Elsevier boycott in the Notices

Douglas Arnold and Henry Cohn have posted “Mathematicians Take a Stand,” their sober, carefully argued, and thoroughly researched case for the Elsevier boycott on the arXiv.  It will soon appear in the Notices of the AMS.

I don’t know what shape the mathematical publishing of the future will take but it seems almost impossible that it will look much like it does now.

Update:  Mathematics is important as a kind of avant-garde but the money is in biology, as we all know.  That Wellcome is considering launching an open-access competitor to Nature and Science, and requiring grantees to publish only in open-access journals, is a big deal.

Statement on the Elsevier boycott

A group of mathematicians, myself included, have prepared and signed a statement which attempts to summarize the reasons so many mathematicians and other scientists (nearly 5000 at this count) have signed on to boycott Elsevier publications.

This is an important moment for mathematical publishing, a rare time when the attention of the community is really fixed on an issue that’s been torturing our librarians for many years.  What’s the next step?  A good place to follow people’s thinking will be Gowers’s blog.  Tim, of course, has been a driving force behind the current movement to stop complaining about rent-seeking academic publishers and start doing something about it.