“PUBLISHING obscure academic journals is that rare thing in the media industry: a licence to print money. An annual subscription to Tetrahedron, a chemistry journal, will cost your university library $20,269; a year of the Journal of Mathematical Sciences will set you back $20,100. In 2011 Elsevier, the biggest academic-journal publisher, made a profit of £768m ($1.2 billion) on revenues of £2.1 billion. Such margins (37%, up from 36% in 2010) are possible because the journals’ content is largely provided free by researchers, and the academics who peer-review their papers are usually unpaid volunteers. The journals are then sold to the very universities that provide the free content and labour. For publicly funded research, the result is that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for its creation have to pay to read it. This is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research.”
Continue reading  online  or in the Economist’s print edition from 14th April.

Der ETH-Bibliothek soll per Klage verboten werden, Dokumente in elektronischer Form an ihre Nutzer zu verschicken, Nutzer sollen die Artikel für 30 EUR (!) direkt beim Verlag kaufen.

Wissenschaftsverlag Elsevier unterstützt US Gesetzesvorschlag der die Open Access Plattform “Pub Med Central” mittelfristig den Garaus machen soll.

Mehr: Ein Bärendienst an der Forschung – Hintergrund, Wissenschaft, NZZ Online, 02.02.2012

Ausserdem: Petition by researchers against Elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/

(Pub Med auf findit.lu)