> Andrew Wells from the Council of University Librarians believes Elsevier is being unfairly singled out. "The practices that Elsevier has both in dealing with authors and in selling scholarly content to libraries are very similar to those used by many other scholarly publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis and Springer," he says.

Quite right. The Elsevier boycott gives us a way to make our voice heard against the worst of the publishers. It lends urgency to the drive to change the system, and it will hit Elsevier hard in the pocketbook, demonstrating to publishers that we (academics) are going to stop providing them with their free lunch.

Once we further get our act together, believe me, we will be coming after Wiley and any other publisher who engages in exploitative, rent-seeking behavior.

Why haven't scientists started their own not for profit publishing/clearing house website?

Probably because they don't have the budgets and time to do it. This kind of stuff requires time, money, and energy to coordinate submissions and peer review and so on. I've only seen this from the humanities side of thing, and especially the journal Post45 (http://www.post45.org if you're curious); there are a lot of hidden, niggling issues that make creating this sort of thing harder than it looks.

And that's ignoring the already-established reputational effects that current journals have.

This or some variant of it is most likely the future of scientific publications, now that physical publication isn't really necessary.

A really good example is arXiv (http://arxiv.org/).

There are some DIY-ish journals in some areas as well, in addition to preprint archives. The top-ranked machine-learning journal is now run on an annual budget of $0, on volunteer labor, print-on-demand publishing, and MIT server space: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/

Cannot agree more. Paper publishing is no longer necessary at all (maybe with a few exceptions). Scientists should be publishing to an online application with universal access where their peers could review and comment on the papers. The current system made sense in the past because publishing was complex and expensive. With the advent of desktop publishing and the web, both publishing and the reviewing process were greatly simplified and are essentially done by the researchers themselves. I mean, you have to provide the publisher with "camera ready" files and, in some cases, you have to suggest a couple of names for possible reviewers. How hard is it to do the rest of the work?

This article is almost as hilarious as the RIAA president's op-ed; unfortunately, this one doesn't reveal the author's name.