5 ms·

What? no. Elsevier does not make any science, they just put a stamp on it and sell it. They would be more likely to make you pay $40/y for using their linux in

by return0 11y ago

What? no. Elsevier does not make any science, they just put a stamp on it and sell it. They would be more likely to make you pay $40/y for using their linux in someone else's server. Because you have to have "elsevier linux" to get grants these days.

ikeboy 11y ago
They bought the rights from the author (each side gets consideration: author gets free publication, Elsevier gets copyright signed over to them). That publication costs them, they have expenses, etc. Why is it fundamentally different from buying servers?
- return0 11y ago
  > They bought the rights No elsevier does not pay authors, in fact: > author gets free publication If author wants his paper to be open access (something that is often required by their funding grants), they have to pay a high publication fee. Other journals charge paper submission (for consideration) fees as well. But the error in your argument is at the start. You assume that the market is free and scientists have an alternative to publishing in elsevier. If scientists want their work public, there are tons of free options, preprint archives etc. The problem is that funding sources require high impact (i.e. elsevier) publications to give you grants. There is a self-perpetuating cycle between funding sources <-> (elsevier, NPG etc.; talking about biology). This is a racket. PS. How it is different from buying servers? It would be comparable if , say, the US army had a requirement that all soldiers must do a yearly internship in amazon (paid by the army), thus amazon didnt need to pay any salaries, yet could charge as much as the competitors. It would all be legal, but grossly immoral.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    We're not talking about open access here. I don't see why you brought it in. From what I understand, most journals that charge for access offer free publication. Even if fees are charged, they don't cover costs. >This is a racket. Maybe if they were bribing grant committees to require Elsevier publication. If those committees decide that of their own free will, then they think the benefits of Elsevier are worth the costs. If they really were just extracting rent, I'd expect to see far higher margins, at least above 50%.
    - return0 11y ago
      > If those committees decide that of their own free will, then they think the benefits of Elsevier are worth the costs. We don't know what's happening here, but when elsevier holds the keys to funding scientists, they are not going to turn against them. Elsevier can "bribe" without money in this case. Counter example: the mathematicians' boycott of elsevier. They could pull it off because their career does not depend on it. A biologists' boycott? never happened. Elsevier can ask for all the money in the world and i don't care, the problem is that it's an abuse of copyright law to give them exclusive access without an alternative method for the public to see the results of publicly funded work. Why this kind of provision does not exist is not clear to me, but i suspect lobbying from publishers has played a role. While you can dismiss it as a 'greedy business', elsevier plays an institutional role here, and it holds that role purely by inertia. p.s. Yes , 30% is exorbitant profit, academia has different standards, and most scientists would prefer a non-profit.
      - ikeboy 11y ago
        >A biologists' boycott? never happened. There's PLOS biology. >Elsevier can ask for all the money in the world and i don't care, the problem is that it's an abuse of copyright law to give them exclusive access without an alternative method for the public to see the results of publicly funded work. As I've mentioned before, complaining about publically funded work misses the point. The funding only covered research, not publication. If you want it to be published, you need to pay the costs of that. CLaiming that you have rights to someone else's work (publication costs) because you paid for something else (research costs) is nonsense. You can require the government to pay for publication costs as well (i.e. publish in open access), and then the natural consequence is that the cost of each study goes up, and therefore less get funded. > most scientists would prefer a non-profit. Then set one up. If they can outcompete Elsevier, more power to them. But that doesn't justify illegally stealing from them.
