UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

Elsevier knows this. We have just finish negotiating a new national contract with them, and to our surprise did they agreed to all of our demands. They know which way the wind is blowing and are trying to pivot as quickly as an old lumbering giant can.

This brings an interesting anecdote from when I suddenly had this question of how my seniors working in the 80s and 90s in a small Indian lab managed to get the literature they want (when their small lab was still one of the most advanced institutions in the state). My senior said they’d pretty much have to write up a literature request letter, attach a cheque and mail it to the main library in New Delhi, and they would typically hear back from them after a month or two either with a copy of the article or saying they can’t get it (roughly half the time). They still did good research, arguably even better than what crap gets spewed out now!

Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. It’s definitely annoying but once you’re up to speed in a field you are typically happy with just the abstract and if it’s an important enough paper you find a way to get it one way or another. Especially with a good supportive library and ILL system it’s typically a snap.

>Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience.

Changing everyone's ability to know things is a much taller order than changing some people's ability to know things. I would not be where I am without Wikipedia or the internet. Growing up, I had no educated adults around me. If I grew up without the internet, I do not see how I could have learned many of the things I did, especially due to time and money constraints.

I would certainly dispute the claim that knowing things in a meaningful way (whatever that means) with the internet is worse than without the internet.

> Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse)

Are you making a claim of knowledge (e.g. epistemology) or of learning (e.g. pedagogy?)

If you're talking about learning, then I would say things like Khan academy, MOOCs, online course materials, online textbooks and digital libraries seem like powerful counterexamples. Personally I've learned a lot of interesting and practical things from youtube, github, and HN, not to mention non-paywalled research papers. The internet's enabling of billions of people to get access to thousands if not millions of newspapers, books, television programs, movies, songs, and other sources of information and culture from all over the world, and to talk with each other at minimal cost (compared to traditional telephony), seems like an astonishing achievement

If you're making an epistemological claim, I would suggest that the internet era allows you to compare more sources more easily, for example more newspapers than you would have been able to read easily in the pre-internet era. Although it's possible that news outlets have become more opinion-based in the US recently, opinion-based (or opinion-biased if you prefer) print news is basically as old as the printing press, and was certainly well-represented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

yea... because libgen and scihub are a thing