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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

#221

Post by 20after4 »

kaitocross wrote: post #153
Loughla wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It doesnt exist in their day to day because they cant access it legally. Also, the political space would profit from more open access. How can I base my arguments on facts and logic if the primary sources of the facts are not accessible to me? How can I show others the facts if they cant access the source without getting into legal trouble?

Because the scientific journals publish all of the facts and nothing but the facts?

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

#222

Post by tivert »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #203
tivert wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 def…

> higher moral principles must always take priority with there's a conflic People disagree about their higher moral principles. Resolving to absoluteness requires violent resolution.

> People disagree about their higher moral principles. Resolving to absoluteness requires violent resolution.

And what do you think the implication of that is? For example, in the GGP's scenario about the warehouse of food in a famine?

That point is often used as part of a non sequitur excuse to behave badly (e.g. people don't agree on everything, therefore lets have a free for all ruled by only the market).

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

#223

Post by Vinnl »

Yeul wrote: post #186
Vinnl wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course they want to get published in the big famous journals; the ones that don't lost their funding, and thus aren't scientists any more.

(Which is not to say that some aren't to blame; in particular, the ones on funding committees that still assign value to the journal/publisher names rather than the actual work produced by applicants.)

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

#224

Post by _yb2s »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #208
_yb2s wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just becomes a pain (slower) to get things, but if it's worth reading I think people still manage to get what they need. Nowadays you can pay extra for open access even in a closed access journal and most do- so there are very few truly closed articles published anymore. It is mostly accessing older literature where it becomes a problem, but of course there are ways to get anything, especially if you are tech savv…

Makes sense. That doesn't sound like a disaster though? > It is mostly accessing older literature where it becomes a problem Not sure if this was true with UC, but MIT still has access to all Elsevier content they had before, if it was published before 2020. ) > ...leaving users with immediate access to only pre-2020 backfile content... I'm not sure the details, but I think there are contracts where the university ge…

It made getting papers difficult enough that people often wouldn't read things they wanted to read... hard to say what the real impact of that is.

> While the practice is standard of authors handing out free copies, in most cases I think this is either a copyright or license violation with the publisher?

Journals usually allow the author to share a specific number of free copies, and even give the author a system or link to facilitate it.

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

#225

Post by photonthug »

HPsquared wrote: post #175
photonthug wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just not an issue for most people's everyday. Sure, but if you look at any of the fairly ridiculous and designed-to-be-divisive issues that pretty much decide every bit of our political conversation.. anything can be an issue. Making the military more diverse is a good example, because while it's absolutely important, it also affects less than 1% of people directly, and less than 3% indirectly. I'd hazard a gu…

I don't know about that, I think the military balance-of-forces affects more people indirectly than academic publishing.

Why would you think that? Everyone gets sick and so benefits from medical research, and of course there are other kinds of research, hence the 100% number. Generously assuming everyone in the military has 1 spouse and 1 child, and assuming 1% is in the military (also generous) gives less than 3%.

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

#226

Post by fhsm »

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 "…

Prosecutorial conduct was perhaps more important than MIT’s, although the tragedy of his death provides bountiful opportunities for condemnation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-swa...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/disappointing-unsealin...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/aaron...

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

#227

Post by robertlagrant »

tivert wrote: post #222
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> higher moral principles must always take priority with there's a conflic People disagree about their higher moral principles. Resolving to absoluteness requires violent resolution.

> People disagree about their higher moral principles. Resolving to absoluteness requires violent resolution. And what do you think the implication of that is? For example, in the GGP's scenario about the warehouse of food in a famine? That point is often used as part of a non sequitur excuse to behave badly (e.g. people don't agree on everything, therefore lets have a free for all ruled by only the market).

This sort of extreme argument is silly. Yes in that instance you need bureaucrats who parcel out what's there. But almost all the time (except in countries where governed by "social good" politics, where millions have starved to death) you aren't in a life or death situation and can just proceed normally, producing what people want to consume, or being further back in the supply chain and producing what businesses want to consume, is by far the best approach. Let people decide what they want to do and what they want to buy, and leave them alone as much as possible to achieve that.

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

#228

Post by borski »

photonthug wrote: post #225
HPsquared wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that, I think the military balance-of-forces affects more people indirectly than academic publishing.

Why would you think that? Everyone gets sick and so benefits from medical research, and of course there are other kinds of research, hence the 100% number. Generously assuming everyone in the military has 1 spouse and 1 child, and assuming 1% is in the military (also generous) gives less than 3%.

I think the idea is that by maintaining a strong military presence, thus preventing us from being directly attacked on our soil (in theory), affects many more people’s lives indirectly, since they aren’t living in fear that they could be taken out at any moment.

The same is not true for many countries without a strong military presence.

And then there’s places like Costa Rica, where they somehow make it work.

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

#229

Post by bosco_mcnasty »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #159
Something1234 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to need more history here on exactly what you linked this is insanely interesting. Alternate windows things in unix land are always interesting

Undoubtedly a reference to CMU's Andrew project [1], which was an experimental distributed computing environment from the 1980s - with an emphasis on providing infrastructure for pedagogy. Ideas developed by Andrew and Project Athena [2] can still be seen in contemporary software today: window managers, distributed file systems and authentication, compouns documents , etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Pro…

of note AndrewFS (think cousin of NFS).. with features pertaining to systems being "offline" and "online" alternately, but still accessing the same global file / directory namespace, still reading and writing, so some type of git or cvs style merging also exists in that filesystem

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

#230

Post by mncharity »

joshu wrote: post #183
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.

This would have been a bit earlier, mid-or-late-80s, assuming I'm remembering it correctly.
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