On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 12:27 PM, David Richfield
<davidrichfield(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If I understand the suggestion properly, the idea was
not to stop
linking to articles in closed journals, but to find some meaningful
way to support the efforts of the researchers who are boycotting
closed journals (i.e. they are not publishing in them).
That is actually something we could do: make an intensified effort to
cite the work of the boycotting researchers - to heal their losses
from not publishing in Elsevier journals - and commit to working in
citations of any future boycotters. We wouldn't be banning Elsevier
citations so much as declining to spend our time on adding any new
ones.
Of course, this proposal has the problem that to work, it would
require editors to add a lot of content, rather than delete it. But it
shows that we have a lot of options besides the simple-minded 'ban
Elsevier citations' option.
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net