Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-uc-elsevier-20190711-story.html

by bookofjoe • 7 years ago

626 297 7 years ago

latimes.com

betterunix22• 7 years ago

Death throws of a dying and unnecessary industry.

zadokshi2• 7 years ago

I can’t tell if by “dying industry” you mean universities or journal databases.

hyperbovine2• 7 years ago

Honest question: why do commenters here frequently seem to bear a chip on their shoulder when it comes to institutions of higher learning?

CydeWeys2• 7 years ago

*throes

buboard3• 7 years ago

Good, time to end this

CydeWeys2• 7 years ago

Sounds like everyone at UC is going to use SciHub now, and most likely won't switch back once access gets restored?

This seems like a self-defeating move on Elsevier's part?

Incidentally, I heard from someone who worked at Elsevier around four years ago that the working environment there was terrible, and she couldn't wait to leave. That doesn't seem surprising.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

Well, they've been maintaining access for institutions that cancelled their subscriptions for presumably this reason pretty often already, but as more and more institutions jumped on the train, that's not really tenable: why would others keep paying subscriptions if you're not going to cut off access if they don't?

But of course, if it turns out that access is not that necessary anyway, people will stop paying too. But well, that's the risk if you're not adding that much value. And by now, Elsevier has seen this coming long enough that they've hedged their bets well enough not to be reliant on journal subscriptions alone any more. In fact, I'm sure they'll have considered the past few years in which subscriptions hadn't yet massively been cancelled as being a windfall.

0az• 7 years ago

Based on the email I got last week, they have a contractual obligation for old content.

As for the new issues: I believe there's a standing recommendation to look for preprints or ask the authors for a copy.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 7 years ago

Sounds like everyone at UC is going to use SciHub now

Plenty of people already do.

It's much easier to use than any kind of library proxy service if you're not on campus, and it's also far more reliable. Even if you have access, sci-hub often has things that the library doesn't.

ImaCake2• 7 years ago

I have access to uni libraries elsewhere, but I can provide my own anecdote. At home it's sci-hub, on uni wifi it's just via the website which usually automatically grants access seamlessly. Basically, whichever is least inconvenient.

xiii14083• 7 years ago

Or arXiv. Elsevier authors can post their papers on arXiv and/or their own website.

tingletech7• 7 years ago

UC authors can put their author's final versions in https://escholarship.org

jszymborski3• 7 years ago

That's not strictly the case. This practice is actually infringing on your (albeit bonkers) agreement with Elsevier. You can only share copies with those who requested it as an act of "professional courtesy".

tingletech7• 7 years ago

There are ways we (UC libraries) provide access to the content still w/o using sci hub https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/pub...

CamperBob2• 7 years ago

My guess is that this announcement will coincide with a new wave of technical or legal assaults against SciHub. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, it would have made more sense for Elsevier to go after smaller targets first.

Dinosaurs die hard.

jacquesm3• 7 years ago

But die they do and in the case of Elsevier it can't happen fast enough. It's about time the execs get publicly named and shamed and interviewed about how they feel about holding back progress.

kevmo• 7 years ago

All research done with public money should be publicly available.

Full stop.

cvoss• 7 years ago

It seems like NSF is working towards that. NSF-funded publications must be publicly available for free within 12 months after publication. NSF has a repository for this purpose. This regulation went into effect in 2016.

https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18041/nsf18041.jsp

jpeloquin• 7 years ago

In the US, the NIH has a public access policy since 2008, as required by law:

SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753

Access the papers here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

The 12 month delay for public access shouldn't exist. Any discussion of a paper in the news tends to happen around the official date of publication because that is when the press embargo is lifted. The public deserves to have access to the original work then, not a year later. But everyone does eventually get access to NIH-funded work.

troymc• 7 years ago

Meanwhile, everyone involved knows about the black raven in the room (the one with the reddish key in its mouth). It's just not polite to mention it.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

(They're talking about the logo of Sci-Hub [1], the pirate site that offers most scholarly articles regardless of whether they're behind a paywall or not. They're likely to be a major reason why academics are not going to revolt about access being cut off.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

pizza• 7 years ago

I do wonder, though, if more academics working in the UCs know about sci-hub, than do not? In case not, start spreading the good news!

ImaCake2• 7 years ago

I am unsure about senior academics, but younger academics and research students are all aware of sci-hub these days, even if they don't use it that much.

executesorder66• 7 years ago

I disagree. I think it's rude not to mention Sci-hub by name.

Causality1• 7 years ago

Papers produced using any amount of taxpayer money should be required to be publicly available. Not doing so is like stealing a farmer's crops so you can sell him food made from them.

corebit• 7 years ago

Interesting that you mention farmers crops. Should crops produce with government subsidies also be publicly available for free?

monocasa• 7 years ago

I mean, there's several reasons why food stamps are part of the farm bill, this included.

arkades• 7 years ago

They should be available cheaper than if they weren’t subsidized, proportional to the degree of subsidy. Which is usually the point of subsidizing something’s production.

