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

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

dailybruin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 93 posts

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

#21

Post by ImaCake »

fao_ wrote: post #15
whatever1 wrote: post #13

Let’s ask scihub to tell us how much traffic they get from uc*.edu ip addresses

You would have to get a 10 years before / after comparison for it to prove anything. Also, comparing a university against itself is interesting but not at all noteworthy, for bonus points to make the paper actually useful, you could compare against 10 years of traffic from other universities. But then, Science magazine did a segment on this: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...

You don't really need 10 years. Each researcher at UC might be confounded by their local network, but you could argue that is just a casual variable anyway. As for statistical power, UC has >30 researchers and each one of those researchers would access several papers a week. Take the ratio of sci-hub vs non-sci-hub papers accessed per week or month and compare to the month before UC's contract with elsevier ran out. Take the mean and do a t-test. Don't even need timeseries!

I suspect plotting sci-hub/non-sci-hub papers accessed per week for several weeks before and after the contract expiry would dispense with the need for any statistical analysis.

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

#22

Post by ta988 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #4

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 wo…

Increase the gain, you will increase the signal, and some of the noise as well.

I would not be as extreme, wiki* (data, pedia,...) and Internet made a lot of research possible. Internet enhanced collaborations across the globe (no need to be a big name so people talk to you) and openly accessible data I believe facilitates understanding (ok not deep understanding, but enough for creating common bases for communication).

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

#23

Post by ta988 »

inetsee wrote: post #19
jancsika wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way What are you talking about? Wikipedia substantially changed everyone's ability to know things. In fact, Wikipedia was so good at increasing everyone's ability to know things, I wonder if we're now having to build back a way to synthesize and ponder our desired context for all those things. That problem may be…

My biggest criticism of Wikipedia is that it refuses to publish anything that isn't supported by a dead tree publication, like the ones Elsevier publishes for a fortune. You could be a prominent, highly respected full professor, but unless your research paper has made it into one of these publications, and actually gone out the door, your research won't be included in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for the kind of stu…

There is a lot of crap on arXiv as well... So I respect the position of Wikipedia editors to have someone vet the information before them. To be fair many editors of Wikipedia have a better understanding of their fields than reviewers (at least in my domain)

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

#24

Post by ta988 »

Demigod33 wrote: post #17
ramraj07 wrote: post #4

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 wo…

> free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. What are limiting steps?

There are a lot...

I agree with that person point on that not being a limiting factor. SciHub and all the networks of exchange of publications before that (I've seen exchange of proxy accounts and forums to do that since 2003, unsure about what existed before) have helped with that a lot.

Just to list a few points that come to mind:

Environment:

- A university that doesn't provide the ressources necessary (equipment, computing ressources with adequate expertise)

- Colleagues that are not supportive or worse putting you down for internal competition (just fame, attracting the most promising grad student of the year, or funding lines for grad students and postdocs)

- Intellectualy poor environment, colleagues that have no understanding and no willingness to understand your field of research

Money:

-Difficulty to compete when it takes you 80% of your budget to do 1/10 of a big lab (behind the name of a single person but really a group of 10s employees) can do with their large fundings. This is especially true of US vs many other countries.

Sociological:

- Gender (we know that women are not "allowed" to grow as much as men in some domains)

- University delivering a PhD, I still see people in their sixties being presented as a graduate from (pick an Ivy) and people ignored in discussions at a table of Ivy league graduates (despite that person being an expert)

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

#25

Post by smichel17 »

ImaCake wrote: post #21
fao_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have to get a 10 years before / after comparison for it to prove anything. Also, comparing a university against itself is interesting but not at all noteworthy, for bonus points to make the paper actually useful, you could compare against 10 years of traffic from other universities. But then, Science magazine did a segment on this: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...

You don't really need 10 years. Each researcher at UC might be confounded by their local network, but you could argue that is just a casual variable anyway. As for statistical power, UC has >30 researchers and each one of those researchers would access several papers a week. Take the ratio of sci-hub vs non-sci-hub papers accessed per week or month and compare to the month before UC's contract with elsevier ran out.…

Or maybe there's been little noise about the change because everyone was using sci-hub already anyway!

I recently introduced a part-time professor to sci-hub, when he was having trouble getting his vpn connection to work, so he could access a paper in a journal. Open access is just easier.

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

#26

Post by ta988 »

xipho wrote: post #14

At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published infor…

Heard from an Elsevier person, their purpose is to own the market from the production to distribution and storage of scientific and medical information.

That explains their acquisition of mendeley, their work on lab notebooks, acquisition of medical diagnostics systems...

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

#27

Post by ta988 »

whatever1 wrote: post #13

Let’s ask scihub to tell us how much traffic they get from uc*.edu ip addresses

Traffic from US has always been huge anyway on scihub so thats going to be hard...

Put you in the shoes of a grad student.

What would you choose (ethics aside) navigate to the website of your library do 20 clicks through a shitty interface to finally get a paper, and thats if you are lucky, or just paste a DOI and wait 5 seconds...

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

#28

Post by ta988 »

hedora wrote: post #11

I hope they find a long term archival approach for the literature that’s no longer being paid for. In CS, there was a transition from older journals to newer publishers around 1980, and much of the literature prior to that is simply inaccessible.

This is a growing problem in other fields, especially when universities destroyed the paper versions once they were available online...

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

#29

Post by hyperbovine »

ta988 wrote: post #27
whatever1 wrote: post #13

Let’s ask scihub to tell us how much traffic they get from uc*.edu ip addresses

Traffic from US has always been huge anyway on scihub so thats going to be hard... Put you in the shoes of a grad student. What would you choose (ethics aside) navigate to the website of your library do 20 clicks through a shitty interface to finally get a paper, and thats if you are lucky, or just paste a DOI and wait 5 seconds...

Said behavior is not limited to grad students.

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

#30

Post by ta988 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #29
ta988 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic from US has always been huge anyway on scihub so thats going to be hard... Put you in the shoes of a grad student. What would you choose (ethics aside) navigate to the website of your library do 20 clicks through a shitty interface to finally get a paper, and thats if you are lucky, or just paste a DOI and wait 5 seconds...

Said behavior is not limited to grad students.

You're right I started with grad students as an example and after rewriting I lost that effect.
Post reply on HN