A very quick note to let you all know that my new article is now up at Discover Magazine‘s guest blog, The Crux.  Entitled It’s Not Academic: How Publishers Are Squelching Science Communication , the topic will not be unfamiliar to SV-POW! readers.

Barrier-based publishers have been shouting and stomping around a lot recently.  Kind of like a Vogon guard.  But we’re trying to see the situation from their point of view.

… and that’s why we’re angry. (Note: exact percentages are made up.  But based on a true story.)

In a comment on the last post, an Elsevier employee wrote: Elsevier’s support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnerships to promote access to research, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which seek to dictate how journal articles or accepted manuscripts are disseminated without involving publishers. While we do appreciate that you’re trying

The Elsevier boycott at The Cost Of Knowledge is the most visible sign of the recent uprising against exploitative publishing practices, but it’s far from the only one.

A couple of days ago, we noted that PLoS ONE publishes more open-access articles in a month than all of Elsevier’s 2637 journals put together publish in a year.  This time I would like to consider why that is. I am genuinely interested here, and I’d like to hear from people who have considered publishing their own work as open access in an Elsevier journal.

A few weeks ago, software developer and pioneering blogger Joel Spolsky made an important point about SOPA/PIPA which has stayed with me: And of course the same thing applies to the RWA.

I only became aware of the term Academic Spring the other day but I instantly loved it. The OA wars have heated up significantly in the past few weeks, and Academic Spring crystallizes a lot of what is going on. Although we always welcome new readers, and no-one who cares about science can afford to be ignorant about access to scholarly publications, we do sometimes feel that at SV-POW! we are mostly preaching to the converted.