This morning I received an email asking me to peer review a book proposal for Chandos Publishing, the Library and Information Studies imprint of Elsevier. Initially I thought it was spam because of some sloppy punctuation and the “Dr. Robertson” salutation.
When other people pointed out that this likely wasn’t spam my ego was flattered for a few minutes and I considered it. I was momentarily confused–would participating in Elsevier’s book publishing process be evil? Isn’t it different from their predatory pricing models with libraries and roadblocks to sharing research more broadly? I have a lot to learn about scholarly publishing, but decided that I’m not going to contribute my labour to a company that are jerks to librarians, researchers and libraries.
Here’s some links I found useful:
Amy Buckland’s pledge to support open access
Mita Williams pointed me to The Cost of Knowledge petition, which I also encourage you to sign.
You must be logged in to post a comment.