Germany's Leading Technical University Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions

http://www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier

by fpp • 14 years ago

350 84 14 years ago

ma.tum.de

TomAnthony• 14 years ago

Background and perspective:

Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals. Its archives contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240 million.

The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model, which includes "paywalls" and (in their opinion) excessively high subscription charges.

Some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as $14,000.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

masklinn• 14 years ago

SV-POW has a number of posts on the subject of open access in general[0] and elsevier in particular[1].

[0] http://svpow.com/category/open-access/

[1] http://svpow.com/category/stinkin-mammals/stinkin-publishers...

diminish• 14 years ago

it is not about only universities who may pay for subscription somehow; independent scientists must be able to have full access to scientific publications for free, long term. otherwise, paywalls and closed software will make a global human science impossible going forward to 21st century.

hack_edu4• 14 years ago

> The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model

The only way to win the war is through convincing the librarians and administrators who cut the checks for an institution's subscription. They're who drive prices.

scott_s• 14 years ago

Not necessarily. The academics are the ones who provide both the product and the labor.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

But they are only going to cut checks for journals that the departments are asking for. The more demand for a particular journal, the harder it is for the library to not cut that check.

cjbprime• 14 years ago

Just the mathematics department, no?

lamnk• 14 years ago

This concerns only the math faculty, not the entire university.

sswezey• 14 years ago

And for those not familiar with the German university system, each department of a university is a lot more autonomous than departments in the US. They sometimes have different admissions, different libraries, different policies, etc.

davidacoder• 14 years ago

The title on HN is incorrect. Only the mathematics department is canceling their subscriptions, not the whole university.

debacle• 14 years ago

I think this is a great step. Publications are an outdated business model and they can't and shouldn't survive at their current (in my opinion egregious) costs.

ktizo• 14 years ago

Might only be the maths department, but Elsevier is sitting on a whole lot of loose snow right now and this is yet another snowball picking up speed somewhere further up the mountain.

hack_edu4• 14 years ago

Its worth pointing out that Elsevier also controls the whole line of Lexis Nexis products. Academic publishing, especially journal subscriptions and research databases, is one of those most entrenched industries there can be. It might not be as fashionable as hating on Elsevier but Gale, ProQuest, ACS, CSA and company make a hell of a lot of money through exclusive contracts with smaller publishers. Any new entrances to the industry are locked out from all valuable content or choked before they can even get going.

This is all at the expense of libraries and universities, and by proxy, your tax dollars and tuition. The industry is in need of massive disruption, has been for a decade now, but wrestling their IP seems an impossible feat.

draz• 14 years ago

I thought PLOS (http://www.plosone.org) was created to be a disruptive agent

hack_edu4• 14 years ago

I'm unfamiliar, are they a business or just a platform? As much as I'd prefer it all be open, the only way to send a message is to work in their sphere. Contracts between publishers and libraries exist in the conference rooms, decided by committees. No librarian or administrator will be convinced without face time a salesman who can convince them to dump their past decades of loyalty. How can a librarian, one trained in maintaining and preserving access to materials, trust that a new and free platform will be around for years? The publishing houses have been around for centuries, literally.

Somebody needs to come along and start by making the little, obvious things right. Their next goal is to avoid acquisition long enough to make a difference. Every so often a promising business comes along, only to be bought out by the big guys and slowly dismantled (see SerialsSolutions).

Also, science and math journals are only an aspect of journal publishing, albeit the most pricey of subjects of which to build a collection. These subjects have always been the first to lean towards open access but they stand in distinction from the rest of a library's collection.

darksaga• 14 years ago

Great point. I had a friend who worked as a salesmen at Thomson West when they still owned Thomson Learning which published all their academic materials. To say the industry is entrenched is an understatement. My friend told me once a publisher was in with a university, there was virtually no way other publishers could get in there. Even the professors had little or no say who they could buy their books from.

It's a few steps removed from organized crime.

mturmon• 14 years ago

That's weird to hear. Lots of professors use their own textbooks in their undergrad and (especially) graduate classes (e.g., Yaser Abu-Mostafa uses his own textbook for http://www.work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html).

Also, there are certain canonical texts that are used almost universally across all universities during a certain time frame (say, the CLR algorithms book, or the Cover and Thomas information theory book).

thespin2• 14 years ago

Yes. I think some of the other publishers are more egregious than Elsevier. Everything is bundled together as you say and access is monopolised that way.

But things have to start somewhere. Maybe it's only with Elsevier and maybe it with Maths faculty and only with the journals they publish in. But the whole system is so despicable in light of today's technology and publishing costs that once it's brought to light how much better things could be, I think change will come fairly quick.

