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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

#101

Post by xiii1408 »

driverdan wrote: post #96
notafraudster wrote: post #76

I am an academic at a UC who publishes in Elsevier journals. I support this. I don't want copyright for anything I work on. I also work in a field where patent/IP stuff would not be relevant, so I view all of my work as public domain as far as I am concerned. With my code I either do CC0 or MIT licenses. I have had to publish in journals that are not open access -- mostly I just make pre-prints available to anyone wh…

> I have had to publish in journals that are not open access Why is that?

Career progress in academia is mostly based on publications in top-tier journals in your field. If those journals aren't open access, you're required to publish in closed access journals if you want to (1) get a Ph.D., (2) get tenure, etc.

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

#102

Post by jpeloquin »

kevmo wrote: post #11

All research done with public money should be publicly available. Full stop.

In the US, the NIH has a public access policy since 2008, as required by law:

> SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753

Access the papers here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

The 12 month delay for public access shouldn't exist. Any discussion of a paper in the news tends to happen around the official date of publication because that is when the press embargo is lifted. The public deserves to have access to the original work then, not a year later. But everyone does eventually get access to NIH-funded work.

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

#103

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

Elsevier attempted - successfully, for quite some time - to create a gate-keeping oligopoly by inserting it as a choke point into academic publishing while providing no real added value.

This isn't about copyright, because original authors are forced to pay-to-play.

In a genuine copyright market, creators are paid in exchange for exploitation of copyright.

If they have to pay up to sign over their rights, that's not a copyright issue - that's extortion.

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

#104

Post by tingletech »

notafraudster wrote: post #76

I am an academic at a UC who publishes in Elsevier journals. I support this. I don't want copyright for anything I work on. I also work in a field where patent/IP stuff would not be relevant, so I view all of my work as public domain as far as I am concerned. With my code I either do CC0 or MIT licenses. I have had to publish in journals that are not open access -- mostly I just make pre-prints available to anyone wh…

do you put your author's final version in https://escholarship.org ?

Do you ever use https://oapolicy.universityofcalifornia.edu/ ? (it's only open to senate faculty right now, be we are rolling it out for all ~240k UC employees)

Also related https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu

(disclosure, I'm the nominal tech lead for these)

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

#105

Post by xiii1408 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #7

Sounds like everyone at UC is going to use SciHub now, and most likely won't switch back once access gets restored? This seems like a self-defeating move on Elsevier's part? Incidentally, I heard from someone who worked at Elsevier around four years ago that the working environment there was terrible, and she couldn't wait to leave. That doesn't seem surprising.

Or arXiv. Elsevier authors can post their papers on arXiv and/or their own website.

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

#106

Post by btrettel »

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…

There are few open access journals in my field, and the ones that will publish open access charge absurdly high fees for it. I have a spreadsheet for my field: $2000 to $3140 per article, average $2690. I tried to negotiate with one smaller and more specialized journal in my field on the fee without any luck. I've also tried to find journals willing to take my paper without copyright transfer, as if commonly done for US government employees, but few journals seem willing to do that without the law requiring it.

My solution at the moment: Publish only in conferences that don't require you to transfer copyright so I can distribute my paper open access without paying anything. Yes, the peer review, if there is any, is less rigorous, but my experience suggests that peer review typically offers only shallow critiques of my work. Peer review doesn't need to work that way, but that's how it is in practice at the moment. I think review is valuable, but this makes getting good reviews my responsibility, not a publishing venue's.

This solution also precludes me from working in most tenure-track academic positions, but I believe those positions are a bad deal anyway, so I'm not too worried. Government research positions seem usually okay with publishing mainly in conferences.

If there are any other issues with this scheme, I'm interested in hearing about them.

I'm against subsidizing open access publication as that seems to basically be a subsidy for publishers and not researchers. That would maintain the absurdly high open access feeds. Instead, let's make the journals compete on price, and they'll have to compete against free (e.g., Arxiv), so hopefully this would drive the prices down to a reasonable level. I'm fine with paying publishers if they actually provide a service commensurate with what they charge. The issue is that they don't right now.

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

#108

Post by im3w1l »

braythwayt wrote: post #63
lacker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steel man for the Elsevier side is that nobody is forcing scientists to submit content to Elsevier journals or to read Elsevier journals. It’s a product that they create, so they have the right to price it as they see fit. If Elsevier was really providing no value, why don’t scientists simply submit their work elsewhere? Clearly scientists and universities don’t really care about open access. If it was that impor…

It's not "prestige." Framing it that way makes it sound like Elsevier is in the vanity business, and academics are vain. In actual fact, Elsevier is a gatekeeper to obtaining funding and making a living in research. Elsevier is rent-collecting, not selling an intangible feeling.

So let's go to the root of this. What is it that the funding agencies value in Elsevier publications? That if it's published there it's a mark of high quality research.

Assuming Elsevier is killed off, someone else will have to put in the work of sifting good from bad. And that's not an easy problem, especially when many try to pervert the process for ideological gain.

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

#109

Post by TaylorAlexander »

api wrote: post #97
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly feel like intellectual property is harmful in almost every field I look at. It concentrates wealth and slows innovation (the opposite of what IP proponents claim). I voluntarily waive copyright protection for most of my work, but I’d ideally see the dissolution of the concept more broadly. Our government protects these laws which I see as unjust, and some change to that would be beneficial I believe.

What I've seen in tech is that a patent is a straw asset to make the bean counters feel more comfortable. The value of non-capital-intensive tech companies is almost entirely ephemeral. Even for capital intensive ones most of the value is usually not in the physical capital but in the brand, ideas, collective employee knowledge, and customer relationships. A patent looks like a physical asset on the books so it makes…

Copyright is what keeps billions of people from accessing every book ever written for free.

Google really tried to do this but stopped digitizing books halfway through the worlds collection because of copyright law. It hurts to think of all the knowledge we could have shared if this had been permitted.

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

#110

Post by kevinventullo »

braythwayt wrote: post #63
lacker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steel man for the Elsevier side is that nobody is forcing scientists to submit content to Elsevier journals or to read Elsevier journals. It’s a product that they create, so they have the right to price it as they see fit. If Elsevier was really providing no value, why don’t scientists simply submit their work elsewhere? Clearly scientists and universities don’t really care about open access. If it was that impor…

It's not "prestige." Framing it that way makes it sound like Elsevier is in the vanity business, and academics are vain. In actual fact, Elsevier is a gatekeeper to obtaining funding and making a living in research. Elsevier is rent-collecting, not selling an intangible feeling.

To be fair, Elsevier has no direct say in how that funding gets distributed. This is decided by various foundations, NSF, etc., who choose to use publication in Elsevier-owned journals as a proxy for quality.

(N.b. I am no fan of Elsevier, just trying to figure out how their power can be unwound)

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