Boycott highlights Open Access alternatives

October was quite a remarkable month for the Open Access movement. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) became a fully fledged publisher with the launch of its flagship journal PLoS Biology. The Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Society expressed the increasingly firm commitment of European funding agencies to supporting Open Access publishing. And a group of US academics called for a boycott of Cell Press.

Two researchers from the University of California's San Francisco campus, Peter Walter and Keith Yamamoto, circulated a letter asking colleagues to boycott the prestigious Cell Press journals, to protest about the high prices Cell Press is charging for electronic site licenses. Although site licences initially offered university libraries a way to deal with offering campus-wide access, they represent a financial trap as the libraries are then locked into a system that can be milked by the publisher.

This is not the first time that scientists have circulated a boycott letter about publishing. Many will remember signing the PLoS petition that asked researchers to boycott any journal that did not provide rapid free access to research papers. The PLoS boycott didn't achieve its intended effect or drastically change publishers' minds, leading PLoS to decide to become an Open Access publisher itself.

While many researchers were happy to sign a letter supporting the PLoS boycott, they still needed to publish their work and to receive the 'career credit' that prestigious journals can bring. But the Open Access landscape is quite different now from how it was then and there are many more alternatives. Furthermore, there are now two 'top tier' Open Access journals, Journal of Biology (published by BioMed Central) and PLoS Biology, which are vying to provide Open Access to the very best work and both of which provide a real alternative to the Cell Press titles. And there is now a range of other Open Access journals for more specialized articles.

What is important is not how many people sign a boycott letter, or even how many refuse to serve as referees for Cell Press. The most decisive act of protest is to switch to publishing in Open Access journals.