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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

#111

Post by leemailll »

sigwinch28 wrote: post #103
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

> Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else. Which stages are you referring to? In my experiences in CS, publishing a _conference_ paper required: - Writing the paper using a publisher-provided LaTeX documentclass (potentially a significant portion of publisher cos…

Cs is different from many science fields. Many if not most fields rely on published papers on journals not a conference. Many of the post-accepted production work still need to be done by human. think about a magazine, they sort of like that for production work

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

#112

Post by buboard »

Jerry2 wrote: post #30

This paragraph made me smile: > Elsevier alleges that “one senior library official has repeatedly pointed to illegal sources of articles, including a Russia-based piracy site.” > We are unaware of any library employee who has been directing users to illegal sources of articles. On the contrary, UC explicitly published a statement on its website, in response to questions asked by users, that states: “The UC Libraries…

There was a thread on twitter about how important it is not to talk about sci-hub. Please tell your friends not to use sci-hub to instantly download any science article. Sci-hub and its various domains which can be found by searching "where is sci hub now" must be stopped from their criminal violation of intellectual rights law. I repeat, do not talk about sci hub

https://twitter.com/NeuroPolarbear/status/115747010610198528...

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

#114

Post by aj7 »

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…

Because publishing papers creates personal property for the authors, and the fees are not paid by them. So there is an incentive to leave the system alone. Resistance is building, slowly.

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

#115

Post by foobarbecue »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

If they have a margin of 35%, they are wasting 50%. They do not copyedit. If you drop a nonsense sentance into an Elsevier journal after the volunteer editing stage, it'll be there in the published version. I've noticed plenty of typos in my own papers after publication.

> they [open journals] charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs.

Most Elsevier journals charge an ADDITIONAL ~$1500 if you want to open access, supposedly to make up for the lost profits.

EDIT: correction, I just checked the fee for the Elsevier journal JVGR, the last one I published in. It is $2750 per article!!! https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-volcanology-and...

Oh and don't be confused by "green open access" -- that's not open access. It's just typical smarmy BS marketing. How the hell do we allow these people to be the guardians of science!?

They don't accomplish anything beyond rent-seeking and rubber-stamping. They are as bad as the MPAA and RIAA. I've published papers in Elsevier journals several times, and I'll probably have to keep doing it, because they are the landlord.

They are a major contributing factor to the really serious ignorance problem we have in this country.

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

#116

Post by bigred100 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

I like Elsevier cause they got lotta papers I like to read and I’m not the one who pays the fee anyway so it means nothing else to me

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

#117

Post by qekbg »

geofft wrote: post #95
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is g…

>Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?

Can they? All pieces of software that are the core part of the Linux desktop (kernel, Xorg, GNOME, Firefox, etc) are backed by big corporations.

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

#118

Post by matthewowen »

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…

In a lot of fields, most academics just don't care

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

#119

Post by pedrocr »

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

It would also happen within the same month if the EU and/or the US simply made it illegal to publish publicly funded research behind a paywall. All the content would disappear and the "industry" would reorganize. As a citizen the fact that this has still not been done is outrageous. Explaining that to the general population instead of pretending that this is something that's specific to the scientific community could be a way forward. It's simply a scandal that citizens are not allowed to read for free the research they paid to be performed.

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

#120

Post by kernelsanderz »

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…

I'd highly recommend watching this documentary called Paywall [1] which explains the unhealthy dynamic between academia and publishing. TL;DR - academic prestige and career progression depends on being published in highly rated journals.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM_nWsdbNvQ

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