A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as a blog post at January 21 by Timothy Gowers, a prominent mathematician at the University of Cambridge. The boycott is growing so quickly - it had about 1,800 signers on Monday. Today nearly 3,000 scholars have put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.

The main objections are:

1. They charge exorbitantly high prices for their journals.
2. They sell journals in very large "bundles," so libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals.
3. They support measures such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), PIPA and the Research Works Act, that aim to restrict the free exchange of information.