        return0 11y ago
        > The funding only covered research, not publication Not true, many grants require publication. Any grant giving money to do research that doesnt require any results is fraud. > Then set one up. PLoS, frontiers, eLife, there are plenty and they are good, but until we can drag the critical mass of high-impact scientists into these open publishers, they will keep being underdogs. You need a systemic change here that will at once pull the good reviewers and good scientists to them, in other respects they are much better than elsevier in some technical respects. The problem is that academia is not the free market. The currency is 'prestige' and its proven very very hard to change attitudes without a) a generation dying or b) regulatory action or c) doing something illegal. It's regulations (specifically requiring high impact publications) that brought elsevier to become the arbiter of scientific importance after all. We either have to regulate paywalls out of academia completely, or find a way to replace the institutional role of publishing with something else. In any case, your 'this is free market' approach is wrong here i think. Academia is not a free market.
- dalke 11y ago
  As a minor objection to your analysis, some of the papers they distribute are by employees of the US government. There is no copyright for those papers, therefore Elsevier could not get anything signed over to time. Elsevier and all other journals charge the same price for access to these papers as they do for papers where the publisher controls the copyright. To a first approximation, that means the value of the copyright is not significant. It's a minor objection because there are few papers which are in the public domain. The publishers use contracts to prevent or limit redistribution. (I have wondered if a SciHub variant with only papers which are out of copyright or not under copyright would be viable, even on a US server. I invite someone else with money and lawyers to try it out.) Anyway, to get back to your AWS server scenerio, the parallelism doesn't work that way. In the print publication era, multiple organizations functioned as an archive for the material, including the institution library, various university libraries, and state libraries. I have gone to the local(ish) chemistry library and read publications from the 1960s without paying extra costs to read the article or make copies. I can just walk in as a member of the public and do that. However, it's more cost effective to centralize things at Elsevier (that savings to the library get passed along as profit to the publisher), Elsevier moved towards an electronic-only publication system mediated through user agreements instead of copyright, so the library cannot act as an archive, and that user agreement must extend to all users, including members of the public. (I have signed a paper to that effect, which lets me as a member of the public to access online publications but without the right to print them out or make copies.) In your AWS analogy, Elsevier/Amazon once distributed their software to anyone, and there were dozens of places willing to provide $5K/year to host those services for users of the local cloud, including anonymous hackers. Elsevier/Amazon decided to centralize, by only hosting new services on their machines rather than distribute the software. They also decided to require verified logins. So now our anonymous hacker is forced to either give up doing science, pay potentially $1,000s for legit access, or use subterfuge to do what was once inexpensive or even free, as part of a library's mission to support the public. But in real life AWS never distributed all of its code, so that others could provide AWS services, which is why your analogy doesn't really work as a metaphor for this issue.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    You can still go to a university and access papers for free. In fact, you can log on to their wifi anonymously, and often get access to those papers. I'm not sure why the past actions of a company as you describe would matter for current ethical questions? If Amazon had previously allowed anyone to use it for free as you describe, then upgraded and stopped allowing it, would it then be morally permissible to use hacked accounts or similar to do your computing with?

