[rauhallinen]

Some rants from the foxhole.

American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you.

Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions.

Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this.

To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!)

However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality.

Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it.

Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on.

Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians.

[0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/

[1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset

[2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-...

[3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...

[Vivtek]

I've recently resumed research I initially started with Indiana University (and stopped for life reasons). I've been out of academia since 1995.

Back then, I had the resources of Indiana University for support. Today, lacking institutional affiliation, I couldn't do research at all - the typical price per paper is $35 from publishers, which is on average something like $2 per page. And why not? They don't have competitors for any given paper, and papers are not fungible.

I'm not independently (or even dependently) wealthy, so I can only do this research using the shadow archives. And the irony of the situation is that the access I get through shadow archives is far, far better than what I had at Indiana University in 1995, where I had to physically go to the library and hope nobody had checked out their copy of a given book, and where I paid 10 cents a page for Xerox copies. (I recently went through my files and found every single article there in PDF online - and burned all the 10-cent pages I'd copied in the 90's. It was ... weird.)

Knuth's right (well, of course; he's Don Knuth, what did I expect?) - the commercial academic publishing industry is holding us all back.