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Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

latimes.com

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Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#81

Post by zadokshi »

hyperbovine wrote: post #5
zadokshi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t tell if by “dying industry” you mean universities or journal databases.

Honest question: why do commenters here frequently seem to bear a chip on their shoulder when it comes to institutions of higher learning?

Honest answer: it wasn’t meant to be an attack or some form of resentful comment but a comment about the business model. I worked for half my career in a worldwide top tier academic institution (non-US) before all of these political issues. Even the institutions themselves know the current model is failing.

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#82

Post by dan-robertson »

Is this the first time Elsevier has cut off a major group of universities? In all the similar past occasions I know about, Elsevier would threaten to cut off access but not flow through, out of the kindness of their hearts and for the good of academia (or rather for fear that the universities might discover they don’t get much value out of Elsevier)

One thing Elsevier builds their strategy on is bundling: that to get the journals a university really wants, they also have to subscribe to lots they don’t want. This would mean for Elsevier that they could keep charging high prices until all disciplines don’t care about them. A university can’t say “well all our mathematicians just use the arxiv and email so we don’t want any mathematics journals” and have this work.

Another common theme is universities joining together into larger groups to negotiate a deal together. But this means individual universities can’t really choose to not subscribe to any Elsevier journals (because others in the group want to subscribe), so often they still get what many inside consider a bad deal.

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#83

Post by otherme123 »

mch82 wrote: post #72

The key to all this is that for a person to get a PhD or grants they usually need to publish papers. Self-publishing often isn’t recognized, so expensive journals thrive. Maybe that is slowly changing...

Usually publishing fees are not the problem. The problem is reading papers is expensive if you're not using Scihub.

In fact, publishing in an open journal (e.g. Plos) cost about twice as much as an equivalent closed journal, but it's the model that everybody except Elsevier wants.

When you get a (public) grant, some of the money is reserved for publishing costs. It's outrageus that public money is used to research and publish but then the public and other researchers cannot access for free that content.

The Elsevier bussiness model is just perfect, they just sit on their desk routing papers from authors to other authors for peer review, and create a PDF. This "work" costs about $1.000. After that, downloading that PDF costs another $20-30, but the original author receives $0.

Just imagine that applied to regular books: the author pay to publish. The publisher charges $30 for the PDF. The author never sees a dime.

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#84

Post by mmastrac »

> in the words of Dennis J. Ventry, a law professor at UC Davis who is vice chair of the academic senate’s committee on library and scholarly communication. He says the publisher’s last offer would have increased UC costs by 80% over three years, “hardly cost neutrality.”

> Elsevier says its proposal would have allowed a fivefold increase in the number of UC articles it published under open access — from about 350 now to 1,750 — while increasing the overall bill to UC by no more than annual inflation

One of these two parties is clearly misrepresenting this cost increase.

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#85

Post by JudgeWapner »

refurb wrote: post #75
HeavenFox wrote: post #62

Every time I read about the incredibly exploitative scientific publishing industry, I can’t help but think: can we just make scientific papers not copyrightable? Researchers and their institutions don’t benefit from the copyright protection; they barely make any money from their work. Sure, someone can take your work and claim it as their own, but we already handle them as plagiarism rather than copyright infringemen…

Not sure why you'd want to start making scientific papers non-copyrightable. The easiest solution is just have scientists publish in open-access journals. Easy right? Nope, they are judged by the impact of their papers and it's higher in better quality journals. That's the value these journals offer - exclusivity. Scientists and universities could solve this issue immediately. Scientists publish in open-access journa…

Because there is no reason they should be, so the decision can be handled at the legal level and not be as subject to the influence of the journals. They would have one chance to fight it before it was cemented into law.

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#87

Post by xvilka »

UC should consider using open platforms for publishing, like MIT's PubPub[1]. In fact, so much was discussed already, current publishing model (aside of the publishers) is a bad fit for modern science. We need better collaboration, interactivity, and reproducibility. See discussion[2] about this a few years ago. And a number of followups[3][4][5].

[1] https://www.pubpub.org/

[2] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi...

[3] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/27/gitwikxiv-follow-up-di...

[4] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/22/gitwikxiv-follow-up-an...

[5] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-...

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#88

Post by mirimir »

apo wrote: post #45
jimbob45 wrote: post #26

Can anyone steelman the Elsevier side? I don't want to be caught in the headlights of I have to debate this.

Elsevier owns copyrighted material, which it licenses to individuals and institutions for a fee. The fee is negotiated on a case-by-case basis, which is no different than any other intellectual property such as movies, music, books, or software. If a customer is unable or unwilling to pay the prevailing rate, then no access will be granted. The argument that Elsevier uses unpaid academic labor and therefore should fa…

> If a customer is unable or unwilling to pay the prevailing rate, then no access will be granted.

Sure, but access can still be obtained. For free. So they can sod off.

Edit: Elsevier and the like are predatory scum. They bought top academic journals, and have increased prices dramatically in recent decades. They're bleeding out the industry, as they ride it down to irrelevance. Just as some have done with the newspaper industry.

Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

#89

Post by dredmorbius »

ghostpepper wrote: post #78
jimbob45 wrote: post #26

Can anyone steelman the Elsevier side? I don't want to be caught in the headlights of I have to debate this.

I can't believe I've never heard of this expression.

It's somewhat recent:

https://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/steelmanning/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-hig...

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

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