SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.
If this is unstoppable, then whatever the timescale the alarm bell has to ring and businesses (not just publishers — including universities) have to accept that change is inevitable and plan quite carefully to deal with it.
The Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI) is an initiative from Nature Publishing Group (NPG). It aims to enable scholarly publishers, among others, to disclose their full text for indexing and text-mining purposes but without giving it away in a form that is
A diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.
M. de Cock Buning, A. Ringnalda, and T. van der Linden. (July 2009)This legal guide was produced for SURFdirect, SURF’s digital rights Expertise Community for higher education, by the Centre for Intellectual Property Law (CIER).
This publication is published under Creative Commons Licence Attribution 3.0 Netherlands..