Whereas basic science is almost entirely tax funded, making a pretty good case for it being a public resource.

qwsxyh• 7 years ago

Yes.

buboard3• 7 years ago

They can be, it just costs $5000

bcatanzaro• 7 years ago

I click on the article and get a big paywall instead of text. So meta!

bookofjoe2• 7 years ago

In act of brinkmanship, a big publisher cuts off UC’s access to its academic journalsThe bitter battle between the University of California, a leading source of published research papers, and Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of research papers, just got more bitter.As of Wednesday, Elsevier cut off access by UC faculty, staff and students to articles published since Jan. 1 in 2,500 Elsevier journals, including respected medical publications such as Cell and the Lancet and a host of engineering and scientific journals. Access to most material published in 2018 and earlier remains in force.The move by Elsevier is the latest development in a conflict that has been brewing since last year, when the university’s last five-year contract with Elsevier expired. UC demanded that the new contract reflect the principle of open access — that work produced on its campuses be available to all outside readers, for free.That was a direct challenge to the business model of Elsevier and other big academic publishers. Traditionally, the publishers accept papers for publication for free but charge steep subscription fees. UC is determined to operate under an alternative model, in which researchers pay to have their papers published but not for subscriptions.What kept the two sides apart was not merely the difference in approaches, but the question of fees. UC paid $11 million for Elsevier subscriptions last year — about 25% of its overall subscription budget — while its researchers spent an estimated $1 million more on publication fees on papers subject to open access. The university proposed a new deal under which publication fees and subscriptions would be rolled together for a single sum in a model known as “read and publish.”In part, that was a reflection of concerns over a continual run-up in journal subscription costs that UC, along with many other academic institutions, consider to be unsustainable. The very idea of placing scientific research behind a subscription paywall, moreover, can’t be reconciled with the idea that research should be made as widely available as possible. That’s especially so when the same institutions that generate research papers are made to pay for access to them.“Overwhelmingly the faculty, who have given this a great deal of thought, know this is a matter of principle,” says Robert May, a member of the philosophy department at UC Davis and chair of the UC Academic Council. The council issued a statement Wednesday expressing its determination for UC to “help change the system of scholarly communication for the betterment of all.”UC isn’t the only institution to stage a frontal assault on this model. Open access has been spreading in academia and in scholarly publishing; academic consortiums in Germany and Sweden also have demanded read-and-publish deals with Elsevier, which cut them off after they failed to reach deals last year. Those researchers are still cut off, according to Gemma Hersh, Elsevier’s vice president for global policy. Smaller deals have been made in recent months with research institutions in Norway and Hungary.UC is probably the largest single producer of research papers to make a stand for open access — and an uncompromising stand at that. The university says it generates nearly 10% of all published research in the United States. That has made it a significant partner of Elsevier, which has published about 18% of all UC output.The traditional model has been a gold mine for scholarly publishers such as Elsevier. The scientific, technical and medical publishing arm of its Netherlands-based parent, Relx, recorded about $1.2 billion in operating profit on about $3.2 billion in revenue in 2018, a gratifying 37.5% operating profit margin.The clash of policies led UC to allow its Elsevier subscriptions to lapse as of last Dec. 31. The publisher allowed scholarly access to continue while it tried to reach a new agreement with the university. With no noticeable progress having been made, Elsevier finally pulled the plug.The publisher is rather cagey about its action. In a statement it emailed to UC faculty who were serving as editors of some of its journals, Elsevier wrote that it “sadly had to move forward with [UC’s] request to cancel access.” That’s spin that places the onus entirely on the university: In fact, UC wanted to continue access, but under new terms.The university, for its part, cited Elsevier’s “refusal to address in any meaningful way our dual goals of cost neutrality and open access,” in the words of Dennis J. Ventry, a law professor at UC Davis who is vice chair of the academic senate’s committee on library and scholarly communication. He says the publisher’s last offer would have increased UC costs by 80% over three years, “hardly cost neutrality.”Elsevier says its proposal would have allowed a fivefold increase in the number of UC articles it published under open access — from about 350 now to 1,750 — while increasing the overall bill to UC by no more than annual inflation. Elsevier says on a website it established to explain its position that open-access publishing fees for the estimated 5,000 papers UC publishes per year through the company would run to about $15 million, on top of the $11 million in subscriptions.“We understand that’s not a feasible amount,” Hersh told me. She said the publisher’s proposal aimed to move UC “along that journey [to open access] in a managed and sustainable way.”But university officials say the proposal also would have required UC to “forgo perpetual access to a significant number of Elsevier journals” and would have barred open-access publishing in some especially important journals, including Cell and the Lancet. “UC is committed to making all the work of all of its authors freely available,” the university’s office of scholarly communication said in a statement posted online.University officials acknowledge that the cutoff of direct access to Elsevier journals will cause some inconvenience on UC campuses. Almost any article sought by a campus researcher can be found legally through interlibrary loans, online repositories such as Google scholar or PubMed, or directly from its author.“We know we can provide access to everything through one mechanism or another,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, the university librarian. “We’ve always provided access to scholarly research for things we don’t have subscriptions to. Now we’ll be doing that for Elsevier articles.”Securing access may take a few days longer and a small financial outlay he says, “but there are ways to do it and we’re prepared to make sure that our faculty and students get to read everything they want to read.”Under the circumstances, it looks like Elsevier may have picked a fight with the wrong adversary. While the open-access movement is growing, “the reality is that the majority of the world’s articles are still published under the subscription model, and there is a cost associated with reading those articles,” Hersh says.But it’s hard to imagine that the open-access trend will slow in the future, much less reverse. Elsevier has been holding its ground, but with a scholarly behemoth like UC on the offensive, there’s no telling how long its defense may hold.

ilaksh• 7 years ago

I hope UC made some kind of donation to Sci Hub.

jimbob45• 7 years ago

Can anyone steelman the Elsevier side? I don't want to be caught in the headlights of I have to debate this.

jhbadger• 7 years ago

I would imagine that Elsevier would argue that they (and their fellow for-profit journal publishers) are providing a valuable service of being the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge and without them science would collapse in a chaos of confusion and misinformation. (Not that I really believe that's the case; things like ArXiv show that science can work without the involvement of journals open or closed at all, but that's not how the publishers see it).

dbmueller• 7 years ago

I'm not sure arXiv is an example of doing without journals. arXiv doesn't involve peer review, so that any result published there are to be taken with a big grain of salt.