Didn't at least one library try threatening a publisher that the univerity's faculty would no longer publish in that publisher's journals if fees were not made reasonable?

Is that a viable strategy?

robertwalsh0• 14 years ago

It's great to see mathematicians taking up, Tim Gowers's rallying cry and have the courage to step away from Elsevier. The academic publishing industry for periodicals is going the way of the journal industry.

Apps like Scholastica (http://scholasticahq.com/) allow anyone to start their own peer reviewed journal and manage its content. Very soon, they'll even be able to publish open access (http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-access-p...). Full disclosure: I'm working on this application.

GoodIntentions3• 14 years ago

atm, we seem to be crushing their webserver. If you're feeling kind, don't click.

The page copy is just two sentences, one in German, one in English - essentially:

"due to unsustainable pricing, the math department has canceled Elsevier subs"

growt• 14 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...

fpp3• 14 years ago

their admins seemed to have blocked access now:

"...Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013..."

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nu3pKnb...

diggan• 14 years ago

Also:

>@http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)

fpp3• 14 years ago

sorry for that - hopefully such an unusual event also provides positive feedback to your directors for their decision.

coolowencool• 14 years ago

Related article published about a month ago in the Guardian about frustrations with journal publishing models: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blo...

keithvan• 14 years ago

The HN link is giving a 403 -- anyone have an alternative link?

amouat• 14 years ago

There really isn't anything to see except:

"Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013."

pbhjpbhj• 14 years ago

See http://coralcdn.org/ - they provided a caching mechanism that I've been using for what seems like a decade or so - you add .nyud.net to the domain part of the URL and you get their cached copy. Hence, this provides a short term mirror of the OP's link:

http://www.ma.tum.de.nyud.net/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier

amolsarva• 14 years ago

These things are super expensive. The value they provide is a network effect --> prestige from history + high quality peers reviewing the work that's published

The elite universities can "make this" themselves -- they did something like this in philosophy (led out of Michigan) when I was in grad school:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_Imprint

The reality is these days that most/all papers are shared online in these PDF exchanges long before 'real' publication. And as a result the journal articles hardly matter as much.

I would guess this is most true for stuff with less lab work and more "pencil" work like math or logic or philosophy.

auggierose• 14 years ago

I got my Ph.D. from this university. I am proud of you, TUM!

user24• 14 years ago

> Low Bandwith Version of this site due to large amount of requests:

> Aufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen hat das Direktorium des Zentrums Mathematik beschlossen, alle abonnierten Elsevier-Zeitschriften ab 2013 abzubestellen.

> Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013.

> @http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)

stfu• 14 years ago

Somewhat odd that "Germany's leading Technical University" isn't able to handle a few Hackernews visitors showing up

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lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

I remember Reading HN now had a million accounts (btw can anyone confirm?)

if that's true then top story at the beginning of the US day could generate a lot of requests, and if the university has a plain cms that is updated once a week by the departmental secretary then it's pretty unlikely they have seen much traffic, ever.

To be honest I would be interested if pg could publish what kind of click through rate the various links generate - could even be a counter next to the story.

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Cass• 14 years ago

I studied medicine at the TUM and its sister university, the LMU (The schools teach their med students together for the first two years). Their site would reliably go down every third Friday evening, when the anatomy exam results were posted - meaning they couldn't even handle the minor and expected spike of 600 students downloading a smallish PDF.

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pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

I too thought there were only a few (thousand) HNers, but yesterday I learned how wrong I was.

Yesterday I submitted a link (an StackOverflow question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3943556) that got 107 up-votes on HN, but the number of unique visitors went from below 5000 to 25000 (in other words, 20000 unique (based on IP) visitors clicked on my link).

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random1235• 14 years ago

Well ... actually we can. The web server configuration has been changed to handle this amount of requests and it is working pretty good right now. :) We did not really anticipate that much traffic, as it is far more than what we usually see. So the web server was not configured for such a situation and ran out of workers to handle the requests.

Creating a static site at first was just a much faster and safer solution, especially as the original site did not contain anything apart from the two lines of text.

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rb2k_• 14 years ago

German universities are financed by the states. You probably won't find many good operations people or programmers working for that little money.

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brazzy2• 14 years ago

Go, TUM!

The first time I've actually felt proud of my alma mater :)

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random1235• 14 years ago

The link is working again now, but has been replaced with a low bandwidth version. (The original version just contained additional images.) The amount of request generated by this site was unfortunately a bit too much for the web server.

(I'm one of the server admins ... and have been in fear of a real DDOS attack during the last couple of minutes. ;) )

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GoodIntentions3• 14 years ago

If it isn't asking too much, would you mind telling HN about it? what kind of traffic you saw, what hardware/software platform you have in place?

