Occupy All STEM Publishers? Will boycotting just one be effective?

A recent article in The Scientist reports that nearly 4,500 researchers have signed an agreement to refrain from publishing in, refereeing, and/or performing editorial services for Elsevier. This boycott was launched when Cambridge Mathematician Timothy Gowers detailed Elsevier’s high prices and practice of bundling journals in package deals. This alludes to Science Direct. The site encouraging scientists to boycott is at http://www.thecostofknowledge.com/ .


As a librarian for a technological college, I am concerned about journal prices and how they take up a very large percentage of our materials budget. Science and engineering journals are more expensive than those in the humanities or social sciences.

Why single out Elsevier when journal costs from other private publishers are very high as well? Even journals from professional societies are very expensive. Will boycotting just Elsevier solve this problem? Is open access publishing the answer?

News from the VALE Reference Services Committee

I am on a subcommittee of the VALE Reference Services Committee to make recommendations about proposed features of the Discovery Tool of the Open Library System (OLS). VALE is now considering these discovery tools for the next generation catalog:

 

• XC Extensible Catalog
• VuFind
• Blacklight

 

The subcommittee has identified about 30 features that can be used with the discovery tool chosen by the Implementation Taskforce. We are in the process of prioritizing these features and making recommendations.

Meet the NJIT Library Reference Staff

From left to right - Heather Dalal, Davida Scharf, Kate Wiggins, and Bruce Slutsky.  I guess I should try to smile more :)

Next Meeting of the METRO Science Librarians SIG

The next meeting of the SIG will be Friday February 24th at 2 PM. The theme will be New Developments in STEM Publishing. The speakers will be:

Ruth Wolfish of IEEE

Karen Berryman of INSPEC

To register go to http://www.metro.org/en/cev/148

There is no charge for this meeting


For further information please contact Bruce Slutsky at slutsky@adm.njit.edu  or 973-642-4950