On the other hand, there are open access journals that essentially act as a layer above arXiv, so that the main added value is review.

xamuel2• 7 years ago

Not exactly steelman, but something you'll want to be aware of if you're going to be debating in this area: The publishers have attempted (and mostly succeeded) to poison the well by equating true open access (free to read, free to publish) with their garbage version of open access (free to read, $3000+ to publish). Once again demonstrating the power of controlling the language. It's going to be a tough battle as long as it's good-hearted activists fighting in their free time vs. full-time Elsevier PR professionals getting a salary to fight.

titanomachy5• 7 years ago

So you're not a fan of PLoS? I always thought their model seemed fair.

hyperpape• 7 years ago

My best attempt: without journals charging fees for access, there is a free rider problem where only a few institutions will support journals. By allowing Elsevier to charge, you force everyone to share in the costs. In a weird sort of way, the fact that universities haven’t yet put Elsevier out of business is evidence for the collective action problem.

I don’t really think it works, and the publication fees model might already be a good enough counter-argument, but it’s my best try.

apo2• 7 years ago

Elsevier owns copyrighted material, which it licenses to individuals and institutions for a fee. The fee is negotiated on a case-by-case basis, which is no different than any other intellectual property such as movies, music, books, or software.

If a customer is unable or unwilling to pay the prevailing rate, then no access will be granted.

The argument that Elsevier uses unpaid academic labor and therefore should fall under some other system is a red herring. Authors signed over their copyright to Elsevier, and like any other copyright holder Elsevier can license its property toward any legal purpose that advances its business interests.

TehCorwiz• 7 years ago

It's not unpaid academic labor, it's actually exploitative labor. They charge the academics ~$3000 - 5000 to publish via any of their journals.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

If a customer is unable or unwilling to pay the prevailing rate, then no access will be granted.

Sure, but access can still be obtained. For free. So they can sod off.

Edit: Elsevier and the like are predatory scum. They bought top academic journals, and have increased prices dramatically in recent decades. They're bleeding out the industry, as they ride it down to irrelevance. Just as some have done with the newspaper industry.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

Elsevier attempted - successfully, for quite some time - to create a gate-keeping oligopoly by inserting it as a choke point into academic publishing while providing no real added value.

This isn't about copyright, because original authors are forced to pay-to-play.

In a genuine copyright market, creators are paid in exchange for exploitation of copyright.

If they have to pay up to sign over their rights, that's not a copyright issue - that's extortion.

amluto• 7 years ago

Authors signed over their copyright to Elsevier, and like any other copyright holder Elsevier can license its property toward any legal purpose that advances its business interests.

I have two counter arguments here:

1. Funding agencies should not permit this. If I were to fund public research, the results should be public under an appropriate license.

2. Something is very wrong with the system if authors are willing to do this without being paid. If Elsevier paid the author $3k, that would be another story. (And possibly unethical.)

lacker• 7 years ago

The steel man for the Elsevier side is that nobody is forcing scientists to submit content to Elsevier journals or to read Elsevier journals. It’s a product that they create, so they have the right to price it as they see fit.

If Elsevier was really providing no value, why don’t scientists simply submit their work elsewhere? Clearly scientists and universities don’t really care about open access. If it was that important to them, they would just stop submitting content to non-open-access journals. The truth is that scientists care more about prestige than about open access. Elsevier puts a lot of work into making their journals prestigious, and scientists want that.

braythwayt• 7 years ago

It's not "prestige." Framing it that way makes it sound like Elsevier is in the vanity business, and academics are vain.

In actual fact, Elsevier is a gatekeeper to obtaining funding and making a living in research. Elsevier is rent-collecting, not selling an intangible feeling.

mirimir2• 7 years ago

That's exactly backwards.

Elsevier didn't create the high-prestige journals. They were originally published by universities and not-for-profit academic societies. And became prestigious over time, in one way or another.

Elsevier just bought them, and has been raising prices and bleeding them out.

a3_nm4• 7 years ago

If Elsevier was really providing no value, why don’t scientists simply submit their work elsewhere? Clearly scientists and universities don’t really care about open access. If it was that important to them, they would just stop submitting content to non-open-access journals.

The problem is coordination: everyone would like to stop, there would be a huge collective benefit if everyone stopped, but the first ones who stop will be penalized, so no one wants to be among the first.

Elsevier puts a lot of work into making their journals prestigious

This gives the impression that the journals are prestigious thanks to Elsevier. In fact, what makes the journals prestigious is the hard work of paper authors and reviewers over the last decades, none of which were paid by Elsevier.

ghostpepper• 7 years ago

I can't believe I've never heard of this expression.

dredmorbius3• 7 years ago

It's somewhat recent:

https://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/steelmanning/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-hig...