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random1235• 14 years ago

The link got about 13000 hits so far, thereof about 5000 hits with a referrer value containing "ycombinator". But as only 3481 hits occured during the 3 days before it was posted on HN, I guess that actually about 9000 hits are due to HN.

I think the hardware platform is not really interesting, as the DDOS was only caused by the worker pool of Apache2 being too small. Each hit of the site creates about 30 additional request for css,js,png and gif files. So 9000 hits in 3h mean something like 270.000 requests in 3h. Apparently this was too much for 50 workers.

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aheilbut• 14 years ago

I wonder what happens to access to archives of electronic journals when subscriptions are cancelled -- with paper journals, at least they're still in the library.

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andre3k1• 14 years ago

The market for the distribution of peer-reviewed academic journals fascinates me. It is ripe for disruption.

More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles. Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose.

There is a burgeoning movement toward open access journals. More info on the subject available here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

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bgilroy26• 14 years ago

Is really ripe for disruption? I would think that if it was very ripe that the arXiv would serve a broader purpose than it currently does.

The problem is a social one -- academics want to post their work to well respected journals, because the respect is the currency that their future career advancement runs on.

A market is ripe for disruption when every stakeholder except the entrenched competition wants the product to be different AND that difference is readily available through low-cost solutions.

Typically the new, low-cost solutions that haven't already been tried, are only recently available through new technology.

Given the maturity of the market and the social nature of the business, (even considering how squeaky clean arXiv's brand is versus Paypal's) I think the same people who aren't very excited about putting arXiv papers on their CV are those who would never dream of taking their money out of a big, traditional bank.

Even though all of their money is digital, etc.

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its_so_on• 14 years ago

I'd be interested to know how much money they're saving. On its face, it seems like ONE university in every rich country should pay for 'all there is' (within reason). Or, at least the leading journals in each field, and some of the other resources posters have mentioned above.

Like it or not, America spends a huge amount on research as published in journals, and if a country has no subscriptions to it at all they're simply cut off from that. I don't have a horse in this race: I would be very happy if academic publishing were completely different. However, realistically, these things should be 'somewhere' in a country the size (and wealth) of Germany, available for consumption by its interested scholars.

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zerostar076• 14 years ago

Another point worth noting is that many (should be all) papers are readily available (legally) as preprint PDFs (which is usually almost the same as the final version), if the creator bothers to place a preprint online, and most academics would be happy to email you a copy of their work should you ask anyway. So it's not like publishers are forcing someone in a walled garden, it's just that academics still prefer to be in there. So, these attacks on Elsevier are shooting the messenger, but it seems it's the only way to get to the sender here.

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Tobu2• 14 years ago

I've seen the occasional clueless student tell me they didn't think it was legal for them to upload their own papers (they might have signed some contracts with illegal clauses to that effect for all I know). Counting on the authors to unbreak academic publishing works if you already know what you want and can deal with a bit of hassle searching and e-mailing, but it doesn't work at all for skimming or looking at complete proceedings.

I suspect the publishers are fighting a bit harder against competing archives. For example, because they are sometimes involved in organising conferences, they can entrench themselves by offering an archive to the participants (giving a small sponsorship in exchange for the understanding the organisers won't offer the same archive), locking out the rest.

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thespin2• 14 years ago

Mathematics Departments are going to be the heros in lowering the costs to access scholarly journals, in all disciplines.

It has to start somewhere.

Low cost, online education, which is a popular topic here on HN, is a neat idea. But to really make it worthwhile, the student needs full access to all academic journals.

For that to happen, the paywalls have to come down.

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zerostar076• 14 years ago

I agree, besides maths and physics have arxiv. The difficult part is forcing the life sciences people out of their antiquated ways of thinking.

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planetguy• 14 years ago

So what's the endgame here? Drive Elsevier out of business? Watch as its hundreds of journals (some great, some not so great) vanish? What happens to the zillions of papers in existence in those journals, currently available from their website with a few clicks? (What does happen to the copyright holdings of an entity that goes out of business?)

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m_for_monkey• 14 years ago

Many would gladly pay a reasonable price.

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zerostar076• 14 years ago

The authors of the papers are also copyright holders.I believe this is worth pointing out: Elsevier is not offering some irreplaceable service by having a web server. Their value mostly lies in setting up the journal review teams and process, and making sure they live up to their standards.

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xamuel2• 14 years ago

Negative. To publish in an Elsevier journal you must sign away your copyright. The authors do NOT hold copyright. And that's part of why the situation is so ridiculous and urgently needs to be fixed.

