71–80 of 398 posts
> “Graduate students who want to access an article from the Elsevier system should work with their department chair, professor of the class, or their faculty thesis adviser for assistance.” Now THAT is chuckle worthy.
Imagine wasting some researcher's valuable time on tracking papers for you! The gall of these publishing companies never ceases to amaze.
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Has anyone got a breakdown of actual costs incurred by Elsevier? Note I don't include marketing their journals, I mean a breakdown labour costs, rent for buildings (where the building are located) and other production costs. I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish. I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they…
Completely without source and no breakdown, but I read recently that their margins are in the 20-30% range.
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The major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in the first place. And lets not even talk about p…
Yes, publishers historically did that. And they printed journals and books, and reprints. But prices were modestly above cost, back in the day. As recently as the 80s. Now, expenses are much lower, and it's all about profiteering.
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Thanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp. However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
Do academics have time to read every paper?
I may be naive here, but why not search and download the article's preprint from arXiv? Would it be that much different from the final paper? Why would you need to pirate at all?
But you are right, preprints are not all that different from published papers, as this recent analysis confirmed: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363
[edited to add:] I suppose you could look at the data (https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-stories/) and see what proportion of requested DOIs have a preprint version in the arXiv. I suspect it's rather small.
Elsevier and others can go something themselves. Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits. See, e.g., one of many such figures: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap... It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy"…
Has anyone got a breakdown of actual costs incurred by Elsevier? Note I don't include marketing their journals, I mean a breakdown labour costs, rent for buildings (where the building are located) and other production costs. I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish. I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they…
I don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way? As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - fro…
I've just had a paper accepted last week in a traditional journal (peer-reviewed and paywalled) and I'd share a few things I know and feel about scientific publishing from an anthor's perspective. The publisher provide a valuable service to authors. Their online submission protal was a joy to use and their staff very friendly and responsive. Once a panel has decided that my submission was at least fit for further con…
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Where a scientist publishes papers can make or break their career. Historically for area A, journals B, C, D have the highest impact. If you want your work to be recognized as high quality you will publish in those journals and whether they are "open" or "controlled by a publisher" is irrelevant. It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.
Thanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp. However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?
I may be naive here, but why not search and download the article's preprint from arXiv? Would it be that much different from the final paper? Why would you need to pirate at all?
Have any of the mirror sites uploaded all 50M papers as a torrent yet? They really should...
Yeah, I guess we're at the point where 50tb arrays are not infeasible. Not sure where I'd get 50tb of bandwidth though without someone gnawing off my left foot.