UC parts ways with Elsevier

I've been critical of Elsevier for quite a while, joining the Cost of Knowledge boycott campaign early on.  (I also stopped using Mendeley when Elsevier bought them).

So I was pleased to see an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed today reporting that the University of California System canceled its Elsevier subscriptions, and calling the move a win for open access.

I strongly believe that research at US Research Universities (and likely the universities done in many other countries) should be available to the public. Whether directly (such as through state funding of public universities) or indirectly (through overhead collected of research grants), our universities get significant funding from the public purse.  So the idea that the results of the research get buried inside a paywall run by a for-profit company should offend all citizens who are helping to fund it.

In CS, our major professional societies allow professors to make their papers available for free: ACM allows authors to post direct links in the ACM Digital Library (normally paywalled) for all of their papers on one pre-configured web page URL (you can get all my ACM papers at https://blairmacintyre.me/acmpubs).  IEEE allows authors to post accepted versions of papers (the final version, before IEEE formats it for publication) on the web, as long as the authors follow certain simple rules (e.g., include the final DOI and a copyright notice).