give the publishers digital copies of their work which needed no further processing – in other words, the modern academic is expected to do, often for free, duties traditionally assigned to the publisher, and for which, traditionally, the publisher is paid in exchange. [1] For digital distribution, printing is unnecessary, copying is (almost) free, and worldwide distribution happens online instantly. [1] Internet technology, and with it the aforementioned significant decrease in overhead costs, enabled the four major scientific publishers – Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and Informa – to cut their expenditures such that they could consistently generate gross margins on revenue of over 33%. [1]
In 2006, the nine editorial board members of Oxford University's Elsevier-published mathematics journal Topology resigned because they agreed among themselves that Elsevier's publishing policies had "a significant and damaging effect on Topology's reputation in the mathematical research community." [2] An Elsevier spokesperson disputed this, saying that "this still constitutes a pretty rare occurrence" and that the journal "is actually available today to more people than ever before". [2] Journalists recognize this event as part of the precedent to The Cost of Knowledge campaign. [3] [4] In 2008, the Journal of Topology started independently of Elsevier, and Topology ended publication in 2009.
Similarly, in 2015 the entire editorial board of the Elsevier journal Lingua resigned and founded a new, open access journal called Glossa . Lingua continued to exist, albeit with a lower impact and much changed reputation.[ citation needed ]
On 21 January 2012, the mathematician Timothy Gowers called for a boycott of Elsevier with a post [5] on his personal blog. This blog post attracted enough attention that other media sources commented on it as being part of the start of a movement. [6] The three reasons he cited for the boycott are high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act, and the Research Works Act. [4] [7] [8] The "Statement of Purpose" on the Cost of Knowledge website explains that Elsevier was chosen as an initial focus for discontent due to a "widespread feeling among mathematicians that they are the worst offender." [9] The statement further mentions "scandals, lawsuits, lobbying, etc." as reasons for focusing on Elsevier. [9]
Elsevier disputed the claims, arguing that their prices are below the industry average, and stating that bundling is only one of several different options available to buy access to Elsevier journals. [7] The company also claimed that its considerable profit margins are "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation". [4] Critics of Elsevier claim that in 2010, 36% of Elsevier's reported revenues of US$3.2 billion was profit. [10] Elsevier claimed to have an operating margin of 25.7% in 2010. [11]
A 2016 study evaluating the boycott stated that in the past four years 38% of signatories had abandoned their "won't publish in an Elsevier outlet" commitment and that only around 5000 researchers were still clearly boycotting Elsevier by publishing elsewhere. It concludes "Few researchers have signed the petition in recent years, thus giving the impression the boycott has run its course.". [12]
In February 2012, analysts of the Exane Paribas bank reported a financial impact on Elsevier with the company's stock prices falling due to the boycott. [13] Dennis Snower criticised the monopoly of scientific publishers, but said at the same time that he did not support the boycott even though he himself is the editor-in-chief of an open-access journal on economics. He thinks that more competition among the various journals should instead be encouraged. [14] The Senate of the University of Kansas has been reported to consider joining the boycott of Elsevier. [15]
In 2019, the University of California (UC) system announced that it was cancelling its Elsevier subscriptions, citing costs and lack of open access. [16] Similar steps were taken by other universities, including MIT in 2020, [17] SUNY in 2020, [18] Florida State University in 2018, [19] UNC Chapel Hill in 2020, [20] and Louisiana State University in 2019. [21] In 2021, the UC system negotiated a new 4-year "pilot" agreement with Elsevier that permits UC researchers to publish in Elsevier journals on an open-access basis and restores access to Elsevier journals for UC libraries, [22] following similar open-access agreements with Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 (for 4 years) [23] and the Norwegian university system in 2019 (for 2 years). [24]
In allusion to the revolutions of the Arab Spring, the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily newspaper called the movement the "Academic Spring" (German : Akademischer Frühling). [25] When the British Wellcome Trust made a commitment to open up science, The Guardian similarly called this the "Academic Spring". [26] After the Wellcome Trust announcement, The Cost of Knowledge campaign was recognized by that newspaper as the start of something new. [27]
A website called "The Cost of Knowledge" appeared, inviting researchers and scholars to declare their commitment to not submit papers to Elsevier journals, not referee articles for Elsevier's journals, and not participate in the editorial boards.
