Live data from Hacker News

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

dailybruin.com

31–40 of 93 posts

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

#31
post #18
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.

Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.

Yes!

Literally the copyright for scientific articles should be 1 year. This is how we fix open access.

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

#32
post #21
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.…

Does sci-hub release geographic group-by ? She should, I have a corp all access pass to basically everything, and I still sci-hub.

The racist, classist control of information has to stop. It should basically be a reverse paywall.

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

#33
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.

At least in biology, a lot is indexed on pubmed.

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

#34
post #27

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...

Luckily nearly every university offers their library proxy as a bookmarklet. It's two clicks: 1 to hit the bookmarklet, another to hit login on my autofilled secure sign on page.

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

#35
post #18
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.

Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.

My level of cynicism at this point is so high that I'd assume we'd be forced to add narratives to papers until they resemble the five-thousand word life story you find tacked on to a recipe to escape the "just a list" issue. [And breathe]

Although, full agreement if that doesn't become a problem or you have a solution for it already prepared :)

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

#36
post #18
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.

Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.

Any research paid for with tax dollars should be public domain.

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

#37
post #26
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...

They own LexisNexis too. It’s an interesting philosophy where they seem to try to corner information that is free, or should. Then charge rents on top of it.

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

#38
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.

inaccessible?

That's a strong word. Just because something is not digitized doesn't mean it's not there. Have you talked to a reference librarian? Material in archives may be inaccessible because of legal stipulations or just simply unindexed, or writings are known to exist only in manuscript - but "not online" or "in off-site storage" doesn't qualify.

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

#39
At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the publisher's library.

It's to the point now I'd say that all of the grad students and younger PIs insist on posting a pre-print. Pretty great trend especially considering with LaTeX the preprint ends up looking just as good as the published version anyways....

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

#40
post #31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.

Yes! Literally the copyright for scientific articles should be 1 year. This is how we fix open access.

OK.

Step one: Renegotiate the Berne Convention.

Post reply on HN