Communications of the ACM
To Boycott or Not to Boycott
There has been sound and fury in the Open Access movement over the past year. In December 2011, The Research Works Act (RWA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill contained provisions to prohibit open access mandates for federally funded research, effectively nullifying the U.S. National Institutes of Health's policy that requires taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online. Many scholarly publishers, including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), expressed support for the bill. (ACM expressed objections to the bill.)
The reaction to the bill and its support by scholarly publishers has been one of sheer outrage, with headlines such as "Academic Publishers Have Become the Enemies of Science." On January 21, 2012, renowned British mathematician Timothy Gowers declared a boycott on Elsevier, a major scholarly publisher, pledging to refrain from submitting articles to Elsevier journals, as well as from serving as an editor or reviewer. The boycott movement then took off, with over 13,000 scholars having joined so far.
Frankly, I do not understand why Elsevier is practically the sole target of the recent wrath directed at scholarly publishers. Elsevier is no worse than most other for-profit publishers, just bigger, I believe. Why boycott Elsevier and not Springer, for example? The argument made by some that "we must start somewhere" strikes me as plainly unfair and unjust.
Beyond the question of whom to target with a boycott, there is the question of the morality of the boycott. Of course, authors can choose their publication venues. Also, as a scholar, I can choose which publications I am willing to support by becoming an editor, but the boycott petition also asks signatories to refrain from refereeing articles submitting to Elsevier journals. This means that if you sign this petition then, in effect, you are boycotting your colleagues who have disagreed with you and chose to submit their articles to an Elsevier journal.
I believe in keeping science separate from politics. If it is legitimate to boycott publishing politicsthe issue of open access is, after all, a political issuewhy is it not legitimate to boycott for other political considerations? Is it legitimate to refrain from refereeing articles written by authors from countries with objectionable government behavior? Where do you draw the line to avoid politicizing science?
My perspective is that what really propelled the Open Access movement was the continuing escalation of the price of scholarly publications during the 1990s and 2000s, a period during which technology drove down the cost of scientific publishing. This price escalation has been driven by for-profit publishers. In the distant past, our field had several small- and medium-sized for-profit publishers. There was a sense of informal partnership between the scientific community and these publishers. That was then. Today, there is a small number of large and dominant for-profit publishers in computing research. These publishers are thoroughly corporatized. They are businesses with a clear mission of maximizing the return on investment to their owners and shareholders. At the same time, the scientific community, whose goal is to maximize dissemination, continues to behave as if a partnership exists with for-profit publishers, providing them with content and editorial services essentially gratis. This is a highly anomalous arrangement, in my opinion. Why should for-profit corporations receive products and labor essentially for free?
I believe in keeping science separate from politics.
Beyond the moral issue I raised earlier regarding the boycott, there is a more practical issue. For-profit publishers play a key role in computing-research publishing. As an example, approximately 45,000 journal articles were published in 2011 in computing research. In that same year, ACM published fewer than 1,000 journal articles, and IEEE-Computer Society published fewer than 3,500 articles. There is a small number of other non-profit publishers, but for-profit publishers produce the lion's share of computing-research journal articles. Boycotting all of them is simply not a practical option.
I do not believe, therefore, that boycotting is the right approach to the current scholarly publishing controversies. If we want to drive for-profit publishers out of business, we have to do it the old-fashioned way, by out-publishing them. If professional associations in computing research would expand their publishing activities considerably, they should be able to attract the bulk of computing articles. ACM is only a minor player in journal publishing. Why is ACM publishing fewer than 1,000 journal articles per year rather than, say, 5,000 articles? Even if this will not drive the for-profit publishers out of the computing-research publishing business, the competition would pressure them to reform their business practices, which is, after all, what we should be after.
Moshe Y. Vardi, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
©2013 ACM 0001-0782/13/03
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Comments
Anonymous
moshe, open access journals are far more relavent going immediately forward than the older model of paper publishing. i predict that in 10 years most pay-to-play journals will be gone. i would hate to think the future of scientific research depends upon the fate of the paper journals. seriously?
-j
David Karger
Moshe, if your boards are agonizing over this, then they should follow the example of the board of the Machine Learning Journal (Springer) who resigned en masse and founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ . Creating this competing journal allowed the board to continue serving the same authors as they had served before http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/statement.html .
Anonymous
Is Elsevier really no worse than most other for-profit publishers? When has Springer let a crank become editor-in-chief of a journal and publish hundreds of his own nonsensical papers there, as Elsevier did with "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals", or produced fake journals like the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine" that were entirely bought and paid for by advertisers?
