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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

#181

Post by lkjdsklf »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #87
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…

would that be unconstitutional violation of ex post facto? I'm not lawyer, so that question is one i don't know how to even approach.

It’s different from ex post facto, but

The state can not pass laws that alter existing contracts or refuse to enforce them. That’s very explicitly prohibited under the contracts clause.

Very much unconstitutional

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

#182

Post by imgabe »

oaiey wrote: post #172
imgabe wrote: post #171

Why aren’t all scholarly papers just published as HTML on the author’s website? This is literally what the web was made for. Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.

Because the personal home page is not called Science or Nature. And is not reviewed etc. Also could be pirates. System is broken, do not get me wrong. But just a homepage is not the solution

So Science or Nature peer-reviews the home page and then links to it from their page. You get the prestige from being linked to by a major journal.

Everyone can publish anything, but the journals can lend credibility, which is all they do anyway.

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

#183

Post by joshu »

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…

I don’t think Andrew had its own display system. At least by the early 90s, ATK ran on top of X.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

imgabe wrote: post #171

Why aren’t all scholarly papers just published as HTML on the author’s website? This is literally what the web was made for. Journals could still exist to peer review and aggregate links, so you’d have the prestige of being in the journal, but there’s no reason to restrict access.

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by lo_zamoyski »

robertlagrant wrote: post #164
echelon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

> This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally Sorry, but this is a worldview that universally leads to nastiness. It's everyone's world, and just as I don't have the right to sleep in your bed (even though it's "our" world and who are you to stop "us"?) we have to have a non-low resolution and non-tribal view of situations. There is a way to think about this that…

The coherent way to think about this is in terms of the common good. In fact, the private good is for the sake of the common good: by being able to have private goods, we are better able to flourish (e.g., by removing conflict over common use). But because the common good is superior to private good, it is not the case that there is an absolute right to the private good. This doesn't mean principles of justice can be violated. On the contrary, it allows for them to be more perfectly realized. If you own a warehouse full of food in the middle of a famine, then it isn't theft for the hungry to take it, because you have a moral obligation to supply the starving with that food.

The trouble with the liberal notion of property rights is that it has things exactly backwards. It posits private property as primary, and the common good as a perhaps regrettable, but necessary concession of the private good. But it is the common good that is prior and justifies the private good.

So, in this case, does a company like Elsevier serve the common good?

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

#186

Post by Yeul »

Vinnl wrote: post #157
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…

Almost the entirety of Europe, together with big funders like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, took a good stab at battling the cartels to get them to make articles Open Access, with Plan S: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S Unfortunately, the impact seems to have been limited, primarily because the US didn't sign up to it. So I'm afraid I don't see California being able to go on its own.

Elsevier are no doubt scum but I think that scientists share the blame. They all want to be published in the big famous journals. Which gives Elsevier the power to dictate terms.

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

#187

Post by 1oooqooq »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #162
MarkusQ wrote: post #2

Aaron Swartz would have liked some of those principles. This is a small, "better late than never" step for most of us, but for Aaron...it's more like "too little, too late."

I consider it a lot more obscene, MIT doesn't go after all the megacorps that are training ML algorithms on research articles because they feel small in comparison, but if a kid borrows too many articles, or in too quick a succession, they had no problem squashing him like a bug. Its the same behavior you seen in frustrated adolescents that feel to small to retaliate against the perpetrators of their misfortune and "…

those companies usually pay Elsevier for the whole bundle because it's cheaper than scrapping.

the system greatly benefits those it pretends to protect the authors against.

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

#188

Post by pbronez »

Interesting to see that MIT explicitly wants the ability to do computational analysis over published papers. Many content creators are strongly against their work being used in AI, but this policy welcomes it:

> Publishers will provide computational access to subscribed content as a standard part of all contracts, with no restrictions on non-consumptive, computational analysis of the corpus of subscribed content.

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/

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

#189

Post by tivert »

neves wrote: post #168
robertlagrant wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally Sorry, but this is a worldview that universally leads to nastiness. It's everyone's world, and just as I don't have the right to sleep in your bed (even though it's "our" world and who are you to stop "us"?) we have to have a non-low resolution and non-tribal view of situations. There is a way to think about this that…

It's really interesting when people doesn't notice that the view of "copyright=pepper" is pure ideology.

> ...view of "copyright=pepper" is pure...

Huh?

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

#190

Post by tivert »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #185
robertlagrant wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is our world, and anyone telling us they get to gatekeep information exchange is not an ally Sorry, but this is a worldview that universally leads to nastiness. It's everyone's world, and just as I don't have the right to sleep in your bed (even though it's "our" world and who are you to stop "us"?) we have to have a non-low resolution and non-tribal view of situations. There is a way to think about this that…

The coherent way to think about this is in terms of the common good. In fact, the private good is for the sake of the common good: by being able to have private goods, we are better able to flourish (e.g., by removing conflict over common use). But because the common good is superior to private good, it is not the case that there is an absolute right to the private good. This doesn't mean principles of justice can be…

You are exactly right, especially with the example of the famine. Maybe in some cases moderate amounts of greed and selfishness can lead to the common good (though the market), but higher moral principles must always take priority with there's a conflict. Unfortunately a lot of people miss that, especially with the astounding amounts of free market propaganda out there, hocking incomplete models and nonsense like defining good as whatever the market does.

If you find yourself in a famine with a warehouse of food, and your thought is "how can I exploit this situation for maximum profit" you are doing it wrong.

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