To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be “taking legislative action” on the RWA. In short, the bill is now dead on its feet.
One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company. While welcoming Elsevier's decision, Aspesi concluded, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier’s problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper”. So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below.
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| Claudio Aspesi |
The RWA was introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year. Had it become law, the bill would have reversed the 2005 National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. It would also have prevented other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.
In short, the RWA would have been a serious setback for the OA movement. But the danger has been averted.
Sadly for Elsevier, however, its flirtation with the RWA appears to have wreaked havoc on its relationship with the research community. The blogosphere has been alive with criticism of the publisher, several petitions were launched to stop the bill and, most damagingly, in January a blog post by highly regarded Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers sparked a boycott of the company, with thousands of researchers pledging that henceforth they will not publish in, or referee and/or perform editorial services for any Elsevier journals.
It is important to note, however, that this anger was not just over Elsevier’s support for the RWA. It was soon apparent that researchers have a number of historic grievances against the company, grievances that were reawakened by its support for the bill.
The boycott site (Cost of Knowledge) lists a number of these grievances, including the complaint that Elsevier charges “exorbitantly high prices” and that it has used the Big Deal (aka journal bundling) as a way of forcing librarians to “agree to buy very large ‘bundles’” of journals, including “many journals that those libraries do not actually want.”
As such, the danger is that having opened Pandora’s Box, Elsevier may not be able to close it again, and its retreat from the RWA may fail to stem the tide of researchers joining the boycott. At the time of writing, the number who had pledged to shun the publisher had grown to 7,690, and continues to grow by the hour.
Given the PR crisis it sparked, and the embarrassing climb-down that Elsevier has had to make, one is bound to wonder why the publisher ever supported the RWA in the first place.
Ask Elsevier why and it will tell you that self-archiving mandates like the NIH policy represent an unfair threat to its business — by depriving it of vital subscription revenue it needs to fund the publishing of research papers. It also claims that the NIH policy amounts to unwarranted government interference in the market.
But is it true that self-archiving mandates inevitably cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, as Elsevier claims? This is far from self-evident.
