I am surprised that it took so long after the invention of the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, these journals used to play a significant role in distributing research papers in physical paper form. It made sense then. There was no way to copy a 10 page research paper from Germany to China with a few finger taps at low cost. But with the advent of the Internet and its pervasiveness, it no longer makes sense to rely on a costly media based on physical printing, distribution, and centralized organizations milking money out of it.
I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!
It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.
That's because, despite being called "publishers", publishing is not the main function academic publishers like Elsevier are being used for. Their main function is identifying and recognising the most valued academics in each field. So obviously academics are going to pay whatever amount of public money is needed and available to get that stamp of approval, because otherwise they'll be out of a job in a very competitive job market.
This is not a technological problem, but a coordination one. Each of the individual researchers, faculty and grant committees are being perfectly rational in supporting status quo, they are just stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium [1].
To quote Yudkowsky for a possible solution to this metaproblem "That’s why we have ... there doesn’t seem to be a word in your language for the timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment… hold on, this cultural translator isn’t making any sense. “Kickstarter”? You have the key concept, but you use it mainly for making video games?" [2]
Because as techies we fail to recognize that some things are the way they are not for lack of a better alternative, but because of entrenched interests.
I am still amazed that the record industry managed to shut down what was likely to be the next iteration of internet: P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.
This has nothing to do with the physical form of the media. Of course everything is digital and has been for decades.
The root of the problem is that to make an academic career you have to publish is one of those journals. When you apply for a new position, the first thing they look for is how many papers you have published in high profile journals.
You shouldn't conflate the negative nature of for-profit scholarly publishing with the use of paper as a medium.
In my own field, virtually all of our journals are produced by non-profit learned societies instead of companies like Elsevier or Springer. But thank goodness that these journals are still published on paper and collected in my library alongside the production of PDFs. Any work I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs. Plus, printed journals in library holdings allow one to spend hours browsing through research without any of the distractions that electronics bring.
I definitely appreciate having PDFs of articles, but paper still has its place.
I think the Nobel prize is not what drives most researchers. Rather, tenure track and grant application committees should only consider open access research. However, obviously their main concern is finding the "best" applicants, not changing the scholarly publishing ecosystem, and doing so would help the former but arguably hinder the latter.
Love this. GenBank had a similar tactic - got Journals where people published sequencing papers to say they won't publish any results that haven't been uploaded to GenBank. Created an anchor resource that led to computational biologists having world class shared datasets and evolving the field much faster.
Unless you think you are really likely to win one its still going to be important for your more immediate-term career to publish in high impact journals, of which most aren't open access (ex. Nature/Science).
The more democratic you are as a nation, the more time elected officials spend thinking about ways to improve the lives of ordinary people (not just those in power).
I've got to say, political debates in Scandinavia have nothing to do with what you see in the US. People are debating the real problems (education, housing, healthcare, etc.) instead of focusing on inter-party rivalries.
For example, Ireland is currently number 6 on the Democracy Index, but way down at number 19 on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Correspondingly, Singapore is high at number 7 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, but down at 69 on the Democracy Index. I would suggest that you should look at both lists before deciding where to move.
What if in stead of a giant stack of hard to nav papers...
...what if in stead each discipline would aim to publish a book????!
Each chapter would highlight the most important components of which the full version would be.... another book?
tier 2 of the books would simply refer to papers to provide even more additional reading.
The whole thing would keep it self up to date using version control and the closer to the front page of tier 1 the more extremely critical the review would be. An as-large-as-possible crowd sourced budget should be dedicated to reviewing and rewriting each of the book.
Each would be freely available online but every self respecting nerd would want a copy on his bookshelves.
A strict less is more policy would keep the books portable.
Technicality of the tier 1 books should be limited as much as possible in order to fit in a little encyclopedia of terms and methods.
By exposing the most important parts of a field to an audience as large as possible scientists would finally get the recognition they deserve which in turn would stimulate allocation of public funds.
I had trouble getting to Sci-Hub and LibGen at my uni (this was about a month ago) and I don't know if it was my uni's firewall or the recent court ruling smack-downs in earlier this month[0] and last November[1]. I just checked from home and I found https://sci-hub.tw/ and http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ work okay for me so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Nope, it's Sweden :) Much is still unclear though, as these negotiations were done on the level of the universities, so even academic librarians don't fully know what this might mean to e.g. their budgets, and whether they can invest the money saved in open research infrastructure.
