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MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

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Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#251

Post by czzr »

prepend wrote: post #218
jl6 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have never seen a concrete example of a job which is clearly a bullshit job. Any suggestions?

I think of as these rent-seeking organizations that don’t provide value and don’t need to exist. For example, Elsevier has this monopoly on publishing so they need to hire staff to manage everything. Those staff do real jobs- accounting, sales, IT, etc- but there is not value created. So I might call that bullshit. Layer of layer of real functions and interdependencies of people and groups all costing and resulting i…

Where does scihub get the papers from, in this scenario?

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#252

Post by peterwwillis »

woofie11 wrote: post #248
nawwal wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't totally understand why there's so much hate on MIT for this, so consider this more of an inquiry rather than an outright defense of what happened and let me know if I'm missing something critical: Based on what I know, Aaron Swartz - someone with no affiliation to MIT - abused MIT's open campus/network policies and tried to download all of JSTOR by hiding a laptop in a closet . At best, this is at least somet…

A few corrections: 1) Saying Aaron had no affiliation to MIT does not reflect the reality of the situation. MIT, at the time, had an open door policy. There were a lot of people who hung out at MIT -- accepted, participating, contributing members of the MIT community (often actively participating in running MIT classes or doing MIT research), who just happened to not be in a formal role (student, faculty, etc.). MIT…

> an attack by the administration on a member of the community

Prosecuting someone for breaking into your network and using it for illegal activities is attacking them?

> What's really evil is

Every time I see someone use the word evil in a debate, I just ignore everything else they say, because there's no rationalizing with emotions. "Evilness" is subjective, which is why we have laws. I tend to stick to the laws and not demonize people for doing things that were according to it, since if it were truly evil the people would at least demand the law be changed.

If we all really cared enough about open access journals, there would be a world-wide boycott of science education until a national law was passed blocking all public funding to anything but open access. But that's not going to happen, and we all know why: it's not evil enough for us to drop everything and use collective action, but we still want to pose it as evil because we're really angry, and we're really angry because we don't know enough about how it all works to find a better solution.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#253

Post by occamrazor »

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…

Elsevier is a for-profit publisher, but JSTOR is a non-profit University consortium.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#254

Post by setgree »

gpm wrote: post #213
setgree wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good point. I just double-checked and ours says: > Copyright: © Cambridge University Press 2018 > This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. So I guess Cambridge is the copyright hold…

I don't think that was an "or" clause, I think it was an "and". The author will retain the copyright, and they will have generous re-use rights (i.e. they will not agree to a restrictive exclusive license).

But Elsevier's lawyers would presumably argue during negotiations that the option to have CC0 distribution of text meets this stipulation, whether in spirit or letter.

I would bet that MIT's choice to divorce from Els came from a combination of ideoligical, budget, and reputational concerns (e.g. the UC system divorced from them as well and MIT now stands in solidarity). So I don't think issue was likely to be decisive.

I think that if the price had been right, all parties would have found a way to argue that the stated terms had been met -- or to simply not address them.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#255

Post by RNCTX »

The state university I attended here in Texas has started publishing a list of their subscriptions and the costs.

https://library.unt.edu/collection-management/transparency-l...

What's notable is the ones who have tried to put non-disclosure clauses in their subscription contracts. In my opinion a state university should not be allowed, legally, to enter into a contract which is not fully available for public review.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#256

Post by MrGunn »

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…

Journals do transfer among publishers, go out of business, etc so you shouldn't expect a direct link like that to be stable. The recommended practice is to use the DOI. Would using a DOI meet your needs?

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#257

Post by mehrdadn »

Tainnor wrote: post #246
dash2 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grandparent said that the law doesn't say that "a and not a" is always INvalid. (The law also doesn't say that "a and not a" is sometimes valid. It makes no comment at all, but only claims that "a or not a" is always valid. According to the grandparent. Now I need to lie down for a bit....)

Yes, this. The point was that you can reject the law of the excluded middle without getting into the absurdity that would result from accepting "a and not a".

