Elsevier is still not getting it

Greg Martin, a number theorist at UBC (the University of British Columbia in Vancouver) [..] decided to resign from the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Number Theory [..letter below]

Dear colleagues,

I am writing to inform you of my resignation from the editorial board of the Journal of Number Theory, effective immediately. I will also be adding my name publicly to the list of people who refrain from volunteering for, or submitting manscripts to, Elsevier journals.

It has been a little over a year since the boycott against Elsevier went public. The petition at

http://thecostofknowledge.com

has been signed by thousands of mathematicians (indeed, over 13,000 researchers in total). There was a flurry of communication back and forth between Elsevier and our editorial board (and those of other journals, I’m sure). But now the dust has settled, and I must conclude that essentially nothing has changed [..].

As far as I can tell, Elsevier’s responses to our concerns ended up being limited to a slight easing off of support for legislation limiting access to our research, together with a nominal reduction in individual journal prices [..].

More recently, we were told of Elsevier’s new policy that editors would receive $60 for every article they process for the Journal of Number Theory. To me, this policy demonstrates a true inability (or unwillingness) to understand the key part of our observation that “all the work is done for free by volunteers, but access to that work is exorbitantly expensive”. We want access to be less expensive; we’re not looking for extra dough in our pockets [..].

It might well be that a commercial company such as Elsevier is simply unable to adapt to a publication model more appropriate to our 21st-century ability to easily format, store, and transmit research around the globe. This is why my resignation does not contain any condemnation of the people who work for Elsevier. But I do not wish to continue supporting a system, however entrenched, that forces our institutions to make a choice between giving up increasingly expensive research resources and throwing more and more of their educational budget into the closed coffers of commercial publishers [..].

Sincerely yours,