On 8 February 2012, 34 prominent mathematicians who had signed The Cost of Knowledge released a joint statement of purpose explaining their reasons for supporting the protest. [28] [29] In addition to Timothy Gowers, Ingrid Daubechies, [30] Juan J. Manfredi, [31] Terence Tao, [28] Wendelin Werner, [28] Scott Aaronson, László Lovász, and John Baez are among the signatories. Many signatories are researchers in the fields of mathematics, computer science, and biology. [32] On 1 February 2012, the declaration had a thousand signatories. [33] By November 2018, over 17000 researchers had signed the petition. [34] The success of the petition has been debated. [35]
On 27 February 2012, Elsevier issued a statement on its website that declared that it has withdrawn support from the Research Works Act. [36] Although the Cost of Knowledge movement was not mentioned, the statement indicated the hope that the move would "help create a less heated and more productive climate" for ongoing discussions with research funders. Hours after Elsevier's statement, Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney, who were sponsors of the bill, issued a joint statement saying that they would not push the bill in Congress. [37] [38] Earlier, Mike Taylor of the University of Bristol accused Issa and Maloney of being motivated by large donations that they received from Elsevier in 2011. [39]
While participants in the boycott celebrated the dropping of support for the Research Works Act, Elsevier denied that their action was a result of the boycott and stated that they took this action at the request of those researchers who did not participate in the boycott. [40]
On the same day, Elsevier released an open letter to the mathematics community, stating that its target is to reduce its prices to $11/article or less. [38] Elsevier also opened the archives of 14 mathematics journals back to 1995 with a four-year moving wall. [38] In late 2012, Elsevier made all of its "primary mathematics" journals open access up to 2008. [41] The boycott remains in effect.[ citation needed ]
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or thesis. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
Sir William Timothy Gowers, is a British mathematician. He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998, he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.
RELX plc is a British multinational information and analytics company headquartered in London, England. Its businesses provide scientific, technical and medical information and analytics; legal information and analytics; decision-making tools; and organise exhibitions. It operates in 40 countries and serves customers in over 180 nations. It was previously known as Reed Elsevier, and came into being in 1993 as a result of the merger of Reed International, a British trade book and magazine publisher, and Elsevier, a Netherlands-based scientific publisher.
Nature Portfolio is a division of the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature that publishes academic journals, magazines, online databases, and services in science and medicine.
The term serials crisis describes the problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications, especially scholarly journals, outpacing academic institutions' library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers' needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than inflation for several decades, while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining subscriptions. The increased prices have also led to the increased popularity of shadow libraries.
Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.
Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering algebraic combinatorics. It was established in 1992 and is published by Springer Science+Business Media. The editor-in-chief is Ilias S. Kotsireas.
The Research Works Act, 102 H.R. 3699, was a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives at the 112th United States Congress on December 16, 2011, by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) and co-sponsored by Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY). The bill contained provisions to prohibit open-access mandates for federally funded research and effectively revert the United States' National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, which requires taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online. If enacted, it would have also severely restricted the sharing of scientific data. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which Issa is the chair. Similar bills were introduced in 2008 and 2009 but have not been enacted since.
Academic journal publishing reform is the advocacy for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet and the advent of electronic publishing. Since the rise of the Internet, people have organized campaigns to change the relationships among and between academic authors, their traditional distributors and their readership. Most of the discussion has centered on taking advantage of benefits offered by the Internet's capacity for widespread distribution of reading material.
The Academic Spring was the designation, inspired by the Arab Spring, used for a short time in 2012 to indicate movements by academics, researchers, and scholars opposing the restrictive copyright and circulation of traditional academic journals and promoting free access online instead.
An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making an academic work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. This fee may be paid by the author, the author's institution, or their research funder. Sometimes, publication fees are also involved in traditional journals or for paywalled content. Some publishers waive the fee in cases of hardship or geographic location, but this is not a widespread practice. An article processing charge does not guarantee that the author retains copyright to the work, or that it will be made available under a Creative Commons license.
Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection: a 2021 study estimated, that Sci-Hub provided access to 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers, and on 15 July 2022 Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.
Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access academic journal covering general linguistics. It was established in 2016. The journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities and the editor-in-chief is Johan Rooryck.
Scholastica is a web-based software platform for managing academic journals with integrated peer review and open access publishing tools.
Algebraic Combinatorics is a peer-reviewed diamond open access mathematical journal specializing in the field of algebraic combinatorics. Established in 2018, the journal is published by the Centre Mersenne.
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
Diamond open access refers to academic texts published/distributed/preserved with no fees to either reader or author. Alternative labels include platinum open access, non-commercial open access, cooperative open access or, more recently, open access commons. While these terms were first coined in the 2000s and the 2010s, they have been retroactively applied to a variety of structures and forms of publishing, from subsidized university publishers to volunteer-run cooperatives that existed in prior decades.
Subscribe to Open (S2O) is an economic model used by peer-reviewed scholarly journals to provide readers with open access (OA) to the journal’s content, without charging costs to authors. S2O converts journals that have a traditional subscription model to open access.
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