Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by btrettel » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

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?

PhD student here. Here's my 20 minute rant:

If I don't like academia, it's from my experience in academia. Doing good research won't guarantee you a position. On the contrary, what seems to matter is bringing in a lot of money via grants and publishing tons of papers in recognized journals. This better be done steadily too. I know one guy who didn't get tenure at my university, likely because he had a year or two without any publications. Personally, I think a year or two without publications might be necessary for some longer-term projects. So the system has a short-term bias built in too.

You can be a jerk to your students and thrive in this system. (I'm sure other grad students and former grad students can think of copious examples.)

This seems to be because most people, even other researchers, can't evaluate the quality of work in other fields. I'd go farther than that and say that most researchers don't even know what good quality work should look like in their own fields. So instead they look for proxies like the sheer number of papers published, amount of money brought in, impact factor of the journals published in, how a researcher follows trends, etc. But these are weak proxies at best, maybe even anti-correlated with good research.

I'm sure that tenure track positions are great once you have tenure, but it's a lottery at best, and I think the processes of getting a PhD and tenure select for people who are unlikely to take risks, or teach them to avoid riskier research. So if you have tenure, you're less likely to do the sort of bold research I think is so valuable. I would hesitate to call most research even "incremental" as most researchers do a shallow review of their field, so they can't really build on anything. More like "spinning your wheels". If I became a professor and got tenure I'd probably never advance from associate to full professor, as I'd immediately switch my research strategy from "safe" research before tenure to higher impact research after tenure.

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

#122

Post by a1369209993 » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

apo wrote: post #56

The model Elsevier operates on is under attack from a number of sides. In addition to UC, there is Plan S: > The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021.[4] The "S" stands for "shock". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S The plan is backed by a wide range…

> Elsevier may have a right to license its content as it sees fit

Elsevier doesn't have content of it's own. It takes others' content (without paying them a dime in most - if not all - cases), maybe runs it through spellcheck, slaps a legal threat and price tag on it, and milks it for as much protection money as it can. Elsevier is the very model of modern major copyright troll.

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

#123

Post by CamperBob2 » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

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.

My guess is that this announcement will coincide with a new wave of technical or legal assaults against SciHub. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, it would have made more sense for Elsevier to go after smaller targets first.

Dinosaurs die hard.

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

#124

Post by iamnothere » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

marksomnian wrote: post #114

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copyright as an idea is fine - as in, how it was described in the Constitution: "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", emphasis on "limited times". It's our current batarnak of an implementation that's causing all the problems. Getting rid of copyright and instituting a copy-anarchy would mean that creatives would have no real incentive…

> Can there ever be a happy medium?

Short terms (15yr?) for unregistered or "implicit" copyright, renewable with registration and fees that increase year-over-year.

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

#125

Post by olliej » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

tingletech wrote: post #104

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)

Elsevier requires that authors do not do that - they can only provide copies of their papers in response to requests.

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

#126

Post by olliej » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

To clarify, Elsevier is unhappy that they aren't allowed to profit off of other peoples work.

1. It costs money to submit to Nature, Cell, Science, etc

2. Reviewers for journals are not paid

3. It then costs money to read the published papers

4. The journals are filled with ads

Literally the entire thing is profit for Elsevier, they are paid by the people who do the original work, they don't pay for any of the vetting and review that Elsevier claims you're paying for, and then you have to pay to read the published papers. And get through all of the ads.

Elsevier is a company that steals from the public.

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

#127

Post by michaelmrose » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

marksomnian wrote: post #114

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Copyright as an idea is fine - as in, how it was described in the Constitution: "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", emphasis on "limited times". It's our current batarnak of an implementation that's causing all the problems. Getting rid of copyright and instituting a copy-anarchy would mean that creatives would have no real incentive…

How about a combination of

- free health care for all

- universal basic income at a really basic subsidence level

- voluntary patronage

People define themselves by their art if they can live a reasonable life and produce they will do it.

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

#128

Post by dproblem » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

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…

Your university commercialization office will disagree. Check with them. From what I understand, it is illegal to release your code in CC0 or MIT unless you have taken permission from the commercialization office (Some universities allow GPL without explicit permission). Have you checked your contract ? Your work is not yours if it has any value. The value belongs to the university (mostly) - which also means you have no incentive to work on valuable stuff.

I think Elsevier is least of UCs problems. It's a distraction from the real ones.

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

#129

Post by mirimir » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #47

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.

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…

That's exactly backwards.

Elsevier didn't create the high-prestige journals. They were originally published by universities and not-for-profit academic societies. And became prestigious over time, in one way or another.

Elsevier just bought them, and has been raising prices and bleeding them out.

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

#130

Post by petra » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 6:39 PM UTC

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…

Many patents areuseless.

But without patents, and with today's reverse engineering, most things would be reduced to cheap chinese clones.

Yet it's not the case, in many fields.