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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

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Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#91

Post by code4tee »

abhv wrote: post #39
underdeserver wrote: post #22

I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist. Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a monthly journal. Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a…

I'm an academic. For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks: * There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to gua…

These are valid concerns but in 2020 very easy problems to solve. There’s little reason why a small consortium of institutions couldn’t build a very robust system to accomplish all that. Use digital signatures and distributed mirrored storage and problem solved. Charge a very modest fee to members to cover fixed costs and make it free to the public. Heck a few we’ll organized S3 buckets with a search engine attached would be better than a lot of what’s out there today.

Not to pick on academics but the commercial publishing houses basically prey on the stubbornness of the academic community here. In the pure private sector someone would come along tomorrow and make Elsevier and others obsolete and they would go bust quickly. MIT is making the moves that might just whip something into shape to remove Elsevier’s role in the market.

On “high impact” if the top universities in the world en-mass unsubscribe from the commercial players that will change quick.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#92

Post by garmaine »

dathinab wrote: post #83
setgree wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights. I've published a few papers (and have worked closely with Elsevier in a business context). When we published in a paywalled journal, we had the option of paying an APC [0] to make the particular article open access. So in that sense, we wer…

As far as I understood it 2. isn't about open access per see. It's just completely absurd that e.g. if I publish an paper and than want to re read it in a year I have to buy my own paper. Same when I want to give it to an intern to read and similar. So it's about the author being able to reuse it for himself, not about open access.

But in practice "reuse it for himself" means "upload to arXiv."

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#93

Post by aduitsis »

oefrha wrote: post #79
abhv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an academic. For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks: * There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to gua…

Digital archival of PDFs weighing a few hundred KBs to a few MBs is definitely a solved problem. And there are already arXiv overlay journals out there, and platforms supporting them. Tim Gowers' (Fields medalist) blog posts on this topic are quite informative: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an... https://gowers.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/advances-in-combinat... Highlights: $10 per submission…

Today it's much easier, practically all universities participate as Identity Providers in SAML Federations and digital libraries participate as Service Providers. So you can just use your institutional login credentials to the identity provider page of your university. The service provider receives a signed SAML assertion that, well, asserts that you belong to your university and you are, say, a student. Most popular software is Internet2 Shibboleth (IdP and SP) in the academic field. It all works very well and has been for some time.

In the country where I live, you get access to office365, (physical) books, digital libraries (including Elsevier :)) and a wide variety of other services all via your institutional login.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#94

Post by mywittyname »

underdeserver wrote: post #53
abhv wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an academic. For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks: * There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to gua…

I'm a random industry software engineer. :) > In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? Printed versions + digitally signed and timestamped PDFs. This is a solved problem in the world, at least up to the level that Springer can solve it. > How to guarantee that these…

Just pointing out that Elsevier is ancient in business terms, it's origins as a publisher goes back to the mid 16th century and the modern version of the company is from around the 19th century. I'd be surprised if the company isn't around when I die.

In addition to publishing, they (RELX) is one of the biggest companies you've never heard of. They provide information systems to governments all over the world and span multiple market segments. I guarantee you're in a dozen of their databases right now. And that your local, state, and federal taxes all funnel into their pockets in one form or another. Along with some of the money you pay for various insurances throughout the year. When you buy a house, rent an apartment, get a job, or basically have any major event in your life, they get paid.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#95

Post by czzr »

dfdz wrote: post #88
czzr wrote: post #73

When thinking about the cost of providing the services journals provide, I’m always struck by the example of PloS - non-profit, set up with the mission of promoting open access, and just about surviving by charging authors $2000-$3000 per article. I can only conclude that managing journals is not as cost free as most people in this thread seem to think, for whatever reason.

You should not be getting down voted. I am an early career academic; there are some new non-profit open access journals that I would consider publishing in that cost ~$500 dollars to publish a paper. Everything is on arXix so I cannot justify the expense (perhaps if I was late in my career with lots of grant money I would help to support these journals..)

That’s interesting. I always thought that it was early career researchers who had to publish in journals to establish their reputations. Does it not work that way for you?

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#96

Post by dguest »

snambi wrote: post #68

Why can't techincal papers use something similar to github/git Pull-request model?

Can you elaborate? Do you mean curating papers via pull request?

If that's your question, the answer is that there's absolutely nothing in the way technologically: academics could easily form shoestring "journals" around a github README files with links to arXiv.

As others have said, the real issue is historical: for better or worse the currency of science is still peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals, and a lot of those journals are still owned by Elsevier.

Obviously this is starting to change, but old traditions die hard.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#97

Post by btrettel »

setgree wrote: post #77
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #11

Here is the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ It requires that: 1. No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals. 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with gener…

> 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights. I've published a few papers (and have worked closely with Elsevier in a business context). When we published in a paywalled journal, we had the option of paying an APC [0] to make the particular article open access. So in that sense, we wer…

> When we published in a paywalled journal, we had the option of paying an APC [0] to make the particular article open access. So in that sense, we were not 'required' to relinquish copyright. It was just costly to retain it.

It's worth noting that some (maybe even many) journal open access options do not allow the authors to keep copyright, even if they pay money! Open access ≠ keeping copyright.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#98

Post by jupp0r »

While this is really good news, it's still mind boggling to me why giving taxpayers free access to the research they paid for is still a controversial thing at all in 2020. Not to mention the benefit to science of giving everybody free access to everything.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#99

Post by TeMPOraL »

saalweachter wrote: post #84
JackFr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of resources and unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here) If the COVID-19 lockdown has taught us anything, it's that probably a full third of our economy is bullshit jobs. We're at best self-perpetuating economic 'nice-to-haves', at worst parasitic rent seekers, probably somewhere in between, whose real role is simply to distribute GDP more wide…

I suppose that is a third way to deal with automation. I usually say, there are two ways to deal with productivity increases (from automation and industrialization): you can either attempt to do more as a civilization (build moon bases, increased consumer goods, etc) or you can have everyone work less (3 or 4 day work weeks, 5 hour work days, etc). I guess you can also just create lots of bullshit jobs so everyone is…

I believe your third answer is indeed the reason that despite so many things being automated, we're not seeing benefits of that in terms of reduced workloads on people. The way I see it, as long as creating bullshit jobs is easy, the market will force everyone to work 40+ hour a week to survive. And as long as creating bullshit jobs that just shuffle money around is easier than creating socially valuable jobs, we won't see any Moon bases either.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#100

Post by TeMPOraL »

marcosdumay wrote: post #62
Nextgrid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules This is caused by managers' and middle-managers' performance metrics being tied to the wrong outcomes. The top layer of management's target is the desired outcome. The bottom layer's (the worker) target is also clear, it's to do whatever their manager says to do. In the middle is where it often breaks down; their objectives are short-sighted a…

> The top layer of management's target is the desired outcome. Kinda. Top managers tend to have a much shorter time preference than shareholders. The incentives are aligned only when all shareholders are of the active trading kind (if that ever happens on any company).

Isn't there also an additional misalignment caused by shareholders who hold shares only to speculate on the stock market? Those shareholders don't care about long-term goals of the company, but only about short-term stock performance they can use to jump sell their shares high, and then buy some other shares low.
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