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man

brighter2morrow2• 7 years ago

My Steelman for Elsevier: they coordinate the peer review (giving your work more legitimacy), the marketing, and the distribution of your work. We all take Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud for granted but actually keeping a searchable and relevant archive of your work on place forever is also a fairly involved process.

ikonoklast• 7 years ago

Suicide, quite simply.

NelsonMinar• 7 years ago

Wanted: Sci-Hub for the LA Times.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

It would help with their BS about "this content is not available due to GDPR"

Though to be honest they're not an essential news source, so nothing of value is lost

bookofjoe2• 7 years ago

Included in Apple News+ FWIW

nyolfen• 7 years ago

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

gumby3• 7 years ago

This is excellent!

Elsevier could have started by extorting smaller, less powerful institutions but foolishly went after a university they need more than it needs them.

azernik• 7 years ago

Those smaller, less powerful institutions haven't dared to confront Elsevier in the way UC has. Since Elsevier represents the status quo, its opponents are on the offensive and can self-select. They tend to be either big institutions (UC) or collectives (several Europe-wide or EU-state-wide programs) big enough to stand toe-to-toe with the publishers.

apo2• 7 years ago

The model Elsevier operates on is under attack from a number of sides. In addition to UC, there is Plan S:

The plan requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state-funded research organisations and institutions to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all by 2021.[4] The "S" stands for "shock".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

The plan is backed by a wide range of European groups.

Elsevier may have a right to license its content as it sees fit, but the market as turned against its business model. The company now must decide whether to go down fighting or acknowledge the inevitable.

An of course, there's the ever present Sci-Hub, which presents a comprehensive selection of research papers far better than Elsevier ever did - and at no cost to the reader.

a1369209993• 7 years ago

Elsevier may have a right to license its content as it sees fit

Elsevier doesn't have content of it's own. It takes others' content (without paying them a dime in most - if not all - cases), maybe runs it through spellcheck, slaps a legal threat and price tag on it, and milks it for as much protection money as it can. Elsevier is the very model of modern major copyright troll.

mayank• 7 years ago

I can assure you that Elsevier does not run articles through a spellcheck.

wpietri• 7 years ago

Exactly. Their business added significant value back when paper was the primary medium. With the rise of the Internet, their value-add was significantly decreased, but they somehow decided the right thing was to double down on being a rentier and extract way more money.

I have zero sympathy for them. As they say on Wall Street, "Bulls make money, bears make money. But pigs get slaughtered." They've had 20 years to find new ways to deliver value and it doesn't seem like they've bothered. At this rate they'll be out of business soon, and I'll enjoy it thoroughly.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

People give Elsevier (and other publishers) their content, unfortunately...

cybert00th2• 7 years ago

UC is determined to operate under an alternative model, in which researchers pay to have their papers published but not for subscriptions.

Yep, slowly but surely OpenAccess is beginning to take hold.

The UK publisher I work for has had a couple projects going for a few years now, looking into ways to rejig their revenue stream.

HeavenFox• 7 years ago

Every time I read about the incredibly exploitative scientific publishing industry, I can’t help but think: can we just make scientific papers not copyrightable?

Researchers and their institutions don’t benefit from the copyright protection; they barely make any money from their work.

Sure, someone can take your work and claim it as their own, but we already handle them as plagiarism rather than copyright infringement.

Currently all the works by the federal government are not subject to copyright, and many are scholarly work by NASA, Congressional Research Service, etc, and we never hear problem about it.

It is also not that far fetched. Copyright protects expression of ideas rather than ideas themselves, and I would argue for most papers, the expression is the less interesting part of it.

godelski• 7 years ago

In addition to what you said, I want to remind everyone that a significant portion of money that is used to fund research at universities (and other institutions) is from the government.

xiii14083• 7 years ago

At least with most DOE-funded research, we're required to retain the copyright to the official "release" copy of papers. This allows us to redistribute the official paper ourselves.

Even if you don't retain the copyright to the camera-ready version of your paper, you can just redistribute a preprint version that is almost identical (on arXiv and/or your website).

refurb2• 7 years ago

Not sure why you'd want to start making scientific papers non-copyrightable.

The easiest solution is just have scientists publish in open-access journals. Easy right? Nope, they are judged by the impact of their papers and it's higher in better quality journals.

That's the value these journals offer - exclusivity.

Scientists and universities could solve this issue immediately. Scientists publish in open-access journals and universities stop judging based on the journals "impact factor". However, neither one wants to do that.

JudgeWapner• 7 years ago

Because there is no reason they should be, so the decision can be handled at the legal level and not be as subject to the influence of the journals. They would have one chance to fight it before it was cemented into law.

TaylorAlexander9• 7 years ago

I honestly feel like intellectual property is harmful in almost every field I look at. It concentrates wealth and slows innovation (the opposite of what IP proponents claim). I voluntarily waive copyright protection for most of my work, but I’d ideally see the dissolution of the concept more broadly. Our government protects these laws which I see as unjust, and some change to that would be beneficial I believe.

api• 7 years ago

What I've seen in tech is that a patent is a straw asset to make the bean counters feel more comfortable. The value of non-capital-intensive tech companies is almost entirely ephemeral. Even for capital intensive ones most of the value is usually not in the physical capital but in the brand, ideas, collective employee knowledge, and customer relationships. A patent looks like a physical asset on the books so it makes accountants and investors sleep better even if it doesn't actually mean much of anything.