Knowledge will eventually be communicated by adding new information to a universal network which represents all known truths ... the act of ~publishing~ will be to add new nodes and/or edges ... this network will get launched by seeding it from culling all existing published papers however once it goes live the very idea of publishing research to any journal will become obsolete and counterproductive
Some more details for those of us who would like to know who “Sweden” is in these circumstances. This kind of decisions are usually not taken on the level of the national government.
long ago, while working at a science software company, I was casually told by a co-worker that in Japan, science publishing is run by their mafia.. The scientists I saw were so busy, so intent and so disciplined, that no management topics were ever discussed. So I went to a US business school library and looked up some management-side statistics about profit-per-employee.. and saw that the science companies of the time had less than half the number of employees, typically, with large revenue.
Some number of people are just predatory over profits, whatever the level of intelligence, legality and social status. Whatever the origins of this science conglomorate, you can bet that over the years, a crude extraction of profits via control of players, emerged.
As with other online transfers, actually publishing/reading material has become the easy part and a whole pile of issues with security cropped up instead. (You don’t even really need a publisher to help with notoriety, if your stuff already shows up easily on Google.)
I wish that Elsevier was being paid to solve a bunch of hard security problems but they seem to just be an expensive paywall. For example, do they provide a block chain or other trusted time stamp solution to make it easy to prove that a publication was “first” (no matter who decides to steal a file and copy/paste their own name as author instead)? I’d really like to see those kinds of things become mainstream defaults for publishing. Right now the main downside to just throwing files on random web sites is that they don’t typically have those security elements, making it easy to steal and hard to authenticate what you’re seeing.
Journals do usually list the submission date, I believe. Otherwise, submitting your work to a preprint server can prove that you were first (assuming you trust the preprint server), although in some fields, journal publication is still the only thing recognised as planting the pole.
You'd only need blockchain if you don't trust the preprint servers, but I don't think there's reason not to.
I worked in the scientific publishing industry. Not directly for Elsevier, but we had dealings with them too.
Many people here view Elsevier as this evil nebulous entity. Leaving "evil" aside, like every large business, Elsevier is composed to people, some of them very smart.
Which is to say Elsevier has seen this "open access" movement coming for a better part of a decade now, just like everyone else. As far back as 2011 the industry has been inventing ways to make "open access" as profitable as the current system (ideally, even more). Green open access, gold open access, diamond and hybrid; moving walls, paywalls, article processing charges…
Having seen the sausage made, I guess I'm a little cynical about "open access". I see it devoid of the idealistic "stick it to the man" connotations, and more like another feel-good buzzword scam.
Many companies fell despite having many smart people working for them.
I would say every semi-big company probably has many smart people working for them. That does not prevent them from doing very stupid/bad/evil things, and sometimes disappearing.
The fact that they anticipated the move does not mean anything regarding their future, just like Kodak with digital photography for instance.
Taken differently, maybe you see a tsunami coming from very far away and are able to even calculate how strong it is and when it will come, but that does not mean you will be able to save your house in the seafront ;)
It’s irritating when a journal article from 1933 is behind a £42.50 paywall. <idealism>Information, especially science, should be free and open to the public.</idealism>
[+] [-] foo101|7 years ago|reply
I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!
It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
Edit: The argument in more detail: https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-scholarly-publishing-d...
[+] [-] kilotaras|7 years ago|reply
To quote Yudkowsky for a possible solution to this metaproblem "That’s why we have ... there doesn’t seem to be a word in your language for the timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment… hold on, this cultural translator isn’t making any sense. “Kickstarter”? You have the key concept, but you use it mainly for making video games?" [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x5ASTMPKPowLKpLpZ/moloch-s-t...
[+] [-] Iv|7 years ago|reply
I am still amazed that the record industry managed to shut down what was likely to be the next iteration of internet: P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.
[+] [-] Ma8ee|7 years ago|reply
The root of the problem is that to make an academic career you have to publish is one of those journals. When you apply for a new position, the first thing they look for is how many papers you have published in high profile journals.
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|7 years ago|reply
In my own field, virtually all of our journals are produced by non-profit learned societies instead of companies like Elsevier or Springer. But thank goodness that these journals are still published on paper and collected in my library alongside the production of PDFs. Any work I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs. Plus, printed journals in library holdings allow one to spend hours browsing through research without any of the distractions that electronics bring.
I definitely appreciate having PDFs of articles, but paper still has its place.
[+] [-] Bromskloss|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aurizon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
It's arguable that stuff isn't actually in the public record if access requires payments.
