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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

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Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#161

Post by pas »

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.

What!? 2-3K? For .. what? Where does that money go?

I mean referees don't get paid. And there's nothing else to do really if it's a digital journal.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#162

Post by ironmagma »

burtness wrote: post #158
WJW wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s roughly the same concept. Those people were hired for a reason, even if it wasn’t a fully rational one. Just as musicians are the quality of life improvers of society at large, so too are code janitors to an IT team.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#163

Post by majormajor »

JackFr wrote: post #57
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…

> 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 don't really understand what COVID would tell us about "bullshit jobs." It tells us that restaurants and bars and concerts, etc, aren't "necessary." Duh? Leisure activity has never been necessary, but it's still something we enjoy and value.

The existence of those leisure jobs and the venues they operates certainly adds value to my life.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#164

Post by Tainnor »

wegs wrote: post #29
enriquto wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be considered "fraudulent" at this point.

That's what I do. If I want to say something obvious, I Google for the first citation which says that thing in a way which is readable, understandable, and correct. Honestly, the problem isn't with whom I cite, so much as: 1) Academia deciding to use metrics inappropriately (as well as expecting citations on well-known obvious things). I'm not going to adjust my work style because academics decided to adopt dumb metr…

No, you got that wrong. The way you do it is:

"As previous research indicates, the sky is blue ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9])."

Of course you haven't actually looked at all those 9 sources, except maybe the abstract of the first three.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#165

Post by pas »

ramraj07 wrote: post #150
obiefernandez wrote: post #5

Further indications that Aaron Swartz didn't die completely in vain...

Just came across his name yesterday when I was looking for python markdown parsers! Thinking about what happened to him, I'm a bit ambivalent. He was a great dude, for sure, but what he did with downloading the entire JSTOR database sneakily does sound a bit out there. It's definitely a Robinhood move, but Robinhood also had an arrest warrant on him. Expecting no less of a retaliation would have been naive at best. M…

The current copyright regime is too strict. As someone else pointed out JSTOR went open access without much ado. So basically the whole thing led to the death of some dude because he dared to show how much what he did did not really matter. It's not like universities just stopped paying for access because there's SciHub. And it's not like academics stopped paying journals for publishing because old stuff is open access.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#166

Post by jopsen »

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…

I heard the archiving argument before.

But I can't imagine that this is an expensive role for an organization like library of Congress or similar to take on. Many counties have a national library of sorts.

Bandwidth/storage costs are limited, we're talking about PDFs.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#167

Post by roenxi »

mlyle wrote: post #127
WJW wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 layer…

To be fair, nobody knows which parts of a complex bureaucracy are useless and which are important. There is a pretty decent chance that the truly useless parts of an organisation are linked in to complying with regulations.

Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#168

Post by mywittyname »

njharman wrote: post #128
mywittyname wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extendin…

I disagree. It seems like you only know Elsevier as a publisher of journals, but that's only about 1/3 of their overall business. They (RELX) provide a lot of useful services to companies and governments.

About half their revenue and profits come from Risk and Legal services, which are not things you hear about in the news. They offer services for police, airlines, legal firms, insurance companies, accounting firms Hell, they have an analytics tool for agricultural businesses. They also have enough money to throw around in these spaces to prevent any startups from getting large enough to be a threat.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#169

Post by bduerst »

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…

>When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away.

Isn't this predatory pricing?

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#170

Post by a1369209993 »

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 honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist.

I suspect you're being rhetorical here, but just in case: your premise is wrong; they don't need to exist, in fact they need to not exist; preferably they need to die in a fire.

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