It'll probably fade away for the most part once a new generation that is comfortable with the dematerialization of value takes high leadership positions.

edanm• 7 years ago

I honestly feel like intellectual property is harmful in almost every field I look at. It concentrates wealth and slows innovation (the opposite of what IP proponents claim).

Do you have any reference/proof for that? At least the part about slowing innovation?

btrettel4• 7 years ago

There are few open access journals in my field, and the ones that will publish open access charge absurdly high fees for it. I have a spreadsheet for my field: $2000 to $3140 per article, average $2690. I tried to negotiate with one smaller and more specialized journal in my field on the fee without any luck. I've also tried to find journals willing to take my paper without copyright transfer, as if commonly done for US government employees, but few journals seem willing to do that without the law requiring it.

My solution at the moment: Publish only in conferences that don't require you to transfer copyright so I can distribute my paper open access without paying anything. Yes, the peer review, if there is any, is less rigorous, but my experience suggests that peer review typically offers only shallow critiques of my work. Peer review doesn't need to work that way, but that's how it is in practice at the moment. I think review is valuable, but this makes getting good reviews my responsibility, not a publishing venue's.

This solution also precludes me from working in most tenure-track academic positions, but I believe those positions are a bad deal anyway, so I'm not too worried. Government research positions seem usually okay with publishing mainly in conferences.

If there are any other issues with this scheme, I'm interested in hearing about them.

I'm against subsidizing open access publication as that seems to basically be a subsidy for publishers and not researchers. That would maintain the absurdly high open access feeds. Instead, let's make the journals compete on price, and they'll have to compete against free (e.g., Arxiv), so hopefully this would drive the prices down to a reasonable level. I'm fine with paying publishers if they actually provide a service commensurate with what they charge. The issue is that they don't right now.

patall2• 7 years ago

Interesting that you did not succeed negotiating. We had a case where our open-access fund would only help out if the fee was $2000 maximum. We communicated that to the journal and they obliged without further comment. (Though this was after review and that journal really wanted our paper as it was obvious that we would raise their impact factor). I agree that $2000 still seems like a lot of money for an online-only document that journal is not doing anything for aside a little adjusting of the final pdf + paying the editor.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

While not 100% what you mentioned, in the Netherlands authors are allowed to freely share (semi-)government-funded however they please, after (I believe) six months. The universities now take care of that for you, if you're an author: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care

mkl• 7 years ago

I doubt you could come up with a workable definition of "scientific paper" to decide what is or isn't copyrightable.

rsa4046• 7 years ago

"they barely make any money from their work." Researchers make zero direct money from publications. Yes, they are paid a stipend or salary to publish results, but by their University or Institute, not by Elsevier. I've published dozens of papers over my career. I have no direct access to any of them, save Sci-Hub or "authors' copies" I've saved. Of course, I could always pay the fee, ranging from $40-$110 on up , for a copy I would still be unable to legally distribute. Elsevier, Springer, et al., are the true pirates here. Its way past time this business model died the death it deserves.

woofie11• 7 years ago

Go UC! I wish my alma had a similar backbone.

Tomte• 7 years ago

Elsevier still hasn't dared to cut off the German Universities, or have there been developments I've missed?

Might get interesting now.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

Yes they have: https://www.projekt-deal.de/elsevier-news/

mch82• 7 years ago

The key to all this is that for a person to get a PhD or grants they usually need to publish papers. Self-publishing often isn’t recognized, so expensive journals thrive. Maybe that is slowly changing...

otherme123• 7 years ago

Usually publishing fees are not the problem. The problem is reading papers is expensive if you're not using Scihub.

In fact, publishing in an open journal (e.g. Plos) cost about twice as much as an equivalent closed journal, but it's the model that everybody except Elsevier wants.

When you get a (public) grant, some of the money is reserved for publishing costs. It's outrageus that public money is used to research and publish but then the public and other researchers cannot access for free that content.

The Elsevier bussiness model is just perfect, they just sit on their desk routing papers from authors to other authors for peer review, and create a PDF. This "work" costs about $1.000. After that, downloading that PDF costs another $20-30, but the original author receives $0.

Just imagine that applied to regular books: the author pay to publish. The publisher charges $30 for the PDF. The author never sees a dime.

notafraudster• 7 years ago

I am an academic at a UC who publishes in Elsevier journals. I support this. I don't want copyright for anything I work on. I also work in a field where patent/IP stuff would not be relevant, so I view all of my work as public domain as far as I am concerned. With my code I either do CC0 or MIT licenses.

I have had to publish in journals that are not open access -- mostly I just make pre-prints available to anyone who wants them and encourage my students to use sci-hub if they need to find something we don't subscribe to.

driverdan• 7 years ago

I have had to publish in journals that are not open access

Why is that?

kurthr• 7 years ago

It's your job... publish or perish. It was especially true more than 5 years ago. Most academics have been working 20years or more.

xiii14083• 7 years ago

Career progress in academia is mostly based on publications in top-tier journals in your field. If those journals aren't open access, you're required to publish in closed access journals if you want to (1) get a Ph.D., (2) get tenure, etc.

icelancer• 7 years ago

Because academia is a run by a bunch of cronyist elitists who care about impact factor more than they care about science.

tingletech7• 7 years ago

do you put your author's final version in https://escholarship.org ?