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xamuel2• 14 years ago

The journals would not vanish if the publisher went bankrupt. Their back issues would become accessible through Portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/), which exists precisely for that purpose.

The endgame is ensuring that everyone has access to scientific research. Whether or not the publishers continue to be in business is not relevant, as long as we are able to wrest away the literature which they are holding hostage.

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Tobu2• 14 years ago

If Reed Elsevier went out of business (very unlikely because it doesn't just do academic publishing, it also does publishing in other small but lucrative niches), it would make room for some great open-access journals. The same people and institutions who write the current journals would still be involved, their libraries would work more efficiently at a fraction of the cost, and there would be at least one universally available public library indexing and archiving the open-access work.

The digital library wouldn't vanish even if Elsevier filed for bankruptcy. But even imagining some James Bond villain destroying all copies, the journals would be digitised again from library copies, possibly something like the Google Books initiative. The libraries wouldn't fall twice for a partnership with a cartel creating newly exclusive rights.

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MetalMASK• 14 years ago

High-quality Open-access Peer-reviewed journal that takes less than a year to get review and published is already in place (e.g., http://www.josis.org/index.php/josis). As a matter of fact, the academic community loves it.

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vga256• 14 years ago

Fucking A. Twas about time. Also read Scott Aaronson's thoughts on this issue in general.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=912

Also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring

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bborud5• 14 years ago

Good. Very good.

Something needs to be done about scientific publishing and the excessively high tolls on knowledge. The publishing industry may claim that it performs some vital role, but I find it extremely unlikely that this is the optimal way of reviewing and disseminating knowledge.

I think we are morally obliged to do a lot better.

To me the paywalls around scientific publishing is a lot more than a question of principles -- it may end up impacting my life. Five months ago I was diagnosed with kidney failure. If left untreated, this will kill me. What I do the next months may have a big impact on my quality of life.

When your doctor tells you that you have a condition that will kill you, I would assume that most of you would try to educate yourselves on the topic. This includes reading recent papers.

Well, good luck with that. For absolutely every aspect that I have looked into I keep bumping my head into paywalls. Some articles are only available if I pay a lot of money -- and I have no way of knowing up front if the article will be worth it. Kidney disease is a narrow enough subject for publications to be very expensive.

I am continually asked what the hell I need access to these articles for since I am not a doctor. Imagine that: people acquiring knowledge because they need it and not because the publishing industry needs the money...

I think it is time academia started taking knowledge seriously.

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czr80• 14 years ago

Were the papers you were trying to read in Elsevier journals? They do offer an option for people with medical conditions to get free access to papers they would like to see - don't know if that helps you, but perhaps good to know.

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bborud5• 14 years ago

I don't remember anymore. What I do remember is that the publication seemed narrow in scope, was published monthly and cost several thousand USD per year.

I also tried the old trick of searching for "unlikely phrases" in the abstract to look for accidental publication online, but didn't find anything.

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greboun• 14 years ago

Hi, I read your comment and the first thing I want to say is that I am sorry for your condition. I would like to ask you if you are willing to tell your story on a site on open access that we have set up to show that the need for open access is not only for academics. The site is whoneedsaccess.org. We have another site called @ccess at access.okfn.org with info and blogs. Please read the info on the site and if you want to tell your story you can contact me at tomolijhoek@malariastichting.nl thnx

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bborud5• 14 years ago

Thanks for your concern! I'd be happy to help any way I can.

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zerostar076• 14 years ago

People take it for granted that all academics have access to these paywalls. My institute recently cancelled subscriptions to major Nature journals due to financial constrains, forcing us to end up with personal subscriptions.

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bborud5• 14 years ago

People also take for granted that only people at universities (or affiliated with certain classes of institutions) have any use for these publications.

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imeikas• 14 years ago

You may try to contact the authors in the papers directly. In addition to getting the paper you might even get to discuss the issues directly with the authors.

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bborud5• 14 years ago

At this stage I am mostly trying to get an overview and trying to find out what I need to know. This means reading a few books to give me the background knowledge I know and it means surveying what is being published to identify topics I need to explore. This usually means _skimming_ a lot of material to determine if it is worth my time right now. If I need to contact the author, that slows the process down a lot.

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kragen• 14 years ago

Yes, there is a tradition in academic publishing of sending several unbound copies of the printed article to the original author, which they will then send to people who write to them requesting them; these copies are called "offprints". Your mileage requesting copies of articles from surviving authors might vary, but mine has generally been very good.

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eleitl• 14 years ago

Just the Mathematics department, not the whole university.

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Germany's Leading Technical University Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions

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