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UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

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Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#71
post #2

Elsevier knows this. We have just finish negotiating a new national contract with them, and to our surprise did they agreed to all of our demands. They know which way the wind is blowing and are trying to pivot as quickly as an old lumbering giant can.

Losing UC as a subscriber is a huge own goal for Elsevier. Researchers will get used to: 1. always posting preprints, 2. always looking for preprints first, 3. using scihub to get older papers, 4. citing and sharing material using links to preprints or scihub by default.

They will spread these habits to their students and colleagues and as they move between institutions. UC is huge across all the constituent colleges and many parts of it are extremely prestigious, so UC grad students are the sort of people who will often end up as professors in other institutions.

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#73

At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the pu…

Same in cryptography, where the research community manages our own preprint archive (http://eprint.iacr.org/). My experience has been that preprint archives are often used to "mark territory" i.e. get credit for an idea quickly so that it can be discussed more openly.

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#74

At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the pu…

> Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier

Why can't you just upload to arxiv and perhaps places like researchgate or academia.edu ?

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#75
post #45
post #14

At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published infor…

I work for Elsevier. About 2 years ago there was a big internal push to drive it home that we are now a data and analytics company and not a publisher.

Given this, please consider some internal lobbying to publish all works under a free license, as a non-publisher should not care about others making copies of works it has published.

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#76

At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the pu…

> Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier Why can't you just upload to arxiv and perhaps places like researchgate or academia.edu ?

Uploading to arxiv is a pre-print. That's exactly what the parent is saying that they do. Some journals will forbid this as part of the publishing contract.

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#78
post #55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully some universities have a decently working ezproxy config but still. Then you hit the paywall, or the non working website from the crappy publisher that thinks people want to read pdfs as their enhanced-pdf and require two other clicks to get a real pdf, during that time the 5 (not kidding look at what those pages load!) trackers are loading...

In my experience at least those are edge cases from some super dodgey journals. All the major publishers and journals worth reading work fine.

I'm talking about a major publisher here, Wiley $1.7bn revenue...

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#79
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. Didn't know about that one so I had to Wikipedia it: "LexisNexis is a corporation providing computer-assisted legal research (CALR) as well as business research and risk-management services." if anybody is wondering.

Wikipedia's description isn't very helpful sadly - they're like the real world data version of Microsoft or SAP, they have a ton of different products that are basically databases of data collected from a ton of different sources. Lawyers use LexisNexis to find research legal precedent and find the contact information of defendants to send cease and desists or where to serve them papers; universities and public schoo…

Oh wow I had no idea, now I want to have a look at it.

Re: UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

#80
post #63
post #14

At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published infor…

> they sell medical diagnostic tools, text etc. [0]. If they actually do that, that is not represented in the link you provided. The whole page is about teaching materials about the field, and one piece of software to _simulate_ "real-world patient data systems". On their whole website I couldn't find a single product/service that a company would use in their direct operative work (in contrast to training).

Sorry for the crummy link. See the LexisNexis comment above. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX.
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