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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

#261

Post by gumby »

0815test wrote: post #79
gumby wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. COnsider: First, PLoS fees are lower and as a nonprofit only have to support operation (no profit). Also as a nonprofit there is some transparency as to where those fees go, so I assume that publishing there really does cost something like $1600. Second PLoS's fee rules include the sentence "Authors' ability to pay publication fees will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish." Else…

> (I'm looking at you, MIT!) You couldn't choose a worse example than that. MIT famously screwed Aaron Swartz legally over public domain (pre-1923) papers, by baselessly claiming that his access had been "unauthorized" when in fact it was entirely consistent with their own pre-existing policies! They are a bad actor in this whole issue and aren't going to do a thing.

I'm an alum and I agree and I mentioned MIT because I think it should take a stand to atone for that.

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

#263

Post by anticensor »

trentlott wrote: post #232
anticensor wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PLOS is a top-tier indexed refereed open-access journal.

The impact factor of PLOS is 2.8 Not awful, but certainly not top tier My boss would prefer to hold a project for six months and add significance versus publishing in something <4

More people needs to read and submit articles in order that impact factor to rise. A journal's impact does not increase on its own.

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

#264

Post by kingludite »

icelancer wrote: post #251
driverdan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because academia is a run by a bunch of cronyist elitists who care about impact factor more than they care about science.

There was a window in time, more than a million internet years ago, when all of the good code was written by a bunch of 13 year olds. Assembly was used but machine code was the superior weapon of choice. Something like: These are the opcodes, we calculate things in hex, deal with it you noob. They were always there of course but the academics came in ever larger numbers and tried to forge something prestigious out of the field. These unsophisticated developers who didn't learn how to code started uttering all kinds of authoritatively sounding nonsense. While the 13 year olds bragged about their kung fu being better than yours the professors kept talking about how hard and labor intense everything was. Clear noob talk with a cherry on top. Tears from laughter.... I remember one kid saying: So it has to run on millions of computers and run for millions of cycles but we should sacrifice performance for ease of development? Because those poor developers bla bla bla? There was real elitism among the 13 year olds, no one cared for something that kind of worked, the prestige was all in squeezing out more performance. During academic construction the man behind the curtain was clearly visible. He wrote everything in basic because machine code was ohh so much to hard. His own words.

A long story short: The ferengi alliance hired countless mercenaries and defeated the borg. Today you cant even send an sms message or distribute a text document without paying tribute to the grand nagus one way or another.

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

#265

Post by j1vms »

0815test wrote: post #79
gumby wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. COnsider: First, PLoS fees are lower and as a nonprofit only have to support operation (no profit). Also as a nonprofit there is some transparency as to where those fees go, so I assume that publishing there really does cost something like $1600. Second PLoS's fee rules include the sentence "Authors' ability to pay publication fees will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish." Else…

> (I'm looking at you, MIT!) You couldn't choose a worse example than that. MIT famously screwed Aaron Swartz legally over public domain (pre-1923) papers, by baselessly claiming that his access had been "unauthorized" when in fact it was entirely consistent with their own pre-existing policies! They are a bad actor in this whole issue and aren't going to do a thing.

> famously screwed (over)

infamously is what you mean, particularly considering "screwed (over)" is very much an understatement in regards to the sombre culmination of that legal case. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#MIT

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

#266

Post by a3_nm »

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.

That's not exactly true -- they allow authors to post their papers, e.g., on arXiv; and on institutional repositories such as eScholarship after the end of an embargo period. Here is the page with the (very complicated) terms: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing

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

#267

Post by brighter2morrow »

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.

My Steelman for Elsevier: they coordinate the peer review (giving your work more legitimacy), the marketing, and the distribution of your work. We all take Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud for granted but actually keeping a searchable and relevant archive of your work on place forever is also a fairly involved process.

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

#268

Post by brighter2morrow »

jasonhansel wrote: post #134

Now all that Elsevier has to do is eliminate piracy! Just like how the RIAA eliminated piracy, and we are all still willing to pay 99 cents for a new song on iTunes. (sarcasm)

I prefer to buy music legally. Am I alone? I don't want to have to worry about legal processes when I could just spend a buck to listen to that little diddy stuck in my head.

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

#270

Post by Vinnl »

patall wrote: post #200

I never understood why university libraries are not making the journals themselves instead of having them done by companies and paying for the subscription. Every university would have like 5 or 6 journals and pay everything for those and all the scientific articles would be free. I mean elife does it and it is great.

The problem is not starting new journals, the problem is having researchers submit their work there. And the problem with that is that the name/reputation of existing journals are currently used as a proxy to judge the quality of applicants for e.g. tenure tracks. As long as that's not changed, researchers are incentivised to submit their work to the traditional, "reputable" journals.

(Disclaimer: I'm part of a project that aims to provide an alternative measure of quality.)

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