Elsevier responds to critics with policy change

Publisher withdraws support for the Research Works Act

Elsevier today published a press release, where they state their withdrawal for the Research Works Act. The publisher had initially supported this act, which proposes legislation that would prevent the US government from mandating Open Access to taxpayer-funded research.

In it’s press release Elsevier also states that

(…) while withdrawing support for the Research Works Act, we will continue to join with those many other nonprofit and commercial publishers and scholarly societies that oppose repeated efforts to extend mandates through legislation.

Even though the press release marks not a complete U-turn of Elsevier’s policy towards Open Access, it still seems as a sign, that the protest in the research community against the publishers business practices has already shown some impact.

Researcher Initiative for Publishing reform

Under the headline “The Cost of Knowledge” more than 7000 researchers protest against Elsevier’s business practices.

Their main request is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work (e.g. via Open Access business models). As long as Elsevier does not comply with that, the signing researchers refrain to do any publishing, refereeing or editorial work for Elsevier journals. The initiative started in the mathematical science, but also several Economists have signed the petition.