It has been a little over two weeks now since the protest site at thecostofknowledge.com was set up to register declarations of non-cooperation with Reed Elsevier in protest of their research publishing practices, inspired by this blog post of Tim Gowers.   Awareness of the protest has certainly grown in these two weeks; the number of signatories is now well over four thousand, across a broad array of academic disciplines, and the protest has been covered by many blogs and also the mainstream media (e.g. the Guardian, the Economist, Forbes, etc.), and even by Elsevier stock analysts.    (Elsevier itself released an open letter responding to the protest here.)  My interpretation of events is that there was a significant amount of latent or otherwise undisclosed dissatisfaction already with the publishing practices of Elsevier (and, to a lesser extent, some other commercial academic publishers), and a desire to support alternatives such as university or society publishers, and the more recent open access journals; and that this protest (and parallel protests, such as the movement to oppose the Research Works Act) served to drive these feelings out into the open.

The statement of the protest itself, though, is rather brief, reflecting the improvised manner in which the site was created.  A group of mathematicians including myself therefore decided to write and sign a more detailed explanation of why we supported this protest, giving more background and references to support our position.   The 34 signatories are Scott Aaronson, Douglas N. Arnold, Artur Avila, John Baez, Folkmar Bornemann, Danny Calegari, Henry Cohn, Ingrid Daubechies, Jordan Ellenberg, Matthew Emerton, Marie Farge, David Gabai, Timothy Gowers, Ben Green, Martin Grotschel, Michael Harris, Frederic Helein, Rob Kirby, Vincent Lafforgue, Gregory F. Lawler, Randall J. LeVeque, Laszlo Lovasz, Peter J. Olver, Olof Sisask, Richard Taylor, Bernard Teissier, Burt Totaro, Lloyd N. Trefethen, Takashi Tsuboi, Marie-France Vigneras, Wendelin Werner, Amie Wilkinson, Gunter M. Ziegler, and myself.  (Note that while Daubechies is current president of the International Mathematical Union, Lovasz is a past president, and Grotschel is the current secretary, they are signing this letter as individuals and not as representatives of the IMU. Similarly for Trefethen and Arnold (current and past president of SIAM).)

Of course, the 34 of us do not presume to speak for the remaining four thousand signatories to the protest, but I hope that our statement is somewhat representative of the position of many of its supporters.

Further discussion of this statement can be found at this blog post of Tim Gowers.

EDIT: I think it is appropriate to quote the following excerpt from our statement:

All mathematicians must decide for themselves whether, or to what extent, they wish to participate in the boycott. Senior mathematicians who have signed the boycott bear some responsibility towards junior colleagues who are forgoing the option of publishing in Elsevier journals, and should do their best to help minimize any negative career consequences.

Whether or not you decide to join the boycott, there are some simple actions that everyone can take, which seem to us to be uncontroversial:

  1. Make sure that the final versions of all your papers, particularly new ones, are freely available online, ideally both on the arXiv and on your home page.
  2.  If you are submitting a paper and there is a choice between an expensive journal and a cheap (or free) journal of the same standard, then always submit to the cheap one.