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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

#111

Post by bogtog »

I’ll preface this by saying that the current system of publishing is a natural monopoly issue… but out of all the major publishers, Elsevier is the only one to offer a public API for downloading journal articles (and an excellent one at that, which anyone can sign up for in minutes), so out of this group of parasites, I honestly hate Elsevier the least.

There's a Romanian saying "A furat dar a și facut": They stole but at least they did something (usually in reference to politicians I believe but still).

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

#112

Post by Loughla »

dredmorbius wrote: post #99
Loughla wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because not a lot of professions access these research journals for their day to day outside of medicine, engineering, and academia. It's just not an issue for most people's everyday. So it's just not an issue.

It's an issue pretty much anybody who's gone through a tertiary academic institution should have some awareness of. That's well over half the adult population these days in the US and likely EU. Being cut off from library access was a huge shock for me on leaving uni.

Again, not really. Most professions, once you leave University, do not consult research materials. They have no reason to. And when these folks are in university, the materials are all super easily accessible.

It's literally a non-issue for, I would bet, a majority of people. It just doesn't exist in their day to day. Regardless of how that actually impacts the world.

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

#113

Post by giantg2 »

salt4034 wrote: post #73
giantg2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps lower quality.

Why lower quality? The money doesn't go to authors, editors or peer-reviewers.

Lower system quality? I saw job postings from Elsevier a couple years ago and considered applying. I assume there are other paid staff who contribute to quality of the articles or their delivery as well.

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

#115

Post by PopePompus »

dsr_ wrote: post #97
PopePompus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're certainly right about authors and peer-reviewers, but are you sure that editors don't get paid with some of that money?

Yes. The "editors" for most such publications do not edit, they make publishing decisions. Copy-editors are expensive, and paid for by the researchers, not the journals.

I have published papers in scientific journals. I had to pay page charges to the journal (well, my employer did), but I never directly paid any editor or copy-editor.

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

#116

Post by throwaway2037 »

Etheryte wrote: post #63
hyeonwho4 wrote: post #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.

How do these numbers work out though? MIT probably isn't the richest university there is, but I would expect it to be pretty far up there. Even if all 2000 unis spent as much as MIT did, it would only add up to roughly 80% of the profit — and I would expect most universities to have far less budget than MIT. So is there a set of big whale universities who are paying way more?

According to Wiki, MIT has an endowment of ~25B USD -- #6 in the US. It is incredibly rich.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

I don't know how this ranks internationally, but I guess that US universities have the largest endowments globally.

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

#117

Post by echelon »

mncharity wrote: post #69

Some random bits of context. This conflict goes back a long time. In the early 1990's, with online journals just getting started, MIT was able to insist on principles like "anyone physically in the library has full access, even if they are not otherwise affiliated with MIT". A couple of years later, power shifted, and Elsevier could "our terms, take it or leave it". Then three decades, a human generation, of Elsevier…

> "our terms, take it or leave it".

So many monopolies do this and they should all be disrupted. This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally. Google with Chrome, Apple with iPhone.

> Societal change can be so very slow, nonmonotonic, and profoundly discouraging. And yet here we are, making progress.

Encouraging, but we lost Aaron.

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

#118

Post by panagathon »

Loughla wrote: post #112
dredmorbius wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an issue pretty much anybody who's gone through a tertiary academic institution should have some awareness of. That's well over half the adult population these days in the US and likely EU. Being cut off from library access was a huge shock for me on leaving uni.

Again, not really. Most professions, once you leave University, do not consult research materials. They have no reason to. And when these folks are in university, the materials are all super easily accessible. It's literally a non-issue for, I would bet, a majority of people. It just doesn't exist in their day to day. Regardless of how that actually impacts the world.

Perhaps in industries you are familiar with. Many industries, however, would have a continued professional development disposition that benefits from continued access to fundamental research. Mine certainly does and the lack of access impoverishes that professional development.

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

#119

Post by jacekm »

calf wrote: post #85
PopePompus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But sci-hub stopped adding new articles years ago. It's significantly less useful than it used to be.

They did? Is there any alternative nowadays?

Reportedly there are Nexus bots on Telegram but I am not sure how they work and where to find them.

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

#120

Post by CoreformGreg »

mullingitover wrote: post #78

I wonder how far California could go on its own in destroying the journal cartels. They really are a parasitic racket, and I don't think the average voter understand how bad it really is. I feel like one basic ballot measure to the effect of "All state funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void" might be enough to knock over the first domino, h…

If you're not aware, you may be interested in checking out https://www.osti.gov and https://www.osti.gov/search-tools
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