What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by buboard » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

leemailll wrote: post #102

boomboomsubban wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks. I understand why you would think this, but most editing is done by unpaid volunteers. They have 20,000 editors and ~8000 employees. Which means institutions are already "paying" to submit reports, with exceptions for those who can't afford it.

The editing is not done by volunteers, the reviewing process is. Editing, proofreading, layout, and submit related info to different databases need to be done by someone. Editors for academic journals usually did not do the late part.

Editing -> done by authors and reviewers, (paid) editors never make editorial suggestions

Proofreading -> $50 on mechanical turk (this is really just proofreading according to a list of detailed rules, they not validating the text)

Layout -> Completely useless in the internet age. In fact pasting it all in an HTML page makes it easier to read.

Submit related info to different databases -> This should not be a thing at all. It is a thing because their databases are closed-access so they submit data and metadata to paying customers. I dont even think this is covered by subscription/publication costs but from those paying customers.

So yeah, i think most ppl would be happy to pay ~$200 for their paper. It helps to weed out trolls too.

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

#132

Post by foobarbecue » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

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…

Tragedy of the Commons.

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

#133

Post by asark » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

madez wrote: post #88

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 just about coordination. Clearly, coordination would make solving the accepted problem relatively easy. Yet, individual action does solve the problem to a small degree. Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happe…

The problem is that often changing your own behavior hurts you more than it works to effect change, unless lots of others also spontaneously jump onboard. Which, more or less certainly, they won't, so you're basically just self-flagellating in a closet, which might make you feel morally pure but isn't doing anything to change the world. This is a pretty well-studied part of political science (and probably is covered in other disciplines like sociology, I'd expect) so there's a ton of both theoretical and practical (case) studies on the topic.

Coordination problems (and very serious problems of information access & distribution) are why things like boycotts are in fact, however much we might wish otherwise, so laughably bad at enforcing community norms on e.g. large companies, and why the market doesn't do a great job of just "sorting out" all kinds of things most people would consider to be problems.

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

#134

Post by n1000 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #104

n1000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fun fact about Elsevier: In their contract with university libraries they exclude the right of fair use as described in the US copyright law. That means one can download papers, but technically mustn't use the data found in them without consent. This is just ridiculous.

Isn't that illegal? Or at least, doesn't that cancel the copyright as it explicitly breaches the copyright contract with the demos .

I was wondering too. The librarian that told me about it, is a copyright expert and was outraged. However, it seems like there was not much they could do. I am guessing the fact that this is happening at an Ivy league university means that lawyers are not useful in this matter. They also said that only Elsevier does that.

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

#135

Post by lkbm » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

madez wrote: post #88

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 just about coordination. Clearly, coordination would make solving the accepted problem relatively easy. Yet, individual action does solve the problem to a small degree. Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happe…

> Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happen, although many people recognize that there is a problem.

To me it sounds like you just described a coordination problem. Can you clarify why you don't think it is?

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

#136

Post by zstiefler » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

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…

This reminds me of what vineyards did during the prohibition, selling “grape bricks” and explicitly instructing people to NOT dissolve in water and let sit for 21 days or it would turn into wine.

https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...

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

#137

Post by zaroth » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #126

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…

"Note: The UC Libraries do not endorse using Sci-Hub for article access. Using Sci-Hub circumvents cumbersome publisher paywalls to access content illegally. The Sci-Hub interface hosted at https://sci-hub.tw/ proxies requests and does not use login credentials, so access to research cannot be tracked the publishers in violation of copyright. The UC faculty and staff and the regents of the University of California wo…

If this is hyperbole, please remove the quotes. If this is an actual quote, please cite it!

Ether way it's hilarious, but it would help to be clear.

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

#138

Post by malms » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:27 PM UTC

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.

I agree with you but that's none of my point.

My point is just that you have to weight the cost: it provided tremendous value through the system of journals, while not really giving a "real" drawback since everyone in research who has ever wanted to get a given paper in the past 5 decades has been able to find it despite the locking by trying hard enough to bypass it.

i don't even understand the downvotes: i don't agree with the system and Elsevier can die but my point is just that they never were a really tangible "problem". Mostly a "1rst world problem".

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

#139

Post by DannyB2 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

qekbg wrote: post #117

geofft wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Big Corporations contributing manpower to open source means (gasp!) that they must have discovered some profit motive to using, and supporting open source! They're not doing this out of the goodness of their heart; but to increase shareholder value.

Gee, what if open academic publishing could also work, without the likes of Elsevier?

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

#140

Post by anticensor » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

rumanator wrote: post #40

mcv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those lists are subject to change, though.