Elbows Music Blog Community

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I am starting a thread on global monopolistic behavior by few publishing and media companies...
It is surprising how few big labels play such huge roles too.

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Academics line up to boycott world's biggest journal publisher

At least 97 academics from across the country have signed their names
to a boycott of the publisher, which owns more than 2,000 titles. In
2010, the company made a profit of £724m on revenues of £2bn, for an
operating profit margin of 36%.

So far almost 6,000 researchers across the world have pledged to withdraw the fruits of their research from Elsevier journals.

Academics are typically required to pay journals an “article
processing fee” to cover the cost of the peer-review and editing
process. They must also sign over the copyright to the published work.

For their part, journals then charge up to $A42 per piece for access
to the work online. Libraries that subscribe to one journal usually have
to pay vastly inflated amounts for bundled services, said Dr Danny
Kingsley, the Australian National University’s manager of scholarly
communications and e-publishing. Dr Kingsley also coordinates the
university’s new Digital Collections database, a free online repository
of academic research.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-academics-line-boycott-world-biggest.html

Academics are also furious that Elsevier has placed its weight behind a
bill in the US – the Research Works Act – that aims to make it illegal
to force researchers to make their work publicly available.

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US Trade Rep doesn't know what "transparent" or "lobbyist" means

The US Trade Representative claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
closed-door copyright treaty being negotiated in even greater secrecy
than the notorious ACTA, is "transparent." Actually, he says it has "unprecedented" transparency,
because an advisory group is allowed to see it under nondisclosure, and
they're not lobbyists at all. Except they are. And except that the norm
for copyright treaties used to be UN treaties, negotiated in full
public view, not closed-door arm-twisting marathons where the US Trade
Rep and a bunch of industry goons threaten foreign nations into signing
onto agreements that even the US Congress couldn't pass into law.

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8,200+ Strong, Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access

Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott
by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free…well,
more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher
of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its
aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by
Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy
enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted
the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research.
Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave
of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first
win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away.

But the fight for open access is just getting started.

http://singularityhub.com/2012/03/18/8200-strong-researchers-band-together-to-force-science-journals-to-open-access/

This is not some crappy, baby boomer era rock n roll pretending it's the entirety of humanity's entire peak cultural output worth exactly two gazillion billion. This is the future. Access to basic data for future needs. Curing cancer, unlimited energy, everlasting world peace sort of stuff..

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Elsevier B.V. (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɛlzəvir]) is a publishing company which publishes medical and scientific literature. It is a part of the Reed Elsevier group. Based in Amsterdam, the company has operations in the United Kingdom, USA, and elsewhere.

In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion.^[3] Elsevier accounts for 28% of the revenues of the Reed Elsevier group (₤1.5b of 5.4 billions in 2006). In operating profits, it represents a bigger fraction of 44% (₤395 of 880 millions).^[4] Adjusted operating profits rose by 10% from 2005 to 2006.^{[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier}

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Resignation of editorial boards

In November 1999 the entire editorial board (50 persons) of the Journal of Logic Programming (founded in 1984 by Alan Robinson)
collectively resigned after 16 months of unsuccessful negotiations with
Elsevier Press about the price of library subscriptions.^[11] The personnel created a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, with Cambridge University Press at a much lower price,^[11] while Elsevier continued publication with a new editorial board and a slightly different name (the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming).

In 2002, dissatisfaction at Elsevier's pricing policies caused the European Economic Association to terminate an agreement with Elsevier, which designated Elsevier's European Economic Review as the official journal of the association. The EEA launched a new journal, the Journal of the European Economic Association.^[12]

At the end of 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower priced publisher,^[13] at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth.^[14] The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued^[15]. The ACM Transactions on Algorithms is still in circulation.

The same happened in 2005 to the International Journal of Solids and Structures, whose editors resigned to start the Journal of Mechanics of Materials and Structures.
However, a new editorial board was quickly established and the journal
continues in apparently unaltered form with editors D.A. Hills (Oxford University) and Stelios Kyriakides (University of Texas at Austin).^{[citation needed]}

On August 10, 2006, the entire editorial board of the distinguished mathematical journal Topology handed in their resignation, again because of stalled negotiations with Elsevier to lower the subscription price.^[16] This board has now launched the new Journal of Topology at a far lower price, under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society.^[17] After this mass resignation, Topology remained in circulation under a new editorial board until 2009, when it appears to have been discontinued^[18].

The French École Normale Supérieure has stopped having Elsevier publish the journal Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure^[19] (as of 2008).^[20]

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Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

ACTA first came to public attention in May 2008 after a discussion paper was uploaded to Wikileaks.^[16]
According to a European Union commentary however there was at that
stage no draft, but the document constituted initial views as they had
been circulated by some of the negotiating parties.^[17]
Leaked details published in February 2009 showed the 6 chapter-division
also present in the final text. Most discussion was focused on the
"Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights" (IPR) chapter 2, which had
the four sections also present (but slightly differently named) in the
final version: Civil Enforcement, Border Measures, Criminal Enforcement
and Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement in the Digital Environment.^[17]
Apart from the participating governments, an advisory committee of
large US-based multinational corporations was consulted on the content
of the draft treaty,^[18] including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America^[19] and the International Intellectual Property Alliance^[20] (which includes the Business Software Alliance, Motion Picture Association of America, and Recording Industry Association of America).^[21] A 2009 Freedom of Information request showed that the following companies also received copies of the draft under a nondisclosure agreement: Google, eBay, Intel, Dell, News Corporation, Sony Pictures, Time Warner, and Verizon.^[22]

On 23 March 2010, the entire "18 January 2010 consolidated text" of sections 2.1 and 2.4 (Civil Enforcement, and Special Measures Related To Technological Enforcement Means And The Internet) along with the demands of each negotiator was leaked to the public.^[23]^[24] This was immediately called the "biggest ever" ACTA leak.^[25]

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Out ACTA-ing ACTA: All TPP Negotiating Documents To Be Kept Secret Until Four Years After Ratification

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has now been signed
by several nations – even if its actual status is by no means clear.
But that doesn't mean governments have finished with their trade
negotiations behind closed doors. As Techdirt reported
earlier this year, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is, in
some ways, even worse than ACTA, and looks to be a conscious attempt to
apply the tricks developed there to circumvent scrutiny yet further.

For example, like ACTA, TPP is being negotiated in secret. But that,
apparently, is not enough: a memorandum has been signed that stipulates only the final treaty will be revealed at the conclusion of the negotiations:

The parties have apparently agreed that all documents except the final
text will be kept secret for four years after the agreement comes into
force or the negotiations collapse. This reverses the trend in many
recent negotiations to release draft texts and related documents. The
existence of agreement was only discovered through a cover note to the
leaked text of the intellectual property chapter.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111018/05561916398/out-acta-ing-acta-all-tpp-negotiating-documents-to-be-kept-secret-until-four-years-after-ratification.shtml