Do you ever use https://oapolicy.universityofcalifornia.edu/ ? (it's only open to senate faculty right now, be we are rolling it out for all ~240k UC employees)

(disclosure, I'm the nominal tech lead for these)

olliej3• 7 years ago

Elsevier requires that authors do not do that - they can only provide copies of their papers in response to requests.

dproblem3• 7 years ago

Your university commercialization office will disagree. Check with them. From what I understand, it is illegal to release your code in CC0 or MIT unless you have taken permission from the commercialization office (Some universities allow GPL without explicit permission). Have you checked your contract ? Your work is not yours if it has any value. The value belongs to the university (mostly) - which also means you have no incentive to work on valuable stuff.

I think Elsevier is least of UCs problems. It's a distraction from the real ones.

gisely• 7 years ago

Grad student at Berkeley. The commercialization office only takes an interest if your work is high profile enough and has enough commercialization potential. Plenty of UC researchers release CC0 or MIT license code without issue.

Elsevier may be only one of many problems for the UC community, but that doesn’t mean it’s a distraction—- millions have been wasted every year subsidizing their profits. And Elsevier’s rent seeking business model is a problem for more than just the UCs. Hopefully this decision will end up being Elsevier’s death knell.

sitkack3• 7 years ago

As enabled by Bayh–Dole Act [0]. Reversing this law would put publicly funded research back into the hands and minds of the public. This is the very law that creates a perverse incentive for universities to operate as for profit corporations, even with public dollars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

ljosa• 7 years ago

As a grad student at UCSB, it only took a single email to get formal permission to release all my code under the BSD license.

tingletech7• 7 years ago

FWIW, UC's open source guidelines https://security.ucop.edu/resources/open-source-software-lic...

tstactplsignore• 7 years ago

Grad student at Berkeley for 3+ years. I've never heard of anyone mention or discuss this before among many people constantly publishing reasonably valuable code under open source licenses.

breck• 7 years ago

Awesome, thank you for doing that!

dan-robertson• 7 years ago

Is this the first time Elsevier has cut off a major group of universities? In all the similar past occasions I know about, Elsevier would threaten to cut off access but not flow through, out of the kindness of their hearts and for the good of academia (or rather for fear that the universities might discover they don’t get much value out of Elsevier)

One thing Elsevier builds their strategy on is bundling: that to get the journals a university really wants, they also have to subscribe to lots they don’t want. This would mean for Elsevier that they could keep charging high prices until all disciplines don’t care about them. A university can’t say “well all our mathematicians just use the arxiv and email so we don’t want any mathematics journals” and have this work.

Another common theme is universities joining together into larger groups to negotiate a deal together. But this means individual universities can’t really choose to not subscribe to any Elsevier journals (because others in the group want to subscribe), so often they still get what many inside consider a bad deal.

aj74• 7 years ago

Sounds like cable TV.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

No, although it has indeed threatened to do so and then did not do it often in the past, in July 2018 they cut off several institutions in Germany: https://www.projekt-deal.de/elsevier-news/

Similar things have happened in a few other European countries.

mmastrac• 7 years ago

in the words of Dennis J. Ventry, a law professor at UC Davis who is vice chair of the academic senate’s committee on library and scholarly communication. He says the publisher’s last offer would have increased UC costs by 80% over three years, “hardly cost neutrality.”
Elsevier says its proposal would have allowed a fivefold increase in the number of UC articles it published under open access — from about 350 now to 1,750 — while increasing the overall bill to UC by no more than annual inflation

One of these two parties is clearly misrepresenting this cost increase.

ant6n• 7 years ago

At least one party...

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

Usually, when Elsevier talks about constant costs, they're talking about cost per article. At the same time, they pressure libraries into buying subscriptions in bulk, bundling less widely recognised journals with the big names, allowing them to charge more while claiming to keep the cost-per-article low.

DominikPeters• 7 years ago

Here is my guess at the UC calculations. UC currently pays $11m/yr. For this price, UC wants to get all its 5000 papers/yr as open access, but Elsevier only offers to give them 1750 papers/yr for this price. Elsewhere in the article Elsevier states that the normal open access fees for 5000 papers are $15m, so $15m/5000 = $3000/paper. So UC could take Elsevier's proposal and get 1750 papers (+ read access) for $11m, and pay $3000 for each of the remaining 3250 papers, for a total of $21m. With inflation, $21m is about an 80% increase over $11m.

xvilka2• 7 years ago

UC should consider using open platforms for publishing, like MIT's PubPub[1]. In fact, so much was discussed already, current publishing model (aside of the publishers) is a bad fit for modern science. We need better collaboration, interactivity, and reproducibility. See discussion[2] about this a few years ago. And a number of followups[3][4][5].

[1] https://www.pubpub.org/

[2] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi...

[3] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/27/gitwikxiv-follow-up-di...

[4] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/22/gitwikxiv-follow-up-an...

[5] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-...

tingletech7• 7 years ago

My group at UC provides https://escholarship.org -- a 20+ year old open platform for publishing

xvilka2• 7 years ago

PubPub is an example of the next generation publishing platform. It provides much more than plain publishing. And it is open source [1]. Good example of the similar, but commercial platform is Authorea[2].

