Wikimedia and the "seismic shift" towards open-access research publication
Gowers’ move led to the launch of the webpage The Cost of Knowledge as a hub of protest against Elsevier. Researchers were asked to pledge not to submit or referee papers or serve on an editorial board for the company’s journals. More than 11,000 academics have signed the pledge.
Elsevier is one of the most powerful players in the academic world, publishing more than a quarter of a million research articles each year in its more than 2,000 journals. The Economist reports that "the firm is certainly in rude financial health. In 2010, it made a £724m ($1.16 billion) profit on revenues of £2 billion, a margin of 36%." The publishing giant's portfolio includes prestigious journals such as The Lancet and Cell, books such as Gray's Anatomy, the ScienceDirect e-journals, and the Trends and Current Opinion series. Elsevier owns the ubiquitous online citation database Scopus, which generates data that many researchers rely on to demonstrate their competitiveness.
Such is the company's reach that a substantial proportion of the citations in Wikipedia’s medical and scientific articles rest on its publications. As many editors know, a frustrating aspect of using Wikipedia as a serious tool for knowledge acquisition is that article references often link to sources that require a credit card. The charge can be as high as $50 to access a single article, and readers don't find out whether there's a paywall until they've clicked multiple times. To explore such problems and their solutions, The Signpost has trialled the orange open-access logo, designed by PLoS, against references in our monthly Recent research, and a roll-out for wider usage on Wikimedia Foundation projects is under discussion.