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MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

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Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already is: arxiv.org.

Different roles. I could have agreed if you said, say, PLOS. arXiv is a preprint repository, Elsevier publishes peer-reviewed journals.

The preprints on arxiv are read, and responded to, by plenty of peers. The question was what value Elsevier adds; I think the primary value added is just making papers available to anyone who wants to read them. Arxiv does that. (What's more, it does it for everyone, not just academics--as a taxpayer I can go on arxiv and read research that my tax money paid for. I can't do that with Elsevier published journals.) Publication in journals at this point is mainly resume padding and status signaling, not an actual value add.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#23

US universities could create enough pressure on Elsevier to make them seriously reconsider their practices.

Making Elsevier reconsider its practices is a self-defeating goal. Pay-per-access research publishing should be driven out of business. The majority of institutions funding the actual research being done are publicly funded or receive large public tax breaks, so the resulting research should be publicly accessible, and the peer review process should be managed and funded within a similar network of institutions, not by an oligarchy of rent-seeking private entities.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. The article states that MIT pays $300,000 annually for individual request fees, far less than the prior contract amount.

>They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet. IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyr…

Your link is broken, should be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_....

You missed the final period

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#25
The article mentioned that MIT saved 80%, and that they are paying $300,000 to purchase on a per article basis. So their previous contract with Elsevier was $1.5M annually. Elsevier's net income is £2.02 billion (2022)(Wikipedia). So the loss to Elsevier from MIT is about 0.04% of net income. Which makes sense: MIT is one of around 2000 universities worldwide. I hope this catches on elsewhere, too.

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#27
post #5
post #3

Question: What is Elsevier’s value proposition? Could that be replicated by on open source offering?

The own the prestigious journal names, you can trivially do what they do, but you lack the prestige.

Like Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry?

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#28
post #24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet. IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyr…

Your link is broken, should be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_... . You missed the final period

Your link is broken too – they didn't miss anything, HN removes the final period. Solution is to %-escape it as %2E for a working link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_...

Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract

#29
post #24
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet. IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyr…

Your link is broken, should be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_... . You missed the final period

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