They’ve heard lots of noise but also seen lots of foot-dragging, about making research reports available publicly for free:
The board told Nature that given the journal’s subject matter — the assessment and dissemination of science — it felt it needed to be at the forefront of open publishing practices, which it says includes making bibliographic references freely available for analysis and reuse, and being open access and owned by the community.
“It’s essential that this work
be made openly available and that the communication of the researchbe managed by the community,” says Cassidy Sugimoto, an information scientist at Indiana University Bloomington and a resigning board member.Board members also wanted Elsevier to lower the journal’s article-publishing charges for authors and participate in the Initiative for Open Citations — a project aiming to free up citation data for
study . Dalmeet Singh Chawla, “Open-access row prompts editorial board of Elsevier journal to resign” at Nature
Elsevier said no, hence the farewell letter from the editors.
Elsevier is an odd fish flopping around out of water when you consider this: Who paid for most of the research published?
Do people think it’s better for open science if the public pays (in the form of taxes) or if private corporations pay for what they want? But what reasonable case can be made for the research not usually being open-access if the public paid for it?
See also: One reason some scientists choose low-quality predatory journals But always remember, doubts about science – as practiced – are always because the public is narrow and stupid, according to pundits, and doesn’t “trust science. ”
Pay wall for science articles: Yes or no?
and
How Unpaywall is opening up science
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