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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)

#51

Post by mattkrause »

pirocks wrote: post #48
matheusmoreira wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't actually think of anyone who has been paid for a review in the sciences.

The most I've personally gotten was a nice note from an editor; I've heard rumors of someone who reviewed enough to get some journal-branded swag (a mug or calendar, I think). If you review a book, you might get to keep the copy.

Nobody gets cash.

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

#52

Post by akiselev »

ta988 wrote: post #42
prepend wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia's description isn't very helpful sadly - they're like the real world data version of Microsoft or SAP, they have a ton of different products that are basically databases of data collected from a ton of different sources. Lawyers use LexisNexis to find research legal precedent and find the contact information of defendants to send cease and desists or where to serve them papers; universities and public schools use LexisNexis to search newspapers and other media; finance firms use it for various data feeds; and so on.

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

#53

Post by herpderperator »

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...

What's a DOI?

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

#54

Post by bnewbold »

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.

At the Internet Archive, we are working on one aspect of this problem: https://fatcat.wiki/

Other notable efforts, mostly envisioned and led by librarians, are "dark" digital archives (LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, etc) which usually have a mechanism to flip and "trigger" public access if the publisher vanishes; microfilming and other microform throughout the 20th century; Hathitrust / Google Books; and as others have mentioned, scalable and sustainable (cost-wise) off-campus depositories.

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

#55

Post by asdff »

ta988 wrote: post #41
asdff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In my experience at least those are edge cases from some super dodgey journals. All the major publishers and journals worth reading work fine.

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

#56

Post by oefrha »

It’s outrageous that Elsevier was extracting millions of dollars from UC alone while providing basically negative value-add (yes, paywalling scientific knowledge is negative). That’s funding for ~100 or more PhD students right there. I recall getting offer letters from Berkeley and UCLA back when I was applying to grad school, and immediately hard-passed them since they said something like funding was not guaranteed beyond the first year.

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

#57

Post by Fomite »

sitkack wrote: post #31
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.

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

The NIH and the Wellcome Trust both negotiated effectively this - papers funded by those organizations are open access within 12 months.

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

#58

Post by DominikPeters »

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...

When on mobile/iPad, my university (Harvard) makes me two-factor for every paper.

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

#59

Post by ganafagol »

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.

Yes, there is no monetary compensation. But the currency here is community service. If your CV lists you as reviewer, program chair, technical committee on XYZ, it makes you look important. And you get to see very early who in your field is working on what. It has networking effects and you get to know people (other reviewers and committee members).

That's why academics do it. Most of them anyway. All for "free".

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

#60

Post by pizzicato »

herpderperator wrote: post #53
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...

What's a DOI?

Digital Object Identifier. It's a permanent URL to avoid link rot, really useful for scientific articles.

https://library.uic.edu/help/article/1966/what-is-a-doi-and-...

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