31–38 of 38 posts
A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor. We should boycott all of them
"Elsevier [...] is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable." Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use where I can just get knowledge…
Elzevier isn't the only one, either. While not as egregious, there is Proquest, who locks private researchers out of many databases and digital works (mostly historical works) that are not available anywhere else. If one is not an enrolled student or faculty member of an institution that pays for an institutional subscription, there is no way to gain access to their databases. This type of intellectual elitism disgus…
I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.
Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those were the days, but going back to photocopy world won't be very good for productivity and maybe the quality of research. Being able to check everything easily is an incredible advantage. And then there's this problem of disappearing or lost issues that some might remember fondly. Quite frankly, if it comes to this everybody will get pirated copies or ask a colleague for theirs. I love paper though, a few things…
I don't doubt people will get pirated copies instead of using the paper versions, but the existence of the paper versions allows them to pretend they read the paper in a legit way. I'm not taking sides for that sort of behaviour or against it, just that I expect that will be the workflow.
I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.
Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those…
From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those…
distill.pub IS a legitimate journal. From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.
A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor. We should boycott all of them
The most powerful boycott would be not to submit papers to Elsevier journals. But given current academic hiring practices this is hardly going to happen, at least not in my field.
Strikes me as a lost war for Elsevier
They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good…