The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier.
thecostofknowledge.com
thecostofknowledge.com
Would anyone be willing to help me add improvements to the page? It's become popular more quickly than I expected, and I would appreciate the help. I've temporarily added my email address to my hacker news profile, so anyone can contact me. Thank you!
Linking to the recent NY Times and blog posts from well-known researchers would help as well.
Reversing the list (last-on-top) and putting the "More names belong here" text above the fold might be a good idea.
And if you know somebody who can draw icons, getting an icon for each "refrainment" might look nice (might also look worse, but good icons in the CC style could spread in the community and be used e.g. on researcher's blogs).
Otherwise, I like it. It's clear, simple and to the point.
Also, I think you should default the subject to empty and mandate it, you seem to have a lot of mathematicians (though it could be because it spread there first).
And you should check your form's encoding, there's mojibake at the end of the list, "Université" instead of "Université".
(http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/elsevier-get-into-fanzines...)
I am still undecided if boycotting Elsevir is makes that much sense. In my opinion the essential interest in the whole peer-review process is mainly based on a Journal's Ranking. Academia will not move any time soon away from rating and ranking journals (and neither should they).
Therefore the only option I see is either pushing up the rankings of open-publishing journals or convincing a reputed journal to move into open publishing. Most researchers will care very little about by whom a journal is published - as long as it is ranked well. And the money factors won't appeal that much either since these factors are usually all handled by the library/service department.
In other cases, it is a condition of funding that that the paper eventually be freely available (sometimes with an embargo of about a year).
In all, I think the open access model will become more widely accepted, with the exception, maybe, of papers published in the top journals, such as Nature or Science.
You should have an email verification using the public email addresses for these academics.
Add some identity verification; Maybe facebook/twitter signup etc.
I suspect many in the HN community are associated with the IEEE and ACM. You might want to consider adding these two orgs to the list. (Disclosure: I am an IEEE member and a past ACM member). Both these orgs have great digital libraries and I have no idea why they are so expensive to access. Can someone with some experience serving on IEEE/ACM committees share some info on the financials?
Consider posting and starting a discussion on Chronicle.com. You might get support from a lot of people in the Arts & Humanities as well.
Why should the general public care about this issue? They pay for this indirectly through college tuition fees. Try to share this information with some parent bodies and ask them to pressure universities.
Get some alumni bodies to sign up. They have a lot of clout in Universities.
What do you consider expensive? ACM offers unlimited online access for $200/year. I haven't had trouble pulling that much money together on a grad student income (though I only pay about half that for my membership as a student). Given the salary numbers I see people talking about here, I'm not convinced ACM is prohibitively expensive.
I do understand that there is some cost involved in maintaing such vast libraries and I am not saying that it should be ignored. As I mentioned above, I would like to know more about how they arrive at these values.
The people who write these papers don't do it for the money. The people who review them don't do it for the money. So why can't we come up with something that makes these works more affordable and accessible to everyone on the planet? This debate is an opportunity to start exploring other such possibilities.
I agree, but that's also why I don't want to lump the ACM and IEEE in with Elsevier. That is, the ACM and IEEE are professional organizations. Their main purpose is to represent the interests of the community of professionals in computing. If they stop charging for articles, they can still exist as an organization. Their members just need to elevate the issue to the point that the larger organization changes its policy.
Elsevier, on the other hand, will cease to exist if they stop charging. Their main purpose - their business model - is to charge for access to their journals. This business model is no longer necessary, and these companies will eventually die.