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

#141

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

Gatsky wrote: post #46

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 institution…

Note that the more you know about them, the worse it gets. I wrote a report for Education International last year as part of a global campaign against Elsevier. https://www.ei-ie.org/en/detail/16061/elsevier-the-price-of-...

You make it sound so easy, but if it was, don't you think people will have done it already? Monopolies, vendor lock-in, lobbying, divide-and-conquer approaches, all make moving away to a better system quite difficult.

Public funding agencies should be prohibited from giving away funds and copyrights to private entities with 30%+ profit margins. I cannot understand why this is legal.

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

#142

Post by anticensor » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

lonelappde wrote: post #90

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.

The sad thing is academy solved this exact problem centuries ago with the tenure system, but academics are still cowards

Tenure only exists in upper levels of academic career.

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

#143

Post by grepthisab » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #137

garmaine wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I don't think they need to cite something that's literally in the text of the posted article. This is a comment section to comment on that very article!

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

#144

Post by anticensor » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

fastball wrote: post #24

Irony is that the CEO of Elsevier is a UC Berkeley alum.

Tail of the snake tries to eat its own head

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

#145

Post by mcv » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

malms wrote: post #138

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ag…

Well, they became a problem due to their firm control over the system where they mostly profit from work that others do for them for free.

If scientists write the content and other scientists review it, merely publishing the results of that process shouldn't cost that much. Elsevier is extracting a lot of value from the work of others, and locking the results of that work up.

The act of publishing does add value, but not nearly as much as the researcher and reviewer have added, and yet Elsevier takes ownership of it all, because they happen to be sitting in a position of power built on that work done by others.

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

#146

Post by brianzelip » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #137

garmaine wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Pretty sure it's hyperbole. Here's the page linked to from the OP, "Access to Elsevier Articles", that mentions (only) the first line in the quote above.

[0] https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/pub...

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

#147

Post by jasonmorton » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

Copyright assignments made by authors can be cancelled [1]. For papers and books from before 1994 or so (25 years from present), you can write a letter to the publisher cancelling your grant or assignment of copyright to them. The rules are complex so I might be missing some details. But there are probably a lot of researchers who could take advantage of this to put on some pressure and reclaim their work.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/docs/203.html

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

#148

Post by beowulfey » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

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 think a lot of people are confused about what it is UC is trying to accomplish here! They are not saying to Elsevier "we demand everything be open access!" They are not even saying "open access should not cost more in fees!"

This is all UC is trying to request:

1) Allow any and all UC research the /option/ of being published open access (by paying the requisite >$1000 fees) --> Elsevier countered by structuring the open access ability such that only about 30% of UC's published output would be able to be open access (i.e. as before, not all journals allow for it still)

2) Allow this, without (massively) changing the total subscription fees UC pays towards the journals --> UC actually proposed a higher subscription cost to cover the transition to open access (based on the current fees associated with open access), and Elsevier countered with a much higher fee with, as stated in (1), 2/3rds of the research not given the option of open access.

3) Allow UC libraries to help cover the cost of the open access fee that researchers must pay to allow the research to be open. --> Elsevier countered with "that's not allowed"

TL;DR UC wants ALL Elsevier journals to allow researchers to opt into open access (rather than a small number of them as is current) and they want that option with a reasonable increase in fees to the UC system.

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

#149

Post by mcv » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:45 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…

So the problem is really with the bureaucrats that force researchers to publish in Elsevier journals. They should reward publication in equally well-reviewed open access journals just as much, if not more so, as publication in Elsevier journals.

And because those bureaucrats are often distributing public funds among those researchers, they should also have an interest in the results of that research being accessible to the public, and as many researchers as possible.

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

#150

Post by jasonmorton » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

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…

There are some high-quality open access journals (e.g. https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/) that don't charge authors. They use arxiv overlay. It is entirely possible.