by return0 11y ago

ikeboy 11y ago

They bought the rights from the author (each side gets consideration: author gets free publication, Elsevier gets copyright signed over to them). That publication costs them, they have expenses, etc. Why is it fundamentally different from buying servers?

return0 11y ago
> They bought the rights No elsevier does not pay authors, in fact: > author gets free publication If author wants his paper to be open access (something that is often required by their funding grants), they have to pay a high publication fee. Other journals charge paper submission (for consideration) fees as well. But the error in your argument is at the start. You assume that the market is free and scientists have an alternative to publishing in elsevier. If scientists want their work public, there are tons of free options, preprint archives etc. The problem is that funding sources require high impact (i.e. elsevier) publications to give you grants. There is a self-perpetuating cycle between funding sources <-> (elsevier, NPG etc.; talking about biology). This is a racket. PS. How it is different from buying servers? It would be comparable if , say, the US army had a requirement that all soldiers must do a yearly internship in amazon (paid by the army), thus amazon didnt need to pay any salaries, yet could charge as much as the competitors. It would all be legal, but grossly immoral.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  We're not talking about open access here. I don't see why you brought it in. From what I understand, most journals that charge for access offer free publication. Even if fees are charged, they don't cover costs. >This is a racket. Maybe if they were bribing grant committees to require Elsevier publication. If those committees decide that of their own free will, then they think the benefits of Elsevier are worth the costs. If they really were just extracting rent, I'd expect to see far higher margins, at least above 50%.
  - return0 11y ago
    > If those committees decide that of their own free will, then they think the benefits of Elsevier are worth the costs. We don't know what's happening here, but when elsevier holds the keys to funding scientists, they are not going to turn against them. Elsevier can "bribe" without money in this case. Counter example: the mathematicians' boycott of elsevier. They could pull it off because their career does not depend on it. A biologists' boycott? never happened. Elsevier can ask for all the money in the world and i don't care, the problem is that it's an abuse of copyright law to give them exclusive access without an alternative method for the public to see the results of publicly funded work. Why this kind of provision does not exist is not clear to me, but i suspect lobbying from publishers has played a role. While you can dismiss it as a 'greedy business', elsevier plays an institutional role here, and it holds that role purely by inertia. p.s. Yes , 30% is exorbitant profit, academia has different standards, and most scientists would prefer a non-profit.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      >A biologists' boycott? never happened. There's PLOS biology. >Elsevier can ask for all the money in the world and i don't care, the problem is that it's an abuse of copyright law to give them exclusive access without an alternative method for the public to see the results of publicly funded work. As I've mentioned before, complaining about publically funded work misses the point. The funding only covered research, not publication. If you want it to be published, you need to pay the costs of that. CLaiming that you have rights to someone else's work (publication costs) because you paid for something else (research costs) is nonsense. You can require the government to pay for publication costs as well (i.e. publish in open access), and then the natural consequence is that the cost of each study goes up, and therefore less get funded. > most scientists would prefer a non-profit. Then set one up. If they can outcompete Elsevier, more power to them. But that doesn't justify illegally stealing from them.
      - return0 11y ago
        > The funding only covered research, not publication Not true, many grants require publication. Any grant giving money to do research that doesnt require any results is fraud. > Then set one up. PLoS, frontiers, eLife, there are plenty and they are good, but until we can drag the critical mass of high-impact scientists into these open publishers, they will keep being underdogs. You need a systemic change here that will at once pull the good reviewers and good scientists to them, in other respects they are much better than elsevier in some technical respects. The problem is that academia is not the free market. The currency is 'prestige' and its proven very very hard to change attitudes without a) a generation dying or b) regulatory action or c) doing something illegal. It's regulations (specifically requiring high impact publications) that brought elsevier to become the arbiter of scientific importance after all. We either have to regulate paywalls out of academia completely, or find a way to replace the institutional role of publishing with something else. In any case, your 'this is free market' approach is wrong here i think. Academia is not a free market.
dalke 11y ago
As a minor objection to your analysis, some of the papers they distribute are by employees of the US government. There is no copyright for those papers, therefore Elsevier could not get anything signed over to time. Elsevier and all other journals charge the same price for access to these papers as they do for papers where the publisher controls the copyright. To a first approximation, that means the value of the copyright is not significant. It's a minor objection because there are few papers which are in the public domain. The publishers use contracts to prevent or limit redistribution. (I have wondered if a SciHub variant with only papers which are out of copyright or not under copyright would be viable, even on a US server. I invite someone else with money and lawyers to try it out.) Anyway, to get back to your AWS server scenerio, the parallelism doesn't work that way. In the print publication era, multiple organizations functioned as an archive for the material, including the institution library, various university libraries, and state libraries. I have gone to the local(ish) chemistry library and read publications from the 1960s without paying extra costs to read the article or make copies. I can just walk in as a member of the public and do that. However, it's more cost effective to centralize things at Elsevier (that savings to the library get passed along as profit to the publisher), Elsevier moved towards an electronic-only publication system mediated through user agreements instead of copyright, so the library cannot act as an archive, and that user agreement must extend to all users, including members of the public. (I have signed a paper to that effect, which lets me as a member of the public to access online publications but without the right to print them out or make copies.) In your AWS analogy, Elsevier/Amazon once distributed their software to anyone, and there were dozens of places willing to provide $5K/year to host those services for users of the local cloud, including anonymous hackers. Elsevier/Amazon decided to centralize, by only hosting new services on their machines rather than distribute the software. They also decided to require verified logins. So now our anonymous hacker is forced to either give up doing science, pay potentially $1,000s for legit access, or use subterfuge to do what was once inexpensive or even free, as part of a library's mission to support the public. But in real life AWS never distributed all of its code, so that others could provide AWS services, which is why your analogy doesn't really work as a metaphor for this issue.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  You can still go to a university and access papers for free. In fact, you can log on to their wifi anonymously, and often get access to those papers. I'm not sure why the past actions of a company as you describe would matter for current ethical questions? If Amazon had previously allowed anyone to use it for free as you describe, then upgraded and stopped allowing it, would it then be morally permissible to use hacked accounts or similar to do your computing with?