[+] [-] PeterisP|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s0rce|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] digitalmaster|7 years ago|reply
Been considering moving to one of the countries high on the democracy index to work/code and pay taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
[+] [-] halflings|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
For example, Ireland is currently number 6 on the Democracy Index, but way down at number 19 on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Correspondingly, Singapore is high at number 7 on the Corruption Perceptions Index, but down at 69 on the Democracy Index. I would suggest that you should look at both lists before deciding where to move.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unicornporn|7 years ago|reply
Go here: http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-fo...
[+] [-] igravious|7 years ago|reply
Superb news though, couldn't happen to a nicer company.
[+] [-] dang|7 years ago|reply
All: it's helpful to email [email protected] in cases like this because then we see it, and can act, quickly.
[+] [-] kqr|7 years ago|reply
Legality aside, given how high the usability of Sci-Hub is these days, I have no doubt in my mind about who got the short end of this stick...
[+] [-] hokus|7 years ago|reply
What if in stead of a giant stack of hard to nav papers...
...what if in stead each discipline would aim to publish a book????!
Each chapter would highlight the most important components of which the full version would be.... another book?
tier 2 of the books would simply refer to papers to provide even more additional reading.
The whole thing would keep it self up to date using version control and the closer to the front page of tier 1 the more extremely critical the review would be. An as-large-as-possible crowd sourced budget should be dedicated to reviewing and rewriting each of the book.
Each would be freely available online but every self respecting nerd would want a copy on his bookshelves.
A strict less is more policy would keep the books portable.
Technicality of the tier 1 books should be limited as much as possible in order to fit in a little encyclopedia of terms and methods.
By exposing the most important parts of a field to an audience as large as possible scientists would finally get the recognition they deserve which in turn would stimulate allocation of public funds.
A truly absurd idea, there, I said so myself.
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igravious|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-pirate-bay-for-science-secu...
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/23/sci_hubs_become_ina...
[+] [-] lokedhs|7 years ago|reply
Neither that page nor any of the linked pages mention sci-hub. I can see why they don't, but I guess all researchers know about it already.
[+] [-] gforge|7 years ago|reply
Tack, ha en bra dag!
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtomicOrbital|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ma8ee|7 years ago|reply
http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-fo...
[+] [-] progre|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|7 years ago|reply
Some number of people are just predatory over profits, whatever the level of intelligence, legality and social status. Whatever the origins of this science conglomorate, you can bet that over the years, a crude extraction of profits via control of players, emerged.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] makecheck|7 years ago|reply
I wish that Elsevier was being paid to solve a bunch of hard security problems but they seem to just be an expensive paywall. For example, do they provide a block chain or other trusted time stamp solution to make it easy to prove that a publication was “first” (no matter who decides to steal a file and copy/paste their own name as author instead)? I’d really like to see those kinds of things become mainstream defaults for publishing. Right now the main downside to just throwing files on random web sites is that they don’t typically have those security elements, making it easy to steal and hard to authenticate what you’re seeing.
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
You'd only need blockchain if you don't trust the preprint servers, but I don't think there's reason not to.
[+] [-] Radim|7 years ago|reply
Many people here view Elsevier as this evil nebulous entity. Leaving "evil" aside, like every large business, Elsevier is composed to people, some of them very smart.
Which is to say Elsevier has seen this "open access" movement coming for a better part of a decade now, just like everyone else. As far back as 2011 the industry has been inventing ways to make "open access" as profitable as the current system (ideally, even more). Green open access, gold open access, diamond and hybrid; moving walls, paywalls, article processing charges…
Having seen the sausage made, I guess I'm a little cynical about "open access". I see it devoid of the idealistic "stick it to the man" connotations, and more like another feel-good buzzword scam.
[+] [-] petepete|7 years ago|reply
If that's what they were doing, nothing could better demonstrate that they missed the point entirely and misunderstand the word 'open'.
[+] [-] mijamo|7 years ago|reply
I would say every semi-big company probably has many smart people working for them. That does not prevent them from doing very stupid/bad/evil things, and sometimes disappearing.
The fact that they anticipated the move does not mean anything regarding their future, just like Kodak with digital photography for instance.
Taken differently, maybe you see a tsunami coming from very far away and are able to even calculate how strong it is and when it will come, but that does not mean you will be able to save your house in the seafront ;)
[+] [-] rjsw|7 years ago|reply
A lot earlier than that, I was discussing the options for online publishing with the then CTO of Elsevier in 1987.
[+] [-] black6|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevespang|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]