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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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].
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...
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
[+] [-] notafraudster|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tingletech|6 years ago|reply
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)
Also related https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu
(disclosure, I'm the nominal tech lead for these)
[+] [-] breck|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|6 years ago|reply
Why is that?
[+] [-] dproblem|6 years ago|reply
I think Elsevier is least of UCs problems. It's a distraction from the real ones.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tingletech|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|6 years ago|reply
Dinosaurs die hard.
[+] [-] xiii1408|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apo|6 years ago|reply
> 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|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gumby|6 years ago|reply
Elsevier could have started by extorting smaller, less powerful institutions but foolishly went after a university they need more than it needs them.
[+] [-] HeavenFox|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] patall|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
(Disclaimer: I'm part of a project that aims to provide an alternative measure of quality.)
[+] [-] geezerjay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nemo_bis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trombonechamp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|6 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] DominikPeters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troymc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] executesorder66|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
[+] [-] pizza|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[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-...
[+] [-] tingletech|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsfern|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliej|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jszymborski|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] filleokus|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
Academics are one of the few groups that can afford to be idealists.
[+] [-] dan-robertson|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
Similar things have happened in a few other European countries.
[+] [-] aj7|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betterunix2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbob45|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xamuel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacker|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] apo|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonhansel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cybert00th|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jupp0r|6 years ago|reply
Translation: let’s see how scihub works out for people. Good luck getting them back after they became used to it.
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply