[Foundation-l] Journal Boycott

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:07 AM, Chess Pie <derby_pie at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Looks like a braindead law.
> Does the foundation have a specific position on OpenAccess?

The WMF as an entity doesn't have a specific position/policy, though
in general we are squarely in the camp of OA supporters; but as Daniel
noted the Research Committee is working on an OA policy for funded
research studies, which I'm quite pleased about:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Committee/Areas_of_interest/Open-access_policy

Maybe Daniel knows if there are any general position papers about how
OA in general benefits Wikimedia projects?

Re: the Elsevier journal boycott, I've been following this fairly
closely out of professional and personal interest -- it's not strictly
a protest in favor of OA, but rather a protest around several issues
related to how Elsevier handles and charges for journal content,
including supporting restrictions, like the research works act. It is
true that Elsevier is not especially worse than several other big
publishers, but they have a big name and a long history of unfriendly
moves to the library & academic community which make them perhaps an
easier target. What's interesting about the boycott is that a) it's
grown very quickly, with several thousand people signing in the past
couple weeks; and b) it's a lot of prominent researchers from a wide
variety of institutions. What gives this boycott power is not
institutional support but rather individual researchers and scholars,
who provide both the content and the labor in scientific publishing,
saying that they were not interested in working with Elsevier. If
enough people say that and follow through, Elsevier's entire business
model falls apart.

-- phoebe