The journals are gonna lose this fight.
Academics are one of the few groups that can afford to be idealists.
Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
151–160 of 313 posts
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#152Earlier 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?
Smart people who don't like arbitrary authority (But seem perfectly happy to be paid $300,000/year to build CRUD apps for some product manager at Amafacegoog) often butt heads with educators, be it in school, or university.
Couple that with a disdain that some technocrats have for unquantifiable, soft social sciences, or the politics shared by most people studying them.
Now, couple that with the various well-documented, objective problems that academia has.
Shake it with ice, and you get the comments that you are calling out.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
> Doing good research won't guarantee you a position.
Doing good work in industry doesn't, either. Depending where you work, you still need to play all the same bullshit political games.
The difference is, you can leave an abusive job/boss with a lot less friction then you can leave an abusive graduate/post-graduate program/advisor.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't that just put it back in the hands of the Federal Gov where it would languish like it did before?
Work produced by the Federal Government are usually automatically in the public domain.
Clarification: This thread is referring to work funded by the Federal Government (not done by Federal Government). And I would agree with @sitkak - that perhaps that BD act needs to be cut down - for starters. But we do need more to fix Universities.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#155Sounds 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.
That's not strictly the case. This practice is actually infringing on your (albeit bonkers) agreement with Elsevier. You can only share copies with those who requested it as an act of "professional courtesy".
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What I find interesting is how open source hardware companies can coexist with their cheap clones. The Prusa i3 printer is a great example. An assembled Prusa costs $1000 while clones are $200, and yet the two options serve different markets. If you’re a broke hobbyist you get the clones, and they take a lot of work to keep running. If you’re operating a school, business, or makerspace you get the Prusa because it’s…
One thing the layman loses with no IPR is the ability to tell which are the "real" Prusa, or the real brakes for their bike, or whatever. That is one thing that causes clear and imminent harm.
I'm pretty communist in my thinking, rail hard against established IPR structures, but most of it would be sensible IMO if the balance were shifted back toward the demos.
Things have been allowed to slip away from the IP deals such that the demos no longer get their part of the contract -- eg as established the deal with copyright requires deposit of copies in to pubic libraries (so they fall in to public ownership in a timely manner), DRM breaks the contract at the creator/business end and so such works should not get copyright protection, simple as that.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hav…
Grad student at Berkeley. The commercialization office only takes an interest if your work is high profile enough and has enough commercialization potential. Plenty of UC researchers release CC0 or MIT license code without issue. Elsevier may be only one of many problems for the UC community, but that doesn’t mean it’s a distraction—- millions have been wasted every year subsidizing their profits. And Elsevier’s rent…
Aren't you assuming the risk though? Like, in practice they might not care, but in writing they could care...
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
As enabled by Bayh–Dole Act [0]. Reversing this law would put publicly funded research back into the hands and minds of the public. This is the very law that creates a perverse incentive for universities to operate as for profit corporations, even with public dollars. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
Wouldn't that just put it back in the hands of the Federal Gov where it would languish like it did before?
Surprised that you were downvoted because this was actually the problem that led to the act: IP for work done for the federal government (not by the federal government) was often difficult to make use of.
Those seeking to use government-owned technology found a maze of rules and regulations set out by the agencies in question because there was no uniform federal policy on patents for government-sponsored inventions or on the transfer of technology from the government to the private sector.
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Does that include HTTP requests? :)
Re: Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
#160To 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 vettin…
I totally agree with your overall point, but I'd be remiss not to mention that these journals originally were paper-only and mailed to institutions & profs (and Xeroxed ad infinum). This did involve a cost, but surely nothing like the million dollar agreements unis are signing with multiple publishing houses.
Nowadays, publishers still put out paper versions, but their worth does indeed revolve around scientist giving them material for them to build a catalogue of copyrighted material.
I look forward to their fall.