I was searching for some information — what proportion of Elsevier’s revenue is from journal subscriptions.  So far, I’ve been unsuccessful with that (can anyone help?), but along the way I stumbled across Elsevier’s Annual Reports and Financial Statements for 2011. And it makes happy reading.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-5526 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“5526” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/03/10/things-to-make-and-do-part-10-ostrich-cervical-diverticula/ostrich-diverticula-in-dissection-labeled-480/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ostrich-diverticula-in-dissection-labeled-480.jpg” orig-size=“480,437” comments-opened=“1”

In the middle of February, Times Higher Education ran a piece by Elsevier boycott originator Tim Gowers, entitled Occupy publishing .

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-4269 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“4269” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/03/08/it-came-from-my-desk/matts-desk/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/matts-desk.jpg” orig-size=“1599,1200” comments-opened=“1”

David Roberts just commented on the last-but-one post, Winkling licence information out of Elsevier, bit bit bit : David Roberts Says: March 6, 2012 at 11:41 pm e The extra rights for sponsored articles page is now linked to from http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/sponsoredarticles And he’s right: here’s a screenshot of the Sponsored Articles page: {.size-full .wp-image-5495

Folks, you should all stop reading this blog right now, and get yourselves across to What’s In John’s Freezer? , the awesome new blog of biomechanics wizard and brachiosaur-cervical scan facilitator John Hutchinson.

This post is part three in what, astonishingly, seems now to be an ongoing series about trying to discover what Elsevier’s licenses are.  For parts one and two, see: What actually is Elsevier’s open-access licence? What have we learned about Elsevier’s open-access licence? Today I read an article that I think was meant to be encouraging, but which instead I found disturbing.

In among all the open-access discussion and ostrich-herding, we at SV-POW! Towers do still try to get some actual science done.  As we all know all too well, the unit of scientific communication is the published paper , and getting a submission ready involves a lot more than just the research itself.

{.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-5454 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“5454” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/03/02/ratites-at-the-ok-corral/ostriches-1/” orig-file=“https://svpow.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ostriches-1.jpg” orig-size=“540,720” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}”

I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that JSTOR “turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles” every year.  365.25 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 31557600 seconds per year, which means that 4.75 attempts to access papers on JSTOR are refused every second . Every second, five people somewhere around the world try to enrich their understanding of science, and are prevented from doing so.

A quick note to remind everyone that although the RWA is dead, that only brings us back to the status quo.  At present, it’s still the case that the great majority of US government-funded research goes behind paywalls .  Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a public access policy that is resulting in a lot of papers being posted for general access at PubMed Central, the NIH is only one of a dozen U.S.