revolt, takeover. reminds me of the mutiny post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525173
Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
71–80 of 152 posts
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
JSTOR is not a publisher. They are also a not-for-profit organization. While it would be awesome if all the material they scanned were open access, I think their hearts are probably in the right place. Scanning millions of journal articles isn't cheap, and there's no obvious alternative way to fund that.
There seems to be a world of difference between "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" in the ways we are imagining open-access. JSTOR is not a publisher--agreed. They are, however, a central repository who charges an arm and a leg for research that, often, has been funded on the taxpayer's dime.
For the non-free content on JSTOR, I don't see much that another archive could do about it. The main issue is back issues of journals published between 1923 and now-ish. Future content could go open access directly online, in which case JSTOR doesn't even really enter into the picture. And JSTOR has already made all the older, public-domain content freely available. But in between, there is almost a century of copyrighted content controlled by the journals. JSTOR scans the paper journals, but can only make the PDFs available with agreement of the copyright holder. They could try to pressure them more, e.g. by threatening to evict journals from JSTOR if the journal doesn't agree to certain minimum licensing requirements. But they don't ultimately control that content themselves.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands That's why we have governments. No, I'm not being sarcastic. The public sector is there to serve the public good, and this is quite obviously a public good. I'm not anti-privatization either. Private exploitation under public laws and guidelines is a common strategy to solve these issues.…
I appreciate where you're coming from. But do you really trust, say, Sarah Palin to oversee evolutionary biology research? Exxon to have veto power over climate change articles? Todd Akin to be able to interfere in STD epidemiology? The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others…
> The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others can very easily go on and continue as is.
You can't fork funding the way you fork source code though. It's not just more expensive, but fundamentally different.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I m…
A good start would be increased quality of interfaces and abilities to find and connect similar sources; that's all I'm really asking for. There is a huge amount of research published within the Gale-Wilson-ElSevier-JSTOR-Ebsco-Taylor&Francis vaults, properties of immense academic and economic value, yet the tools they charge to access them aren't much more advanced than Yahoo circa '99. Don't even get me started on…
For most scientific fields, the last decade's research is much less important than the next decade's research. New research is much less locked in than stuff that was written before the internet became ubiquitous, so I'm not as concerned about that issue.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#75The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…
Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I m…
Well, a technical solution is needed to make changes faster and even better, namely:
1. Provide for the papers a system of transparent reviews and ratings accessible and readable to the public.
2. Provide a recommender system and a search engine based on the reviewed and rated papers available publicly.
This would add real value to the scientific publishing and simply help the researchers to find what they need.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#76The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…
I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad review…
I think SO is the wrong model and that Hacker News is a better one. There's already reputation/badges/etc for the sort of academic tasks you're describing: look at any CV (eg: conference presentations, referee assignments, etc, and the obvious one is journal publications). So I don't see how replacing the old system with the old system plus usernames is an obvious improvement or a necessary evolution.
I'm way more interested in informal discussion of interesting papers and news than anything else.
As everyone else has mentioned, the big issue is getting a large community. So what would be really cool would be to figure out how to do something like HN or SO without active involvement by a large community. In my field there's a lot of discussion/review/etc of working papers and published results, but it's all scattered across different blogs and commenting systems. Plus papers build on each other and some are clear replies to other research. If you could take that sort of dispersed discussion and put it into an HN or reddit style threaded view that was available at one spot (or an SO style question and answer format, if you prefer), that would be awesome.
edit: typo
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the many problems with academic publishing is that it's holding on to an antiquated idea behind publishing and not progressing with the way communications are moving now. In a sense, publications are moving at 1970s speed and this hurts science. Hence the technical need to bring it to current times. Is it a "technical issue"? No, but neither is booking your flight via phone, that worked just fine. Could it be…
An anecdote: I finished a decent draft of a paper two weeks ago and posted it to my website an hour before submitting it to a journal. The code to replicate it is on github available to anyone who wants to look at it, and the statistical methods I use I've put in a GPL R package. I've already discussed aspects of the paper and some implementation issues with other researchers over email, presented the paper at confer…
I think it's super awesome that you did all of that! Kudos to you, and I wish more people were doing stuff like that.
My viewpoints are limited to life sciences, where people have no idea what FTP means, let alone GIT. Also, what you did is not typical, people (at least in my field of neurobiology) have no intention of doing something like that in fear of being scooped. The antiquated idea behind publishing is the concept of doing an experiment, filtering out all the negative data, and then submitting their positive data to a journal that they think will publish their data. We've been waiting for 7 months now for a paper to get published in PNAS due to this antiquated process. 7 months to do what you did in a few minutes uploading your data online and making it public.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#78The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…
Aqui-murdering is a consequence of our financial system. When some big company can get bank money at far less than other companies, let's say 3% just as a hypothetical example, they can buy any business with a 6% cap rate and run it poorly so it only makes a 4% cap and still make a profit. This happens all the time. Meanwhile the entrepreneur cannot get money for anywhere near that and has to actually create real value instead of performing financial arbitrage as these companies with access to the cheap money can.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a few websites already trying to do this, but as with all networks, it only works if you get enough users.
Could you give me examples? Thanks!
ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/) and Academia.edu (http://academia.edu/) are two examples of companies looking to build networks for academics.
Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
JSTOR is not a publisher. They are also a not-for-profit organization. While it would be awesome if all the material they scanned were open access, I think their hearts are probably in the right place. Scanning millions of journal articles isn't cheap, and there's no obvious alternative way to fund that.
There seems to be a world of difference between "not-for-profit" and "non-profit" in the ways we are imagining open-access. JSTOR is not a publisher--agreed. They are, however, a central repository who charges an arm and a leg for research that, often, has been funded on the taxpayer's dime.
In my world, I guess I think of JSTOR as the "good guys." The trustees of its parent organization are real academics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITHAKA). Its fees are extraordinarily reasonable, at least compared to Elsevier's. (JSTOR fees for large U.S. universities are on the order of $10,000 annually, whereas my university says they pay about $2 million per year to Elsevier.) Since JSTOR is a not-for-profit, I don't really see where the money would go besides toward the actual cost of making the research publicly available (which in JSTOR's case is non-trivial, since they are scanning a lot of publications instead of converting InDesign files to PDFs).
There is obviously a difference between making academic research available to universities at reasonable prices and making academic research available to everyone for free. The latter is obviously better, but to happen, the money would have to come from somewhere. For a publisher, the obvious answer is publication fees (which is what PLoS does). This is not an option for JSTOR, since most of their material has already been published. I suspect that JSTOR would happily make everything in their collection open access if they had a sufficiently large endowment to do so.