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What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

osc.universityofcalifornia.edu

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Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#31

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #26
dash2 wrote: post #4

Man, 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…

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still w…

[deleted]

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #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 SciHu…

They're officially not endorsing Sci-Hub, but they're sure to repeatedly call the service they're not endorsing by name on multiple pages.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#33

Post by mcv »

reallydontask wrote: post #27
mcv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still w…

If scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month. As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place

If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact.

But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#34

Post by malms »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
mcv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still w…

Welcome to coordination problems. Nobody loves them, but short-term, publishing with them is still the optimal move for scientist's career. > If everybody were to just stop, That's the root of all human-created hard problems on this planet; it's not exclusive to scientific publishing. People don't spontaneously coordinate. As long as it's in the short-term interest of any individual to not be the first one to stop, o…

It's not a "problem". elsevier has been creating actual value for years. It's becoming a problem now precisely because we think they are creating more problems than value.

It's always the value market which dictates what happens. Even a dictator has provide values for enough people (not necessarily its citizen) to stay in power.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#35

Post by malms »

Iv wrote: post #23
dtech wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Endorsing a US-law breaking site like SciHub could place them on the hook for legal repercussions. This non-endorsement endorsement achieves the same goals without the above liability.

Meanwhile, a courageous girl broke some laws with no gain for her, because she thought research was important. If the 10 biggest university libraries endorsed sci-hub, yeah, there could be legal repercussions but that could also move the lines much more than this timid non-endorsement endorsement.

She's a superstar now, could make money from ad or bribes with no personal risk. I would have done the same

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#36

Post by masklinn »

mcv wrote: post #26
dash2 wrote: post #4

Man, 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…

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still w…

> If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them?

They own the high IF journals, which scientists need to publish to in order to get cred'.

It's a chicken and egg problem, scientists can't move to OA journals until these provide the high IF they need to get cred' but OA journals can't get high IF without high impact articles being published in them, which requires paying Elsevier huge fees so you can publish in both.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#37

Post by taejo »

lordnacho wrote: post #12

I read a lot of bad things about Elsevier, so who is supporting them? Why aren't editors moving their publications en masse to some free and open platform? You'd think a reputation transplant would be possible if you just took the key people.

This has happened: the example I know is that the editorial board of the linguistics journal Lingua resigned en masse to create the open-access Glossa. My impression from the outside (just a friend of linguists) is that Glossa is generally considered "the real Lingua" and "Zombie Lingua" has become significantly less selective.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=34106

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#38

Post by rumanator »

mcv wrote: post #26
dash2 wrote: post #4

Man, 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…

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still w…

> If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them?

Because researchers either publish or perish, only the work posted in established journals counts, and the likes of Elsevier controls those journals.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#40

Post by rumanator »

mcv wrote: post #33
reallydontask wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month. As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place

If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.

> If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact.

That's irrelevant. Researchers are forced to publish in high-impact journals to preserve their career, and any newly created journal has zero impact.

Furthermore, some countries/universities enforce a journal whitelist, and evaluate the eir researchers based on the number of papers published in the pre approved list if publications.

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