Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 313 posts

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

#301

Post by isTravis »

rsfern wrote: post #240
xvilka wrote: post #87

UC should consider using open platforms for publishing, like MIT's PubPub[1]. In fact, so much was discussed already, current publishing model (aside of the publishers) is a bad fit for modern science. We need better collaboration, interactivity, and reproducibility. See discussion[2] about this a few years ago. And a number of followups[3][4][5]. [1] https://www.pubpub.org/ [2] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/…

Do you have any pointers to great communities on pubpub? I’ve explored a bit and it seems like a really great idea, but I’m not sure how to find the most robust communities on there...

PubPub folk here - our landing page is pretty much 6 months past its shelf life. A rework that helps people find relevant communities is in the pipeline. In the meantime - we have a simple Explore page[1]. Some of my favorite communities are the newly launched Harvard Data Science Review[2], The Journal of Design and Science[3], _Cursor[4], and the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy[5].

We're also encouraged by a handful of communities that are experimenting with new formats of pre-publication review and training such as: Collective Wisdom[6], EFPT Psychotherapy Guidebook[7], and Data Feminism[8].

At a more meta-level, the challenge here is that this ecosystem is overwhelmingly complex. The business-models, culture, and technical infrastructure are all unhealthy and self-reinforcing. There's no single platform that can fix this - it needs a political campaign in parallel with a social movement in parallel with some really good tech infrastructure. The US healthcare challenge is a good parallel in a lot of ways. Both are going to need new economic and governance models. At the risk of straying too far from the original question, PubPub's parent - the Knowledge Futures Group[9] - is working to push on all of these fronts. Feel free to reach out if this is the kind of thing you care about!

[1] https://www.pubpub.org/explore

[2] https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu

[3] https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu

[4] https://cursor.pubpub.org

[5] https://stanford-jblp.pubpub.org

[6] https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/collectivewisdom

[7] https://epg.pubpub.org

[8] https://bookbook.pubpub.org/data-feminism

[9] https://kfg.mit.edu

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

#302

Post by michaelmrose »

ktaylor wrote: post #287
michaelmrose wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Assuming people will create great works while living off a sustenance-level basic income is a bit of a stretch. And, it seems to ignore the extreme level of work, commitment, and persistence it takes to write books, publish science, etc. The issue is not whether people should be able to profit off their own work but whether a rent-seeking gatekeeper should be able to hijack others' work and profit off it.

A system designed to artificially limit supply impoverishes the world and most of the profit inevitably sticks with the middle men whose existence is only necessitated by the artificial scarcity.

I specifically stated the sustenance level basic income plus patronage as I expect people must have enough to survive but ought to be incentivized to earn enough to live better.

I've heard others, not you, express the nonsensical idea that if people had enough to barely survive they would all quite providing value to society until the whole pyramid balanced precariously on the backs of the few remaining working people collapsed. This is a basic mis-analysis of human nature. People would strive to produce both for reasons of self worth and desire for a better than basic life.

I expect many to most writers with no readers and no earnings would eventually tire of the affair and move on to others.

Others would find a way to live a better than subsidence level life via patronage or doing other work to finance their hobby.

Do you really believe in a world without copyright that Stephen king wouldn't find any supporters?

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

#303

Post by tingletech »

bsder wrote: post #234
xvilka wrote: post #87

UC should consider using open platforms for publishing, like MIT's PubPub[1]. In fact, so much was discussed already, current publishing model (aside of the publishers) is a bad fit for modern science. We need better collaboration, interactivity, and reproducibility. See discussion[2] about this a few years ago. And a number of followups[3][4][5]. [1] https://www.pubpub.org/ [2] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/…

UC is big enough they could actually start their own journal.

several open access journals publish on eScholarship https://escholarship.org/journals

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

#304

Post by tingletech »

xvilka wrote: post #253
tingletech wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My group at UC provides https://escholarship.org -- a 20+ year old open platform for publishing

PubPub is an example of the next generation publishing platform. It provides much more than plain publishing. And it is open source [1]. Good example of the similar, but commercial platform is Authorea[2]. [1] https://github.com/pubpub [2] https://www.authorea.com/

my product managers tell me LaTex is to STEMy

https://editoria.pub is a project we were involved with with UC Press

We run an OJS instance for our journal program. We are looking a Janeway too.

Manifold also looks interesting in this space.

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

#305

Post by sitkack »

captncraig wrote: post #163
sitkack wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we have an autoresponder framework, like MailMain, that can handle mail with messages like [paper-request] bacterial population analysis under exposure to fox news ? And it would respond with the proper paper or papers attached.

And some kind of index that lists possible "request" locations? Perhaps even with some kind of "hyperlinks". I think we may be onto something big here.

https://github.com/Zingle/smtp2http

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

#306

Post by tstactplsignore »

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…

Grad student at Berkeley for 3+ years. I've never heard of anyone mention or discuss this before among many people constantly publishing reasonably valuable code under open source licenses.

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

#308

Post by im3w1l »

a3_nm wrote: post #286
im3w1l wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Assuming Elsevier is killed off, someone else will have to put in the work of sifting good from bad. All of this work is performed by unpaid reviewers, not by Elsevier themselves.

Elsevier delegates yes. But the buck still stops with them. They pick the reviewers, for one.

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

#309

Post by kingludite »

salawat wrote: post #297
kingludite wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

...I think I actually understood that. Not sure whether I should be happy or not, but such is life Anyway, if my parsing is correct, this poster laments the way that academic publishing was subverted away from doing something unique and covering new ground through actually making substantial scientific breakthroughs in favor of higher visibility and accessibility where the metrics of having published something to be…

yes, you should be happy. You not just managed to understand but also managed to translate what I wrote into much more readable form.

That said, I didn't mean to hate on academia. I just wanted to describe what creating a field looks like. They made a lot of effort and had the best of intentions but end of the day they all had to earn a living working for the man. That is the real issue and it lives outside academia for the most part. I also think of academia as the archivers of knowledge. They never take that as a compliment but it really is.

I attempted to illustrate the different mind set [be it poorly]. Academics are respectful by default. 13 year olds are the exact opposite.

To try a thought experiment: Imagine releasing software after you've insulted every programmer you know and made fun of every last bit of code they wrote. To put it mildly: You might want to have another look at your creation. You might want to do that every day for the next 2 weeks. You might want to scrap that feature if you cant sign of on it as the closest thing to perfection humanly possible.

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

#310

Post by radford-neal »

natechols wrote: post #173
xiii1408 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correction: you do not need to publish in closed access journals to get a PhD. However, getting a tenure-track faculty position in the life sciences at a major US university is almost impossible without publishing in Science, Nature, or Cell (an Elsevier journal), none of which is open-access (without paying an exorbitant fee).

Why would you want a tenure-track position in a department whose existing members aren't capable of evaluating the quality of work themselves, but instead just trust Science, Nature, and Cell to have done a good job at evaluating it?

You know, those journals don't actually do that great a job...

Post reply on HN