Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 269 posts

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#151

Post by PeterisP »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #100
marcosdumay wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Short term speculators have no direct influence on the management (other than through share price i.e. the money they promise to give to the long-term shareholders to sell their shares) because they don't hold the shares long enough to vote on the shareholder's meetings - the long- and mid-term shareholders can order the board on what the priority should be or replace the board if it's not aligned with these goals; and there's a class of activist investors who buy shares in order to do just that, to steer the company somewhere else - but in order to do that, you can't be a short-term speculator, you have to buy, vote and wait before selling.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#152

Post by PeterisP »

bonoboTP wrote: post #69
nomercy400 wrote: post #42

I'm curious (playing devil's advocate): Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals? And, if somebody from MIT does publish something under this framework, can they claim copyright and disallow any use of the contents of the papers if so convenient? Move away from patents and straight into copyright. We all know how well the US copyright system works, ri…

> Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere, not even journals? They were never required. Scientists do research and share their results so they can be improved and combined and provide insight. It started out with private letters between scientists in the early days, then journals appeared that would distribute the incoming letters to other interested parties. Over time…

Pretty much every research grant that feeds university researchers (as opposed to industry researchers) will require that the results of the research must be published; often with some more specific criteria - e.g. a peer-reviewed journal with an impact rating in the top quartile, not just on your webpage.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#153

Post by amjaeger »

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…

Chris Bourg sent the email announcing it.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#154

Post by duskwuff »

whatshisface wrote: post #19
calvinmorrison wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it

I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to my point.

In one particularly embarrassing example, in 1994, a diabetes care journal published an article which described a novel method for estimating the total area under a metabolic curve:

https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152

(PDF: https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf)

It wasn't until some months later that a response pointed out that the author had rediscovered the trapezoidal method, which was known to Newton and is typically covered in precalculus courses.

https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#155

Post by xpe »

MrGunn wrote: post #142

As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that wasn't apparent before. Are there legacy…

Thanks for your thoughtful and nuanced comment.

> If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.

First off, in reply to this part: "You don't want a system like this to change quickly." ... I don't accept this as a first principle.

It is useful to think about how research and funding interrelates with publishing and peer-review mechanisms. However, I would not advocate a "go slow" approach with regards to modernizing publishing, e.g. out of some concern for the ability of research and funding aspects to "keep up".

Generally speaking, I advocate for finding leverage points in systems to drive change. Right now, there is considerable leverage to apply to the big academic publishers. So, now, we should push. The big publishers will respond; there will be friction and academic and political fighting. If we're successful, there will be change.

I don't worry much about how such changes will hurt the research and funding system. The system will adapt.

I am mindful that people have jobs in these industries, and that change may threaten them. But it would be a fallacy to only blame promoters of change for risking the status-quo jobs. I think a big responsibility falls on the companies, too. They are (presumably) intelligent actors. So what is stopping the companies from reforming themselves internally? Doing so could provide continuity to their employees, preserving tacit knowledge.

When a company can fight change with PR and lobbying more affordably than adapting, I am rarely surprised at what happens.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#156

Post by WaitWaitWha »

mihaaly wrote: post #109
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 believe peer review should be supplemented or even replaced by social review methods where not only arbitrary reviewers but the whole scientific community might have chance judging, discussing and commenting any paper. Online. The logic and safeguards may not be that easy to create in the first place but in my opinion it would worth the effort eventually!

We will never be all experts on all subjects. Peer review is by peers, not laypersons. From the STEM perspective, a democratic solution would be a disaster. Two immediate reasons come to mind, the loss of peer expertise in the noise, and brigading.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#157

Post by Tainnor »

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…

Totally a tangent, but: the law of the excluded middle ("tertium non datur") doesn't state that "a and not a" is always invalid, it states that "a or not a" is always valid. This is a somewhat important distinction since there are logic systems (intuitionism) where "a or not a" is not a tautology, yet I don't know of any logic that accepts "a and not a".

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#158

Post by burtness »

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.

I dont think the parent comment's bullshit jobs are the same as your definition of nice-to-have jobs, at least assuming parent is talking about David Graeber's use of the term.

Bullshit jobs are ones that could disappear and the impact would unnoticeable or minimal for an organisation's output. Nice-to-have (for society?) professions still have value, otherwise they wouldn't be nice - if all the musicians disappeared people would definitely notice.

I'd also contest the idea that cultural labour is unnecessary. Lots of people in lockdown have depended on all kinds of music, TV, film, etc to maintain their mental health. This seems to go beyond preference, even if not everyone needs the same or as much cultural produce to survive healthily.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#159

Post by pas »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #105
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? And how Springer/Elsevier guarantee that? Is it written into cintracts?

Even if it is... who enforces it? Who checks it? What does that guarantee worth? Who cares really about papers getting numbers changed...

90% of them are absolute crap and only max. 10% of the remaining 10% replicates just based on the text of the paper alone.

Post reply on HN