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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

#181

Post by dmitriz »

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…

> Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.

We have been recording their (dis)services here, with everyone warmly welcome to add more:

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/4

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

#182

Post by dmitriz »

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…

Of course they won't do it as that would show the world the other 99% of their journals are in fact old rubbish. And they don't buy us drinks as we know...

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/104

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

#184

Post by Iv »

malms wrote: post #35
Iv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, a courageous girl broke some laws with no gain for her, because she thought research was important. If the 10 biggest university libraries endorsed sci-hub, yeah, there could be legal repercussions but that could also move the lines much more than this timid non-endorsement endorsement.

She's a superstar now, could make money from ad or bribes with no personal risk. I would have done the same

Yeah, right, no personal risks except being sued out of existence if she ever attempts that in any country that implements copyright laws.

Haven't we learned anything from Aaron Swartz?

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

#185

Post by dmitriz »

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/

All articles are already assured to get salvaged via services like LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and Portico. All we need is to have them go bankrupt, preferably fully, so stories like that won't repeat: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/22

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

#186

Post by dmitriz »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #72
mxcrossb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which journal?

All of them use the same process.

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

#187

Post by dmitriz »

asark wrote: post #133
madez wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very true, this is precisely the problem. Editors don't leave E's journals' boards because it might hurt their vitae. Referees don't decline to work for E's journals (for free) because it might hurt their relations with editors. And authors often don't have much choice where to send their articles and might hurt their career by picking out-of-stream venues.

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

#188

Post by dmitriz »

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.

What sort of value have they been creating?

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

#189

Post by dmitriz »

pedrocr wrote: post #119
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

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…

It is already being tried with Plan S. But the problem is to choose the right alternative, of which the alternative pay-to-publish model isn't.

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/86

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

#190

Post by dmitriz »

mikorym wrote: post #71
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…

Mathematicians have for a couple of years now started to rely on preprints on ArXiv and this is a successful change in culture. However, the related problem of research not being read (and the more subjective "not being worth read") is still unsolved to a large extent. My single paper on ArXiv has probably not been read and despite that my MSc reviewer commented that the work is suitable to be published (apart from t…

How can you tell it is not been read?
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