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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

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Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#121

Post by gwern »

mywittyname wrote: post #94
underdeserver wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spa…

> 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.

The 16th century publisher has nothing whatsoever to do with the current one, which shamelessly pirated and stole everything to plagiarize the prestige (so its ideas of business ethics go right back to its founding). Apparently, it worked.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#122

Post by oliwarner »

enriquto wrote: post #20
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…

> What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have an Elsevier contract. If you ever tried to dig deep into the internals of a large organization, you will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power. At least, this was my experience. For a…

Policy compliance is a constant battle of wills in most large organisation. Enough of a battle in some places that they have compliance staff.

Just because they sign up to do something in a particular way doesn't mean everybody in that org is going to follow those rules.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#123

Post by sudosysgen »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #106
hedora wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m also an academic. Hash each paper, then hash the hashes. Publish the result with the proceedings. After year one, include the hash of the prior year(s). Problem solved. Recently I downloaded one of my old peer-reviewed papers. The “archival” service added a spammy logo to the bottom left corner of each page. I’ve been meaning to find the original and put it on my web page. Honestly, I might just add a list of all…

>Problem solved Not at all. There are corrections and amendments. It isn't as complicated as in law, but still.

Signed declarations of amendment, then amended papers being added as new one with proof of amendment and link with the original. Kind of like how a keyserver deals with revoked keys.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#124

Post by zentiggr »

ptero wrote: post #66
mcphage wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power. That's how life is, though—a jumble of rules that don't all agree and aren't all consistent. So you get used to juggling them all, making them work together as well as you can, so you can get your job done and move on.

Yes, but to me this (the contradictory nature of a large set of rules in life) is a nuisance, not a feature to be welcomed. Sometimes it is unavoidable or very expensive to clean, but we should discourage adding complex rules contradicting our existing set if possible. My 2c.

Consider the state and intent of a group of humanity as a spin glass, and you can apply a little bit of vaguely applicable analysis.

I've tried for most of my life to internalize that most of the difficulty in life is caused by different people having different viewpoints and goals and conditions. Any endeavour only works as well as the sum of its implementors.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#125

Post by ikiris »

lozaning wrote: post #76
underdeserver wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have to imagine it: https://scihub.wikicn.top/

this site doesn't even load.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#126

Post by specialist »

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…

"Top universities should just [fund]..."

I want something more crazy, daring.

Kickstarter, meets blogging, meets X-Prizes, meets startup incubator, meets moon-shots, meets those McArthur genius grants, meets Y-Combinator classes (cohorts?).

Start with a fund.

Recruit some lunatics, err, mavericks, err, battle weary scientists to judge proposals.

Make a couple lofty problem statements. Maybe one per year.

"Create next generation peer review system."

"Invent open access research thingamajig."

"Launch competitive journals for emerging disciplines."

"Deploy FOSS collaborative content management system for science reporting."

Define some semi-plausible victory conditions. Number of papers refereed. Number of research projects hosted. Number of citations.

Each applicant does a pitch.

Fund a reasonable number for groups each round.

Beer and pizza.

Wet, lather, rinse, repeat.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#127

Post by mlyle »

WJW wrote: post #115
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…

There's a ton of nice-to-have professions that are not strictly necessary, like musicians and decorative fountain builders. That is a good thing ! It's clearly possible to live in a giant grey barrack and eat nothing but soylent but it's not what 99% of the population would prefer. If anything, it would be good for society to make the percentage of not-essential-but-nice-to-have as high as possible.

There's various kinds of "unnecessary work" jobs. Some do really contribute directly to the common welfare: artisans and producers of culture; providers of small conveniences, etc.

There's also a whole lot of administrative, artificial, make-busy-work jobs, where we build complicated systems of bureaucracy to prevent losses that cost orders of magnitude more than the losses they prevent, and that in turn impose layers of bureaucracy on others.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#128

Post by njharman »

mywittyname wrote: post #94
underdeserver wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spa…

It's not so much as they aren't an established company it's that that their business model has been broken/bypassed by technology. They've been reduced to being a middle-man that obstructs value rather than providing it.

The only part of biz model left is "prestige" (very fickle), "customer lock in / inertia" (which is already going away re: OA), and lobbying government to prop up/expand their monopoly (ever extending/expanding copyrights, which is the one thing that doesn't seem they will ever lose on cause ever other bypassed dinosaur broke ass business model publisher spends tons on it).

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#129

Post by webmaven »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #104
TeMPOraL wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Look at it from another angle: would people work bullshit jobs if they didn't have to? Fix the incentives, pay people a minimum income where they don't have to work, and if you absolutely need labor you're going to have to pay someone who doesn't have to be there if they don't want to. If people's basic needs were met, I think you'd see a lot of labor shift to work that is valuable, but currently not compensated for.…

> You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the hours per week worked as productivity has increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week forever.

The feasibility of this (in the US) is strongly dependent on health insurance not being tied to having a full-time job (often defined as just under 40 hours a week).

Plenty of employers have demonstrated that they can be organized to use mostly part-time labor, but their incentive to do this has been avoiding the obligation and expense of contributing to health insurance and other benefits, rather than giving employees a productivity dividend.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#130

Post by malikNF »

huhtenberg wrote: post #45
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…

> But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? Trusted timestamping. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt It also happens to be very widely deployed and supported by well-established companies, because it's an integral part of executable cross-signing. That is, this exists right now .

Wouldn't saving the hash of the document on some blockchain be a more simpler solution to proving the integrity of a document?
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