Anonymous
As a student who has repeatedly been victimized by the rapacious prices charged by Elsevier and other publishers (try $30 to $120 per article) for journals that our campus library doesn't have access to due to budget cuts, my question to Moshe is who is being hurt here? Is it the students who are being ripped off because we don't have ready access to journals, the authors who are asked to foot the bill by providing free product for Elsevier et. al. to make a profit off of, or is it ultimately the scientific review process itself? I don't like boycotting, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to induce change! The alternative is to allow the Elsevier and cronies to evolve into little more than vanity press operations where you give them your paper, pay them to publish it and then it is seen by the few who have access to the journals. The publication of papers is intended to spread the information widely, isn't it? What alternative do you propose?
Anthony Wasserman
As an ACM Fellow, my published articles and books have previously helped to enrich Elsevier (and Springer). But I don't have access to my own works from their website, and have long ago stopped my volunteer effort on their behalf. As we now clearly see, the whole business model of Elsevier and Springer is based on voluntary free labor. It's not as if their publications are moderately priced as a result. I am glad that Dr. Vardi has now disclosed his role on Elsevier Editorial Boards in these comments, but he should have either refrained from writing this editorial piece or disclosed his interest (and conflict) as part of the editorial. I hope that ACM, following our Professional Code of Ethics (http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics), will assure that this disclosure appears in the next CACM and on the ACM web site.
Beyond that issue, our professional society should not escape unscathed from this discussion. It's only through my academic institution that I have access to the paywall-protected ACM Digital Library (and, similarly, IEEE Xplore), since I won't pay for that access.
In conclusion, the world has changed significantly since Elsevier, ACM, and others initially developed their publication policies. As the late Aaron Swartz so clearly made clear, we have all already paid for these publications through the taxes we pay to our governments, which, in turn, supports many of the researchers who have written these articles. Open access to this material not only helps to advance the state of the field more effectively, but also makes that material available to those without the financial resources to pay for what should be free. I strongly urge ACM's leadership to reevaluate its policies on open access and our members to limit their unpaid efforts on behalf of for-profit publishers.
Anonymous
Why are you defending the lucrative monetization of the works of underpaid and overworked Academics, by sleazy Suits who profit personally when Wall Street approves of their exploitation of Academics?
Moshe, gimme a break, and get a clue!
Anonymous
So scientists should behave in a moral fashion. While publishers should continue to ratchet up the prices, restrict access and prevent text mining.
I feel guilty when I have refused to review my colleagues work, even in spite of this. So, now, I have stated publicly that I will review any manuscript, posted publicly on a eprints, arXiv or equivalent, that is sent to me (given the usual time constraints). I will post my reviews likewise.
And Springer? No I don't publish with them either.
Anonymous
It is not strictly true that to sign on to the boycott you have to refuse to referee. You can opt out of any subset of submitting articles, editing, and refereeing. A number of signatories have chosen just the first two.
Anonymous
For better or worse, commercial academic publishers (like Elsevier) add little to no discernible value to the material they obtain copyrights on and copyright and distribute ('publish'), not having contributed one iota to the production or selection of what they distribute.
Open Source publishers manage to deliver comparable quality of service at a fraction of the cost. However, commercial publishers charge a mint for their 'services' based on the simple fact that they happen to have ownership of a huge mountain of copyrights on existing publications in well-known journals. In maximising heir profit they strain the current situation to the breaking point, and in some instances beyond.
One might argue that suppliers of raw materials (articles) ought to demand a market price for their wares from commercial publishers, and reviewers likewise (invoice the hours spent on a review). That cost however would be handed down to journal subscribers, mainly the ones who employ researchers and reviewers in the first place, and they will see no reason to pay since they will be happy to exchange articles and services with their peers on a reciprocal basis. So I don't think that charging a market price for articles or reviewing is a viable option..
There is another way though. Given available technology, the presence of commercial publishers is a meta-stable one, in which both the presence and absence of commercial publishers is a stable and feasible state. The problem is one of transition from one to the other, and that is being addressed with the boycott of Elsevier.
Fair or not, it seems to be a necessary step towards an adjusted market equilibrium.
Anonymous
Why not take your expertise and time and use it to assist Timothy Gowers in his efforts in setting up an alternative open access journal based on aXive? Would this not align with your stated opinions? You don't have to participate in the boycott to participate in the competition after all.
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