Status of Elsevier Boycott

Question

Starting around 2012, Timothy Gowers had much to say about the practices of Elsevier. Very roughly speaking, he argued that Elsevier made research articles expensive to access and profited heavily from the volunteer work of peer reviewers. Sympathetic individuals established a website called "The Cost of Knowledge", which hosts the electronic signatures of over 15,000 academics who have agreed to boycott Elsevier to some degree.

Things are relatively quiet now compared to the flurry of activity that followed Gowers' series of posts. The most recent information I can find is Greg Martin's letter of resignation from the editorial board of Elsevier's "Journal of Number Theory", which was posted to Gowers' blog in May of 2013. In it, Martin writes (emphasis mine):

As far as I can tell, Elsevier’s responses to our concerns ended up being limited to a slight easing off of support for legislation limiting access to our research, together with a nominal reduction in individual journal prices. Regarding the latter, however, Elsevier’s “bundling” practice remains in place, making individual journals’ prices essentially irrelevant. Their (aggressively defended) lack of pricing transparency from one institution to another also speaks volumes, in my mind, to the limits of their desire to seriously address our pricing concerns.

My feeling is that not much has changed in the past two years, particularly since I would expect to hear an update from Gowers if any major victories had been won.

Can anyone provide more up-to-date information about Elsevier's pricing, bundling, and access practices?

Answer 1

(converted from a comment on request).

I don't think much has changed about pricing, but Elsevier has made open access all the content of their journals in mathematics after a 48 month embargo (source). This was a very appreciated move: mathematicians often rely on old articles for their research, so 4 years isn't too long to wait (for some), for this discipline. It is also a shrewd move from Elsevier, since it pleases their audience but doesn't cut into their main source of income, which are yearly subscription access deals with university libraries.

Maybe this will encourage academics from other fields to consider a similar protest to obtain the same boon...

Answer 2

In short the current situation is pretty much the same. The peer-review process remains voluntary. What is scandalous is that Elsevier finically profits from this voluntary investment of time but academia does not. Not that academics should profit personally, however some of this should be fed back into the academic community in some way if large sums continue to be charged for access to journals. Although in fairness to Elsevier, there are costs in hosting massive amounts of the academic knowledge.

Access to articles is changing, they are allowing some sharing on personal blogs or sites (some interesting discussion in the comment section of this reference). Although researchers were doing it on closed university networks anyway, but this new approach allows researchers to share more widely. For instance if you have a list of references on your university profile page you will be able to link them to a pdf of the article. However as one commentator mentioned, there is an embargo period before this sharing can occur, these period varies, for instance cognition and Neuroscience have 12 month embargo on new articles. Whilst the Lancet is does not open access for personal posting at all.

So did it work? I would say it has been a successful start. And these embargo periods make it fair as Elsevier need to make some profit out of the facilities and services they provide. However as noted in the comments below, the articles are not automatically made available for free on the elsevier network (if at all). I hope these reference are useful to you.

Almost forgot the pricing list for 2015 and Elsevier's general info about pricing. As far as I know these price lists are for individuals not universities or libraries, which is probably discounted depending on the quantity or services being purchased.