4 | NewScientist | 18 February 2012

SOME have dubbed it the academic spring. More than 5000 restive researchers have united to boycott publisher Elsevier, vowing not to peer-review or submit papers for any of its scientific journals.

Inspired by a blog post from University of Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers, the academics, more than 1000 of whom are also mathematicians, object to the company’s pricing, and its support for controversial proposed US legislation.

They say the Netherlands-based firm’s practice of “bundling” journals prompts university libraries to spend money on titles they may not want. They also

object to Elsevier’s support for the US SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills, and the Research Works Act, which aims to prevent government-funded researchers from being

Journal boycott required to publish their work in open-access journals.

Elsevier, which is owned by the transnational Reed Elsevier – as is Reed Business Information, publisher of New Scientist – rejects the criticisms. It says the cost of downloading an article has never been lower and that libraries are never forced to take bundled packages (New Scientist is sometimes included in such bundles). The firm also emphasises that there are costs involved in publishing research.

Gowers suggests that the protest is particularly popular with mathematicians because many have become used to new ways of working, using web tools such as blogs and wikis both to solve proofs collectively and to distribute the results to their peers. This diminishes the need for traditional journals, he says.

Have the protesting academics been influenced by the Occupy movement or the Arab Spring? “I think there’s something in the air,” says Gowers. He reckons the power of the internet to connect people is probably the common element in the protests.

Cancer drug deficitSTOCKS of a vital cancer drug are running low in the US, which could affect children with leukaemia within weeks.

The US Food and Drug Administration says a number of drug manufacturers are flagging up shortages in methotrexate – which slows the growth of white blood cells in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a cancer that typically affects young children.

Manufacturing delays and unexpectedly high levels of

demand are blamed for the shortfall, together with the voluntary closure of Ben Venue Laboratories, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of the drug.

Oncologists are concerned supplies could run out in some areas within weeks. Reports suggest that the FDA is seeking a foreign supplier to provide emergency imports until domestic ones can meet demand.

Legislation designed to give an early warning of drug shortages was passed to a government committee last summer.

–Licensed to build–

US revives nuclear optionTHE nuclear renaissance wasn’t stillborn after all. For the first time since 1978, the US has approved the construction of nuclear reactors, potentially heralding a new dawn for nuclear power there. The resurgence of nuclear is still likely to be led by emerging economies, though.

The nuclear industry’s growth forecasts were dealt a blow by last year’s Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan. In the aftermath, Japan shut most of its reactors for safety tests, Germany announced it was abandoning nuclear, while other countries chose to review their plans.

The situation may now be changing. On 9 February the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed Southern Company, an energy utility based in Atlanta, Georgia, to build a

pair of reactors at its Vogtle site. They will be the first reactors built in the US since the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.

But Tim Abram of the University of Manchester, UK, says the real nuclear revival will not be in the US or Europe but in emerging economies like India and China. “They will build numbers of plants that will dwarf anything we’ll ever see in the UK.”

Abram suspects Japan, too, will ultimately start building reactors again, despite the government’s announcement last year that it would not. The country has almost no energy resources of its own, and has been forced to increase its imports of oil and gas massively while its nuclear reactors remain idle. “They are living hand-to-mouth,” Abram says.

“Mathematicians have become used to new ways of working, using tools such as blogs and wikis”

IS IT morally right to restart a dead person’s heart purely so it can be donated for transplant? This was the question posed this week by the British Medical Association in a report seeking new sources of organs to redress a shortfall in the UK. Some 500 to 1000 British people die each year waiting for a transplant.

The practice of restarting hearts in people who have just died of heart failure to boost donation rates was first demonstrated in the US in 2008.

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The logic is that keeping the heart ticking helps preserve it for longer. But the report cautions that the paradox of restarting the heart of someone who has just died of heart failure could confuse the public and damage confidence in donation.

It concludes that the best option to increase organ donation rates in the UK would be to make donation a default position from which people must “opt out” – at present the opposite is the case.

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