3 ms·

> 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, bu

by 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.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    I didn't say they don't require publication, only that they aren't paying for it. Plenty of Elsevier titles offer open access for a fee now. And PLOS and co are putting pressure to reduce margins. I don't think it's bad enough that something illegal needs to be done to force it to fix itself. And I've asked before: if Elsevier slashed all their prices by 30%, would people be happy with it? If the answer is no, then they aren't only complaining about profit.
    - return0 11y ago
      Grants typically include publishing costs, it's very rare the scientist will pay out of pocket. And because grant agencies encourage high impact publications it's not small amounts. Ironically, grants that require open access while encouraging high-impact publication end up paying more, as high-impact journals charge more for open access. I agree that money is not the major issue, but the entrapment of useful information in closed systems and its decentralization. We have machine learning systems that could consume the vast amounts of data and come up with potentially life-saving results, but we don't have access to the data, because for 50+ years its been more and more locked in.
      - ikeboy 11y ago
        My understanding is that the publisher subsidizes publishing costs and makes it up on access charges. So if the grant didn't pay the cost to publish, the publisher will. I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much.
        cinquemb 11y ago
        >I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much. You're right, that's why places like sci-hub exist, and Elsevier et al dont seem to be winning this fight…

by return0 11y ago

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.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  I didn't say they don't require publication, only that they aren't paying for it. Plenty of Elsevier titles offer open access for a fee now. And PLOS and co are putting pressure to reduce margins. I don't think it's bad enough that something illegal needs to be done to force it to fix itself. And I've asked before: if Elsevier slashed all their prices by 30%, would people be happy with it? If the answer is no, then they aren't only complaining about profit.
  - return0 11y ago
    Grants typically include publishing costs, it's very rare the scientist will pay out of pocket. And because grant agencies encourage high impact publications it's not small amounts. Ironically, grants that require open access while encouraging high-impact publication end up paying more, as high-impact journals charge more for open access. I agree that money is not the major issue, but the entrapment of useful information in closed systems and its decentralization. We have machine learning systems that could consume the vast amounts of data and come up with potentially life-saving results, but we don't have access to the data, because for 50+ years its been more and more locked in.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      My understanding is that the publisher subsidizes publishing costs and makes it up on access charges. So if the grant didn't pay the cost to publish, the publisher will. I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much.
      - cinquemb 11y ago
        >I agree that it's a nice ideal to have everything open, but people need to realize that there are costs to doing so, and merely saying "I paid for it, therefore I have a right to read it" doesn't do much. You're right, that's why places like sci-hub exist, and Elsevier et al dont seem to be winning this fight…