Ahh! Now I see I misread your comment, I see what you were trying to say now.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#258

Post by gwern »

Majromax wrote: post #250
gwern wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't this exactly the intended use-case for the DOI? Your first article has the DOI 10.1038/mp.2015.225, and the resulting link ( https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225 ) properly directs to the article's present location.

DOIs link to paywalls or temporarily-unembargoed papers, have to be hunted down (many places hide the DOIs in tabs or, like JSTOR, actually bury it in the HTML source itself!), and break things like section links as well. Adding yet another level of indirection is not my idea of a solution and hardly speaks well of 'archive-quality publishers' that we have to resort to third parties to work around their hideously broken websites which, like Nature, go out of their way to make links not just break but actively misleading.

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#259

Post by MrGunn »

gwern wrote: post #258
Majromax wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this exactly the intended use-case for the DOI? Your first article has the DOI 10.1038/mp.2015.225, and the resulting link ( https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225 ) properly directs to the article's present location.

DOIs link to paywalls or temporarily-unembargoed papers, have to be hunted down (many places hide the DOIs in tabs or, like JSTOR, actually bury it in the HTML source itself!), and break things like section links as well. Adding yet another level of indirection is not my idea of a solution and hardly speaks well of 'archive-quality publishers' that we have to resort to third parties to work around their hideously bro…

To solve your immediate problem, just grab the DOI here: https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery They also have an API from which you can fetch DOIs in various ways.

DOIs are a solution to the issue of having persistent, publisher-independent links that will always resolve, even if a journal changes publisher or goes out of business. Academia uses them because link rot is unavoidable across the web, but there must always be a link to the publication that resolves so that when someone in 2070 wants to follow a citation in the references of a work published today, they can do that. It's the same thinking that underlies people pointing to the internet archive in Wikipedia citations. It's a layer of redirection, but in a way that preserves accessibility for the long term. It's also the same thinking that underlies DNS. There shouldn't be one company that controls how to resolve an IP address to a domain name, and likewise you shouldn't have to go through one publisher to resolve a reference to a research article.

As a side note, Crossref is staffed with exactly the sort of web geeks that you would see at an Internet Archive get-together (#).

So I hear your frustrations, but I think you're giving DOIs short shrift.

(#) I mean, just look at this. A dump of all journal metadata on Academic Torrents. Is that not cool? https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-m...

Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

#260

Post by MrGunn »

xpe wrote: post #155
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 consiste…

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree publishers could do more to change & I especially think we should do more to make all the changes that are happening under the hood more visible. I mean, that's literally my job. You gave me a sincere response & deserve one in return, but we need to work towards a shared understanding of what the current situation is if we want to have a conversation that's not just talking past one another.

My understanding of the situation includes the following: Elsevier has a new CEO. Elsevier has been reporting for several years now that revenue from services has been one of the fastest growing parts of the business, so much so that the company now calls itself an information and analytics company, not a publisher (1). Elsevier, though slow initially, is now fully behind open access. 9/10 of the journals launched last year were open access (2). Elsevier is pursuing a number of what the industry calls "transformative agreements" with libraries, consortia, and whole countries which involve full access to all Elsevier content and built in open access publishing for everyone covered under the arrangement (2). This specific issue was about one way of structuring such an agreement to reduce the financial burden on MIT while still ensuring all their content was published open access and was even designed to make it easier for librarians to keep a collection of the intellectual output of their institution by automatically pushing manuscripts into the institutional repository, which is something librarians have been asking for for a long time (3).

So given all this, the only way I can answer your question about what's stopping change is to say that nothing is stopping it. It's happening & has been happening for years. I am tempted to ask, looking at some of the comments in the parent thread, what's stopping change in people's perceptions of Elsevier? I don't just mean that rhetorically. I really would be interested in understanding why people have the views they do and how they're different.

What's your current understanding of the situation and does it differ in ways from mine that you'd like to highlight?

1. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/02/13/re... 2. https://www.elsevier.com/about/elsevier-and-open-access 3. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/learn-more-about-elseviers-...

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