[1] https://github.com/pubpub

[2] https://www.authorea.com/

bsder2• 7 years ago

UC is big enough they could actually start their own journal.

tingletech7• 7 years ago

several open access journals publish on eScholarship https://escholarship.org/journals

rsfern5• 7 years ago

Do you have any pointers to great communities on pubpub? I’ve explored a bit and it seems like a really great idea, but I’m not sure how to find the most robust communities on there...

isTravis• 7 years ago

PubPub folk here - our landing page is pretty much 6 months past its shelf life. A rework that helps people find relevant communities is in the pipeline. In the meantime - we have a simple Explore page[1]. Some of my favorite communities are the newly launched Harvard Data Science Review[2], The Journal of Design and Science[3], _Cursor[4], and the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy[5].

We're also encouraged by a handful of communities that are experimenting with new formats of pre-publication review and training such as: Collective Wisdom[6], EFPT Psychotherapy Guidebook[7], and Data Feminism[8].

At a more meta-level, the challenge here is that this ecosystem is overwhelmingly complex. The business-models, culture, and technical infrastructure are all unhealthy and self-reinforcing. There's no single platform that can fix this - it needs a political campaign in parallel with a social movement in parallel with some really good tech infrastructure. The US healthcare challenge is a good parallel in a lot of ways. Both are going to need new economic and governance models. At the risk of straying too far from the original question, PubPub's parent - the Knowledge Futures Group[9] - is working to push on all of these fronts. Feel free to reach out if this is the kind of thing you care about!

[1] https://www.pubpub.org/explore

[2] https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu

[3] https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu

[4] https://cursor.pubpub.org

[5] https://stanford-jblp.pubpub.org

[6] https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/collectivewisdom

[7] https://epg.pubpub.org

[8] https://bookbook.pubpub.org/data-feminism

[9] https://kfg.mit.edu

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

When you are on a burning platform some advice - shooting at boats fleeing the fire won't put the flames out.

filleokus• 7 years ago

I’ve always thought that a more reasonable model for academic publishing would be to disconnect the availability of the content from the peer review / “publishing”.

Couldn’t the PDF’s be hosted in the open, in a repository similar to arXiv, and then be “published”. Being published would then just basically mean that your paper gets tagged in the repository as “Published in Journal of X”, almost like a Twitter verification mark but more granular [0].

Some publishing fees would remain, and pay for the curation and costs associated with the peer review.

[0]: Of course the journal could still be compiled and published separately as well.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

Sure, and those are usually referred to as "overlay journals". They exist, but the thing that has been keeping the entire system in place now is how existing journals have a reputation upon which the academic career evaluation process is built. That allows publishers to charge ridiculous amounts of money, so they're quite keen on the current situation.

More here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...

tanakachen2• 7 years ago

It will be ok, as students and faculty know they can simply use Sci-Hub.

jupp0r• 7 years ago

We know we can provide access to everything through one mechanism or another

Translation: let’s see how scihub works out for people. Good luck getting them back after they became used to it.

KhoomeiK• 7 years ago

For those who haven't used it previously, you can use https://sci-hub.tw/ to bypass paywalls on almost any scientific paper

buboard3• 7 years ago

I am writing a review article these days which requires skimming through many many articles and this situation really is infuriating. What the hell is wrong with scientists today that they accept this situation? Why aren't all papers in 2019 hosted as HTML pages (the very thing for which HTML was invented) but instead hidden behind paywalls, behind a PDF file? Why can't i use annotations / search / crossreferences the way i use any website? Why do i have to end up copying-the title of the paper, googling the name of it and downloading another pdf, instead of clicking on an HREF link? Why am i forced to use godawful tools like Mendeley (brought to you by Elsevier now) to conform to ancient citation formats which were invented for (paper) libraries. Someone needs to pass a law that invalidates the copyrights of all publicly funded works, so people other than google scholar can have access to the world's scientific output and build proper services on top of it. And yeah, i 'm sure Elsevier, that pretentious club of high horses will be replaced in a day, by a digital peer-supported "uber for reviews". But first academics will have to remove the stick of elitism that is up their arse.

olliej3• 7 years ago

To clarify, Elsevier is unhappy that they aren't allowed to profit off of other peoples work.

1. It costs money to submit to Nature, Cell, Science, etc

2. Reviewers for journals are not paid

3. It then costs money to read the published papers

4. The journals are filled with ads

Literally the entire thing is profit for Elsevier, they are paid by the people who do the original work, they don't pay for any of the vetting and review that Elsevier claims you're paying for, and then you have to pay to read the published papers. And get through all of the ads.

Elsevier is a company that steals from the public.

jszymborski3• 7 years ago

I totally agree with your overall point, but I'd be remiss not to mention that these journals originally were paper-only and mailed to institutions & profs (and Xeroxed ad infinum). This did involve a cost, but surely nothing like the million dollar agreements unis are signing with multiple publishing houses.

Nowadays, publishers still put out paper versions, but their worth does indeed revolve around scientist giving them material for them to build a catalogue of copyrighted material.

I look forward to their fall.

olliej3• 7 years ago

The modern paper versions are also filled with very expensive ads - the only part of this that is not profitable is the review stage, but that’s just because it doesn’t produce revenue - which they manage by not paying reviewers

neonate• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/m7cTp

jasonhansel• 7 years ago

Now all that Elsevier has to do is eliminate piracy! Just like how the RIAA eliminated piracy, and we are all still willing to pay 99 cents for a new song on iTunes. (sarcasm)

aj74• 7 years ago

Actually that’s a great idea.

brighter2morrow2• 7 years ago

I prefer to buy music legally. Am I alone? I don't want to have to worry about legal processes when I could just spend a buck to listen to that little diddy stuck in my head.

