What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
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What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
1–10 of 211 posts
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#2I would be hard pressed to believe anything Elsevier says/claims at this point, without extensive and detailed evidence supporting it. Even then I would be fairly dubious, truth be told.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#3Fields Medal winner, Tim Gowers, has written several articles on the level of dysfunction in the academic publishing market. This article is good https://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-so...
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#4Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service.
I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu.
A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a PDF. Via a web interface.
Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.
And then there's the stuff the article talks about: the huge fees universities pay so that our own work can be "open-access".
I hate them. I hope they go bust. I hope their CEO becomes homeless.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#5Clearly Elsevier is not playing nice here. But this bit is great: "UC retains perpetual access rights to most Elsevier articles published before 2019." Whoever negotiated that bit for the UC side must be feeling very pleased with themselves.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#6"The UC Libraries do not endorse the use of Sci-Hub for article access.”30 As the UC Berkeley university librarian said in a published interview, “we are unequivocal: it is our understanding (though we are not attorneys!) that Sci-Hub is in violation of U.S. copyright law. We will not advise nor help anyone to use it"
That is probably the best endorsing non-endorcement I have read. It never says they discourage SciHub and suggests only SciHub is breaking copyright law.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#7I despise Elsevier and am trying not to publish anything with them. However, what impressed me the most here is the tone of the letter: direct, straight to the point, and clear to read and understand, with no trace of legalese. Every time I read something coming out of some academic office, I always expect a long sequence of bureaucratic sentences.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#8Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service. I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu. A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a…
This is poetry. Thank you! And exactly what I'd expect of an oligopoly player.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#9Clearly Elsevier is not playing nice here. But this bit is great: "UC retains perpetual access rights to most Elsevier articles published before 2019." Whoever negotiated that bit for the UC side must be feeling very pleased with themselves.
Probably standard terms carried over from the print model.
Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier
#10Elsevier essentially does nothing but funnel money from researchers to rent seekers. They add just about zero to science, indeed everything they done - which includes absolutely ruining good programs like Mendeley - has directly worked against scientific progress.
They are an evil company, through and through.