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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

#61

Post by impendia »

mxcrossb wrote: post #17
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…

While we’re doing “as well as”s about Elsevier... I hate how soulless the journals feel. Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site. Where is the history? Where is the pride? Instead it looks just like any old…

> I hate how soulless the journals feel.

I certainly sympathize with you!

That said, personally I'm happy about this development. Journals don't really fill a practical need anymore, and (as you point out) they increasingly don't fill an emotional, intangible one either. Perhaps then we will muster the effort to kick the entire industry to the curb.

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

#62

Post by kevinventullo »

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…

Honest question: if you hate Elsevier, why are you submitting to their journals?

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

#63

Post by praptak »

jraph wrote: post #43
dessant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 — coul…

Almost like this old joke: "How long can we tolerate this nest of indecency and moral corruption at Smith street 2, pink door on the second floor, knock three times?!"

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

#64

Post by praptak »

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…

"Their entire business depends on the people who hate them"

Just like telcos, banks, internet behemoths and every other company that finds or builds a suitable set of barriers to entry.

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

#65

Post by CrazyStat »

kevinventullo wrote: post #62
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…

Honest question: if you hate Elsevier, why are you submitting to their journals?

It would be optimal for all researchers to coordinate to move away from Elsevier, but as long as everyone else (or the majority) is publishing in Elsevier the local optimum for each researcher is to continue publishing in Elsevier.

I know a few researchers who have publicly committed to not publish in Elsevier journals, but there's a career cost to doing this, particularly for early career researchers. Outside of a small number of colleagues who will actually read your work, most people (including funding organizations and tenure review boards) will judge your research by how much you publish and where you publish, and Elsevier owns many of the most prestigious journals.

It varies by field, depending on how many journals Elsevier has managed to capture. I consider myself lucky that Elsevier doesn't own any of the major journals in my specialty, so I've so far been able to avoid them without feeling like I was making career sacrifices to do so.

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

#66

Post by inflatableDodo »

michaelmior wrote: post #53
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…

> I hope their CEO becomes homeless. Not having experienced homelessness myself, this still isn't something I would wish in anyone.

I have experienced homelessness. I hope the CEO becomes homeless and then gets kicked out of any squats when they find out that he used to run Elsevier, and has to live in a cardboard box full of dogs under a bridge, before finally finding enlightenment in his tranformation into a modern Diogenes. He will then wander the world, providing modest educational services for free and be finally happy.

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

#67

Post by jraph »

duckerude wrote: post #60
jraph wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 — coul…

> Since the ledger of Bitcoin transactions is public, we can evaluate the donation activity to known Sci-Hub addresses (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM, 14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA, 1EVkHpdQ8VJQRpQ15hSRoohCztTvDMEepm). Subtle

At this point, this article is a masterpiece.

Thanks for the joke praptak.

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

#68

Post by mcv »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42
malms wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a kind of vendor lock-in. Elsevier is leveraging monopolistic power.

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

#69

Post by perpetualpatzer »

iamnotacrook wrote: post #48

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 st…

>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?

They're not. Elsevier doesn't produce the research. They filter it to give you the good bits.

Historically, the value they've provided is 1) to ensure quality (i.e. guarantee readers not just any crank can publish a paper and waste your time, guarantee authors that you'll be published alongside good stuff, so people are less likely to skip over your work), 2) to coordinate operations (recruit authors, recruit appropriate reviewers, negotiate with printers, general SG&A), 3) manage physical printing and distribution.

Arguably, 3 is now somewhat commoditized because distribution is mostly online. Costs have been driven down on 2 because of a glut of PhD's and the general demand for prestige signalling in academia.

I'm genuinely not sure how relevant 1 is. I could imagine either that it's entirely replicable because 2 is now cheap, or that it's the kind of thing you don't know you care about til it's gone the way no one ever said "I love that my local store only sells genuine and high quality goods," but now people complain about how it's tough to know what you're getting from Amazon.

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

#70

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

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.

It's not a matter of "stopping reading". Impact factor metrics are based on number of citations. And if I publish a paper on a new method to do X, I am expected to compare to (and thus cite) previous papers that did X. I cannot just decide not to cite relevant previous work because it is published in an Elsevier journal.

Of course, sending papers to OA journals, going the extra mile to cite them, and preferring them to non-OA alternatives when any paper will do (e.g. when you are just providing some examples of applications of X, without being exhaustive, and you can find some in OA and others in non-OA journals) does help.

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