Woohoo! First UC now Elsevier! The arc of the moral universe is long, but ever so often, it does indeed bend towards justice.
RIP A.S.
MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
21–30 of 269 posts
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#22I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like them still need to exist.
Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject, with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a monthly journal.
Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown files or a Google Doc. And if you want it printed, there are shops that can do that for you for a small fee as well.
This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and could be 100% funded by those who are still willing to pay for paper versions or by tiny contributions from the top 100 universities.
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#23An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be that anyone who's still publishing in closed-access journals will be at a severe disadvantage in getting cited compared to people who publish open access and make preprints available.
probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it
Also:
It's difficult to know whether a publication is open or closed when you download it from a research institute or a university (access is automatically granted based on the ip address).
You only realize how much it cost when you try to download it from home.
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it
I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to my point.
This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be considered "fraudulent" at this point.
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#25Recently (I believe around a year ago or so) my university lost access to many publisher services because of some negotiations. The negotiations were about a new Norwegian law requiring all publicly funded research to be publicly available. I don't remember exactly what happened with the negotiations, but I presume they somehow found a solution.
EDIT: Found a relevant website about open access in Norway https://www.openaccess.no/english/
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#26An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be that anyone who's still publishing in closed-access journals will be at a severe disadvantage in getting cited compared to people who publish open access and make preprints available.
I believe this is called "FUTON bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias).
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#27Further indications that Aaron Swartz didn't die completely in vain...
Let's not get carried away here.
MIT administrators still use Swartz as an example to threaten potential whistleblowers. Faced with that, people back down. For all the public repentance, this was intentional and malicious by at least parts of the Central Admin.
MIT has good guys and bad guys. The good guys won here, rejecting Elsevier. The bad players on the Swartz front are still there, and still making decision similar to Swartz.
People back down much more quickly with that example held up as what happens if you don't play ball.
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#28Here is the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/ It requires that: 1. No author will be required to waive any institutional or funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher’s journals. 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with gener…
> What was surprising was the number of institutions which had signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious how many of these still have an Elsevier contract. If you ever tried to dig deep into the internals of a large organization, you will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power. At least, this was my experience. For a…
> they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power.
Not amazing. Rules are for the ruled. The executive is not bound by them.
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing recent papers for things that were literally known in the 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to my point.
This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be considered "fraudulent" at this point.
That's what I do. If I want to say something obvious, I Google for the first citation which says that thing in a way which is readable, understandable, and correct.
Honestly, the problem isn't with whom I cite, so much as:
1) Academia deciding to use metrics inappropriately (as well as expecting citations on well-known obvious things). I'm not going to adjust my work style because academics decided to adopt dumb metrics and build massive, dumb incentive structures around those metrics.
2) Reviewers expecting citations for everything, and not caring about quality of those citations. "The sky is blue" doesn't work. "The sky is blue (Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012)" works fine, even if Blitzerman, Tinkledorf 2012 is complete nonsense.
Re: MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
#30An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be that anyone who's still publishing in closed-access journals will be at a severe disadvantage in getting cited compared to people who publish open access and make preprints available.
I believe this is called "FUTON bias" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias ).
Some software I wrote got cited in a paper once. They had used it because it was readily available on the net. I didnt think anyone actually noticed.