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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

#41

Post by FabHK »

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.

FWIW, it has happened [1]. I think it's a coordination problem - if everyone moves, you can take the reputation along, but if you alone move, you bear the cost. In the example of the Journal of Algorithms, the whole editorial board resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a not-for-profit publisher, but that only happened because the founder of the journal, nestor Don Knuth himself, got so fed up with Elsevier that he managed to prod everyone along.

So, yes, it is possible, and it happens far too rarely, and I wish top people in their field would instigate it more often.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...

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

#42

Post by TeMPOraL »

malms wrote: post #34
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's still a problem. Each individual scientists is better off short-term, in terms of their own career advancement, if they support Elsevier (by publishing with them), even though they'd be much better off longer-term if they all stopped supporting Elsevier.

Markets do love this sort of thing; this is one way of capturing customers and extracting money from them, whether they like it or not.

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

#43

Post by jraph »

dessant wrote: post #13
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…

The papers they hold hostage have not been fully backed up [1] and made accessible for everyone. Elsevier does deserve to go bankrupt, but we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/

I had a laugh reading this.

> Readers should note that, in many jurisdictions, use of Sci-Hub may constitute copyright infringement. Users of Sci-Hub do so at their own risk. This study is not an endorsement of using Sci-Hub, and its authors and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers. There is a possibility that Sci-Hub users — especially those not using privacy-enhancing services such as Tor — could have their usage history unmasked and face legal or reputational consequences.

> Sci-Hub is currently served at domains including https://sci-hub.hk, https://sci-hub.la, https://sci-hub.mn, https://sci-hub.name, https://sci-hub.tv, and https://sci-hub.tw, as well as at scihub22266oqcxt.onion

"We are not telling you to use Sci-Hub, but you can use Tor and here are some addresses where you can find it."

> Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals. For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States.

"See, Sci-Hub works that well" :-)

Managing to have this hosted on a .gov website seems noteworthy.

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

#44

Post by lrem »

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.

No, that's not attached to actual reading. Having access to their whole library, I still preferred to Google for preprint PDF. Even better a "research report", which usually is the same content, but before they were forced to remove half a page of text the last day, because the system forced different margins.

The problem is that many bureaucracies attach some kind of point value to journals on this list, and a different on that list and so on. It's reforming those that is a problem, especially since according to their metrics, which are defined by counting the papers in journals in the lists, everything works perfectly.

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

#46

Post by Gatsky »

It is easy to hate Elsevier, but the real problem is academia. Elsevier is just capitalising on an almost perfect business opportunity - take scientists’ work for free, get other scientists to review it for free then sell it back to all of them. You can’t blame them for doing this, or for being so defensive. We are the fools for participating in this racket.

We need a hard fork. Large prestigious academic institutions should band together and decide not to publish in Elsevier journals, that’s the only way forward. Funding agencies should also be on board.

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

#47

Post by steve19 »

vihren wrote: post #25
raister wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to say this, but Russia is helping the world fight against Elsevier and all those money funneling institutions... (with scihub, for anyone not knowing that it is a russian 'service')

The creator of Sci-Hub is Alexandra Elbakyan and she is from Kazakhstan. According to Wikipedia [0] she spend 1 year working for a Moscow company, but that's it. I wouldn't classify it as a Russian service. There is a nice russian service for paywalled ebooks and articles called LibGen [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

At one point in time she banned the whole of Russia from accessing sci-hub after she felt that some Russian scientists had been insulting when they named a parasitic insect after her. Late last year Russia banned isps from accessing sci-hub.

It may or may not be hosted in Russia, but I agree it is not "Russian".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/sci-hub-blocked-in-russi...

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

#48

Post by iamnotacrook »

Is there a page which explains how this situation arose, why they get money from universities to access information produced at tax-payers expense, their role as gate-keepers, any work they actually produce which is useful, proposed alternatives etc. As someone outside of academia this is confusing. Why is someone getting stuff produced at tax-payers expense, peer-reviewed for free, and charging for it, and what's stopping this from being overturned?

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

#49

Post by tomxor »

dessant wrote: post #13
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…

The papers they hold hostage have not been fully backed up [1] and made accessible for everyone. Elsevier does deserve to go bankrupt, but we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/

> we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged.

Hopefully it all gets backed up by sci-hub before that point.

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

#50

Post by jillesvangurp »

wpietri wrote: post #5

Clearly 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.

It's not just Elsevier but also other publishers. They are doing everybody a favor here by forcing the issue. They could just chicken out and make UC pay for open access at a bit lower rate and we'd not be having this debate. But instead they are acting in a rather tone deaf way and are probably accelerating the demise of their business. I actually published a few things with them when I did my Ph. D. back in the day. Given the current debate, I'd probably avoid them and favor other channels these days. Researchers being aware of this is not going to help their marketing.

IMHO all public research funding should be conditional on full open access. If you use public funding, the research results need to be open access for anyone. I'm pretty sure that is becoming standard practice already but in so far it isn't, that should pretty much be non negotiable when getting funding or for any tax money earmarked for research.

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