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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

#211

Post by tingletech »

dproblem wrote: post #128
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 hav…

FWIW, UC's open source guidelines https://security.ucop.edu/resources/open-source-software-lic...

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

#212

Post by golemiprague »

refurb wrote: post #113
JudgeWapner wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should an author not have rights to their own work, just because it’s scientific in nature? You’re also opening the door to unintended consequences - are scientific textbooks not copyrightable also? If not, why not?

Because the researcher is an employee of the university, I don't get a right to my work when working for someone, I get salary instead.

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

#213

Post by DominikPeters »

mmastrac wrote: post #84

> 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 no…

Here is my guess at the UC calculations. UC currently pays $11m/yr. For this price, UC wants to get all its 5000 papers/yr as open access, but Elsevier only offers to give them 1750 papers/yr for this price. Elsewhere in the article Elsevier states that the normal open access fees for 5000 papers are $15m, so $15m/5000 = $3000/paper. So UC could take Elsevier's proposal and get 1750 papers (+ read access) for $11m, and pay $3000 for each of the remaining 3250 papers, for a total of $21m. With inflation, $21m is about an 80% increase over $11m.

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

#214

Post by natechols »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #207
natechols wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "top-tier" you mean "sufficient to impress the hiring committees at Stanford or Harvard", sorry, no. Personally, having no interest in faculty jobs to begin with, I'd vastly prefer to deal with PLOS than Elsevier, but good luck persuading the average biosciences postdoc to choose it over the Holy Triad of prestige journals.

So then why are the people in control of such decisions so corrupt? Shouldn’t there then be a movement of academics seeking to defund these departments captured by corrupt corporate interests and reissued to actual scientists doing scientific research?

If by "corruption" you are implying some kind of quid-pro-quo, that's not how it works. Academia is both extremely decentralized and extremely competitive, and any department that prohibits publishing in non-OA journals is unilaterally disarming and will find hiring and retention very difficult. It's basically the Prisoner's Dilemma in action.

I would love to throw out the entire system and start from scratch (this is not an uncommon sentiment, especially among ex-academics who moved to industry), but the only way this happens is if the major funding agencies impose these decisions from the top down. And that is indeed how the most progress has been made, thanks to the NIH, HHMI, and so on.

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

#215

Post by _delirium »

olliej wrote: post #125
tingletech wrote: post #104

Earlier 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.

The last time I published in an Elsevier journal, I was allowed to deposit it in my institutional repository with a 2-year embargo period. Still sucks, but if your repository software supports embargo periods (my university's did), it means you can deposit now and it'll be automatically switched to open public access when the embargo times out, which is at least better than never (and less error-prone than hoping I remember to post it in two years).

I also posted the PDF on my personal website immediately, on the theory that they are probably not going to sue me personally over my own paper. Not impossible, but I haven't gotten a C&D.

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

#216

Post by jononor »

bahmboo wrote: post #168
bahmboo wrote: post #140

Earlier 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?

From the wikipedia article that was referred to: Prior to the enactment of Bayh-Dole, the U.S. government had accumulated 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5% of those patents were commercially licensed Not saying I understand the complexities but an outright repeal doesn't seem like it would address this underlying systemic problem. Maybe times have changed.

Are more than 5% of university patents commercially licensed these days?

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

#217

Post by patrick5415 »

pixelbash wrote: post #199

> Traditionally, the publishers accept papers for publication for free but charge steep subscription fees To my knowledge (academic family and partner in NZ) this is false, publishers charge for both publication _and_ reading in general.

I think this must depend on your field. In mine, it’s generally free to publish, unless you want color figures or go over the page limit.

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

#218

Post by karlp »

rayiner wrote: post #180
sitkack wrote: post #136

Earlier 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

Imagine a VC that demanded ownership of 100% of all code you developed and user data you collected in return for accepting any investment from them. Would any good startup take the money? Without Bayh-Dole, the government would be in the same position as that hypothetical VC. Innovation is about money, not ideals. More money flowing into research universities is a good thing.

> Would any good startup take the money?

I would wager most grants given by the federal government go to universities or non-profits, so it seems like it would make perfect sense to make them release their research publicly.

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

#220

Post by mkl »

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…

I doubt you could come up with a workable definition of "scientific paper" to decide what is or isn't copyrightable.
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