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

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

#41

Post by ta988 »

asdff wrote: post #34
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...

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.

Thankfully some universities have a decently working ezproxy config but still. Then you hit the paywall, or the non working website from the crappy publisher that thinks people want to read pdfs as their enhanced-pdf and require two other clicks to get a real pdf, during that time the 5 (not kidding look at what those pages load!) trackers are loading...

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

#42

Post by ta988 »

prepend wrote: post #37
ta988 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice. Didn't know about that one so I had to Wikipedia it: "LexisNexis is a corporation providing computer-assisted legal research (CALR) as well as business research and risk-management services." if anybody is wondering.

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

#43

Post by DavidPeiffer »

tokai wrote: post #2

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.

Curious, what were some of the demands?

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

#44

Post by matheusmoreira »

lumost wrote: post #18
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.

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.

I've been told academic journals don't even pay peer reviewers. Is that true? Peer review is the whole point of a journal and is what sets them apart from just publishing a PDF on the internet. If peer reviewers aren't even getting paid for their invaluable service, nothing stops them from forming their own independent peer review group.

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

#45

Post by ttvkdm »

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…

I work for Elsevier. About 2 years ago there was a big internal push to drive it home that we are now a data and analytics company and not a publisher.

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

#46

Post by renewiltord »

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…

That's like the purpose, man. Wikipedia wouldn't be what it was if it didn't do that. In CS, we have these things called DSLs (domain specific languages) and usually one strives to not make them Turing complete because the restrictions give you advantages in reasoning.

Wikipedia's strength is that it represents the viewpoints shown by (relatively) famous sources.

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

#47

Post by teruakohatu »

ttvkdm wrote: post #45
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…

I work for Elsevier. About 2 years ago there was a big internal push to drive it home that we are now a data and analytics company and not a publisher.

I am pleased to hear it but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Elsevier will cease being a publisher first when they stop selling access to journal articles. Until then they are a publisher first and an "analytics" firm second, regardless of corporate messaging.

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

#48

Post by pirocks »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #44
lumost wrote: 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.

I've been told academic journals don't even pay peer reviewers. Is that true? Peer review is the whole point of a journal and is what sets them apart from just publishing a PDF on the internet. If peer reviewers aren't even getting paid for their invaluable service, nothing stops them from forming their own independent peer review group.

In most cases yes, peer reviewers are not paid. These companies are pretty much a paywalled pdf hosting service hence the outrage against them.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #44
lumost wrote: 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.

I've been told academic journals don't even pay peer reviewers. Is that true? Peer review is the whole point of a journal and is what sets them apart from just publishing a PDF on the internet. If peer reviewers aren't even getting paid for their invaluable service, nothing stops them from forming their own independent peer review group.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by partingshots »

colincooke wrote: post #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 pu…

Arxiv was a godsend.
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