We have also heard from some Elsevier journal authors, editors and reviewers who were concerned that the Act seemed inconsistent with Elsevier’s long-standing support for expanding options for free and low-cost public access to scholarly literature.
This morning Elsevier announced it was withdrawing support for the controversial Research Works Act. The rhetoric is priceless. My favorite line is the one above. As if people were just stymied by the contradiction: “Elsevier is usually so good; why are they being evil?" The prodigal publisher returns.
It’s clearly a response to the boycott kicked off by mathematician Tim Gowers - as he points out on his blog this morning, in tandem with the announcement about the RWA, it made a separate statement to the mathematics community which attempts to smooth things over with them. On the other hand, it may also be a response to the support that was already gathering for the FRPAA act introduced earlier this month. As the Executive Director of SPARC (an outspoken open access advocacy group), Heather Joseph, said of the bill, speaking to Publishers Weekly,
“It was pretty amazing to see the issue’s champions in the House and the Senate coordinate simultaneous introduction of identical bills. Bipartisan and bicameral action in 2012, and on public access no less.”
In a sense, supporting RWA was a win-win for Elsevier and supporters of the bill: had the bill passed, they’d win a political mandate that would outlaw further attempts to mandate open access. Yet now that the bill may not pass, the political challenge to the system loses steam. If the RWA was the catalyst for the boycott, will its death on the Senate floor (assuming it occurs) be enough to back-burner the open access pot and take it down to a simmer? Or will the scholarly community, like the participants in the internet blackout in January, become empowered by these new opportunities for collective action and advocate a continuation of the boycott - not because Elsevier itself it evil, but because the system as a whole is broken and we seem to have some reasonable tools (open access platforms and alternative systems of peer review) that could fix it.
Elsevier’s action should be evidence that the boycott was at least somewhat effective. Now it is time to move from defense to offense: instead of saying what we don’t want, we should start creating the system we do want. This will be much harder because it means we have to think about the things publishers do well and how we might be able to do that without the same cost. And it means we will discover the many ways people who supported the boycott disagree with one another about the ideal model of scholarly communication. Sustaining the energy required for a defensive boycott is much easier than the deep commitment it will take to work towards a full transformation of this system.
Lucky for us, it’s not even March yet. We still have 2-3 months before all of this will disappear completely from the academic consciousness (i.e. calendar). If the conversation changes enough (and new platforms are discussed widely), perhaps those summer writing projects will find their way into unusual venues rather than the usual suspects. In the end, changing those individual decisions are an enormous hurdle to the transformation of scholarly communication - which is likely why Elsevier ultimately relented. The boycott may have won this battle, but the war rages on.
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