Havoc• 7 years ago

The journals are gonna lose this fight.

Academics are one of the few groups that can afford to be idealists.

pixelbash• 7 years ago

Traditionally, the publishers accept papers for publication for free but charge steep subscription fees

To my knowledge (academic family and partner in NZ) this is false, publishers charge for both publication _and_ reading in general.

patrick54155• 7 years ago

I think this must depend on your field. In mine, it’s generally free to publish, unless you want color figures or go over the page limit.

twic• 7 years ago

This reminds me of the time when all papers in some journals had this boilerplate at the end:

The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payments. This article must hereby be marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 U.S.C. §1734 solely to indicate this fact. [1]

[1] https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/01/09/history-as-ca...

patall2• 7 years ago

I never understood why university libraries are not making the journals themselves instead of having them done by companies and paying for the subscription. Every university would have like 5 or 6 journals and pay everything for those and all the scientific articles would be free. I mean elife does it and it is great.

geezerjay• 7 years ago

Some universities require their researchers to publish and follow reference journals, the majority of which has been managed/hijacked by for-profit editors. As researchers are forced to meet publishing quotas, there's a negative feedback loop that forces research groups to have no alternative other than following and publishing on these journals.

readme• 7 years ago

It wouldn't cost that much to just self publish the articles on the Internet. This is literally the whole reason for the Internet.

trombonechamp• 7 years ago

eLife doesn't do that anymore: https://submit.elifesciences.org/html/elife_author_instructi...

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

The problem is not starting new journals, the problem is having researchers submit their work there. And the problem with that is that the name/reputation of existing journals are currently used as a proxy to judge the quality of applicants for e.g. tenure tracks. As long as that's not changed, researchers are incentivised to submit their work to the traditional, "reputable" journals.

(Disclaimer: I'm part of a project that aims to provide an alternative measure of quality.)

Nemo_bis• 7 years ago

They do: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Library_published_journals

viburnum• 7 years ago

Academic publishing is a weird way to evaluate worker performance.

deepsun• 7 years ago

Where are Stanford, Harward, Caltech and other, reportedly progressive universities stand on that issue?

8note• 7 years ago

Is there value in a blockchain based academic journal?

have it be well distributed, and only let universities submit new articles if they prove themselves doing replication studies against other universities' submissions

frenchy• 7 years ago

Possibly. There's rougly two problems here:

- distributing research: blockchain is useless here. Things like SciHub already solve this problem on a practical level currently. I used SciHub regularly through my undergrad because it was so much easier to use.

- tracking the "notability" of research. A blockchain might be useful here, but I think you'll have a hard time unseating the existing journals.

Vinnl17• 7 years ago

There have been many, many initiatives based on this thought. However, in my opinion they don't quite hit the mark.

The problem blockchain solves is wanting to store data, making sure that it is not tampered with, but without a single party you can trust.

That's not the problem of Open Access though. Everybody does trust Elsevier not to intentionally tamper with scholarly articles, and they have no reason to. The problem is the oligopoly they and a couple of other publishers have, and the ridiculous prices they charge as a result. Those aren't just solved by adding another failed player; you need to remove the reason the oligopoly can continue to exist. Blockchains do not do that.

_bxg12• 7 years ago

Can someone explain why an alternative hasn't popped up for these universally-hated publishers? What's so hard about hosting a bunch of documents?

rsfern5• 7 years ago

The problem isn’t document hosting, it’s that the journals serve as a proxy for research quality, and everyone wants to publish in journals that have high (perceived and/or actual) impact. To effect real change the editors and prominent authors will need to leave, like when Machine Learning was forked into JMLR

_bxg12• 7 years ago

So the world's most prestigious universities who have a problem with the status quo band together and lend their own credibility to a new platform that they run together. Cut out the middle-man.

Ice_cream_suit• 7 years ago

"What kept the two sides apart was not merely the difference in approaches, but the question of fees. UC paid $11 million for Elsevier subscriptions last year — about 25% of its overall subscription budget — while its researchers spent an estimated $1 million more on publication fees on papers subject to open access. The university proposed a new deal under which publication fees and subscriptions would be rolled together for a single sum in a model known as “read and publish.”"

dariosalvi782• 7 years ago

Not to mention that journals employ armies of unpaid editors and reviewers. If Karl Marx were alive, he would have proy chosen this as the perfect example of how capitalism exploits the masses.

raveenb• 7 years ago

yes, this is the right way to go. public money is used to research and the public doesn't have access to the results is odd. ArXiv is the way to go at this time.

dariosalvi782• 7 years ago

Not to mention that journals employ armies of unpaid editors and reviewers. If Karl Marx were alive, he would have probably chosen this as the perfect example of how capitalism exploits the masses.

meuk• 7 years ago

I don't understand the problem, and the article doesn't really help. If I understand correctly, universities pay a fee to Elsevier to access papers. They also submit their published papers to Elsevier. And (this is where I'm not sure anymore) they have to pay a fee to make their work freely accessible?

Then why don't they just pay for the subscription, but don't submit anything? Or upload a freely accessible pre-print version like many people do?

stebann• 7 years ago

Wow, seems like Elsevier move was really stupid. I hope many more join against this business model. Go UC!

tempodox• 7 years ago

Who gives a rodent's backside what elsevier wants? Just don't feed that parasite any more, and it will die on its own.

Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals

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