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Apropos of this discussion is this posting by the renowned mathematician, Timothy Gowers, explaining why he will no longer do any work for Elsevier:

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

There's now a site where researchers can put a stake in the ground saying they refuse to publish, referee, or do editorial work for Elsevier: http://thecostofknowledge.com/. The signatories are mostly in math and computer science -- but anyone can sign the pledge.

Similarly, a linguist at MIT, Kai von Fintel, has come out with a very strong personal statement as to his own policies for publishing and reviewing: http://kaivonfintel.org/2012/01/16/my-open-access-policy/. This is very much in keeping with what Jeroen suggested below, although Jeroen's list goes even further in what I agree with Bruce are very constructive ways.

Best,
Rebecca

On Sat, Jan 21, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Bruce D'Arcus <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 7:59 AM, Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

...

> What you can *do* as a scholar:
> - refuse to do unpaid labour for Elsevier as long as the profits of their science division are above 10% and as long as they support acts to hinder Open Access
> - refuse to give away your copyright, for a how-to see: http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/
> - submit your articles to pubhlishers with a liberal self archiving policy (see the Sherpa-Romeo listing at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
> - help creating assessment systems that are not soleley based on numbers of articles in certain journals
> - write less (traditional style) articles (but read more :-))
> - help creating discipline wide international preprint servers and working paper hosts, i.e. develop a publication culture more akin to that in economics or physics
> - devote a set amount of time to free information services, e.g. work on further improving wikipedia articles for 2 hours or so each month.
> - ask your library for help if you have doubt about a certain publisher or journal

These are all good suggestions. There's also this fairly practical
open access pledge, which someone just reminded me of:

<http://www.openaccesspledge.com/>

Bruce