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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

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Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#201

Post by bufferoverflow »

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…

> how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

You publish hashes of all the documents. It's trivial to distribute lists of hashes. You can even put them into existing blockchains, which guarantee they won't change.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#202

Post by bufferoverflow »

olau wrote: post #74
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…

Just about the bandwidth costs: You can rent a server at Hetzner.de for 40 EUR with 1 Gbit/s. Let's say each PDF is around 100 kb, then you can serve 1000 PDFs per second. Say there are 50 million active research students in the world, then the single 40 EUR server can serve them about 10 PDFs/week on average.

With that requirements you can do much cheaper even. 1000 PDFs of 100KB is just 100MB. You can put them on a 1Gbit VPS for just $1.5 to $5/month.

https://www.serverhunter.com/?search=PLJ-9TW-TWN

A dedicated box would cost just $7/month.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#203

Post by phkahler »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #183
phkahler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a simple voxel data viewer I wrote circa 1997? Called pkvox. It could load, slice, and iso-surface up to about a gig of data with only 128meg of ram. I provided C++ source to write the file format.

Thanks for your contribution! I can't find it in the usual open archives. You might want to deposit the code on Zenodo, so it gets long-term preservation and a citable DOI. https://zenodo.org/

I'll look, but I'm not sure I even have the code any more. That was a long time ago. It had a software triangle rasterizer that pulled from a 3d voxel array to slice it. I always wanted to update it to store in 3d z-order so it would perform well on all 3 axis but never got around to it.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#204

Post by whatshisface »

mattkrause wrote: post #107
whatshisface wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This....doesn't seem crazy to me? Somebody might have known it in the 1800s, but any given modern reader may not. You could cite the original source, but it might be inaccessible (and possibly not very complete). A modern article could be easier for the reader, especially if it's a review. Sometimes you might just want a few examples of a phenomenon too, so the choice doesn't matter much.

No, I'm talking about when the fact was fully understood and widely known in the 1800s.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#205

Post by yurlungur »

foepys wrote: post #58
pfortuny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear, the burden of organizing peer-review and of consolidating some sort of "quality" stamp (I said "some sort of") is much more expensive than "nothing". I am not pro-Elsevier, I am just stating a fact.

The only people getting paid in the reviewing process are the journals that are only coordinating the reviews. Actual reviewers (aka other researchers in the same field as the paper) are working for free.

That is largely correct, however the editors are very key to maintaining this process and especially the standards. A prestiged academic will not blindly accept any review request without having a level of trust in the process and also the coordinator.

Reviewing others' work is rather tedious and I think it will be a challenge for any fully open platform to demonstrate that it will not be a waste of time to do peer reviews on them.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#207

Post by jlokier »

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…

There's a whole class of formal logic systems that accept "a and not a".

They are called Paraconsistent Logics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic), which allow contradiction without explosion.

Ideal for mathematically representing the kind of reasoning that bubbles up from contradictory positions and goals as you described, where organisations manage to do sane things anyway, sometimes!

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#209

Post by jlokier »

xtracto wrote: post #188
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine that you have voting rights to review a paper (a-la slashdot, where random people got opportunity to tag something as insightful, interesting, etc). Now imagine that there comes an article in X subject (say, Agent Based Modeling). When you "vote" in that article, the "dimension" of your vote is proportional to your "impact factor" in that subject (i.e., say you published 20 articles in ABM and you got 10 "vot…

I think what you are describing has a name: Reputation Systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_system).

There seem to be more effective ones and less effective ones.

Unfortunately sometimes economic incentives cause them to be gamed against real quality. E.g. think of shill online shopping reviews, and circular voting to boost reputation.

In academic terms, that would be "citation rings" to promote their rankings. Like web rings, there are nice and friendly ones, and there are heavy, spammy clones of sites. I would expect the rise of junk-article, plagiarism-from-elsewhere, machine-learning-assisted-plausibility mutual citation rings if there were no good controls to detect and prevent that sort of thing.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#210

Post by Animats »

gwern wrote: post #174
MrGunn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Gwern, big fan of your GPT2 work. I notice I'm surprised to hear you say you struggle daily to fix broken links to the Elsevier catalog at ScienceDirect, because the links are used by libraries all over the world & they don't have the same feedback. Would you have a few examples available for me to send to the folks responsible?

Nature does it all the time. Here's one I fixed just this morning when I noticed it by accident: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201522... (Note, by the way, how very helpfully Nature redirects it to the homepage without an error. That's what the reader wants, right? To go to the homepage and for Nature to deliberately conceal the error from the website maintainer? This is definitely what every…

Do Nature's spinoffs have any prestige any more? Anything in a Nature spinoff related to batteries comes across as PR Newswire level material. If that.
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