A boycott launched on January 21st has (as of February 2nd) obtained a commitment by 11 members of the U-M community and 3044 people in total to refuse to publish, referee, or do editorial work for Elsevier journals “unless they radically change how they operate.”

Elsevier is a global company that publishes some of the most important medical and scientific journals and reference works, including Cell and Gray’s Anatomy. The boycott website—The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier—lists three objections to Elsevier’s business practices: “1) They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals; 2) They sell journals in very large ‘bundles,’ so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all […]; 3) They support measures such as SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.”

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise responded to the boycott by pointing out that the their prices have been in the lowest quartile in the industry over the last ten years. She also said that Internet downloads of some journals increased by 40 percent when Elsevier added them to the collections it sells to libraries.

The boycott was sparked by a blog post by prominent University of Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers. In the Chronicle, Gowers acknowledged that libraries are not forced to buy bundles of journals, though he said “the costs of buying journals individually are so high that it's not far off compulsion."

Wired Campus has earlier coverage of the boycott. The MPublishing blog has posted about the boycott; and Kevin Smith, Duke University's Scholarly Communications Officer, offers his take on the blog Scholarly Communications @ Duke.