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Elsevier and others can go something themselves. Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwi
by leot 10y ago
Elsevier and others can go something themselves.
Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits. See, e.g., one of many such figures: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_graph.png http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap...
It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy", given that all of its contents were originally created and given away with the express goal of wide dissemination.
- finfet1 10y agoTotally agree. I have gone through academia and am now in industry; the other day I wanted to read and browse basic papers in IEEE Explore for basic knowledge on new topics. Since I am no longer a student, I am willing to pay money - as much as hundreds to get unlimited access. Instead, for hundreds, IEEE explore offers a measly ("generous") 25 downloads a month or some such non-sense It just seemed so miserly of them. We researchers had formerly given them pretty much free research to publish, and they turn their back on even legitimate paid avenues for us to get the papers. We are willing to pay; but where is the option? Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading. 25 paper cap includes browsing PDFs; you will easily hit that cap in a single day simply through browsing. IEEE and IEEE Explore can go something themselves. This is coming from a published IEEE author and academic researcher.
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- donlzx 10y agoAfter the IEEE $25 monthly service came out, I subscribed for three years until finally canceled it. Honestly most of the papers I downloaded were junks, the only reason I download them was to verify the available references. The paper quality declination plus publication quantity inflation are the main reasons in this "Sci-Hub" crisis.
- chris_wot 10y agoThis sounds like an increasingly commented on issue: there are now hundreds and hundreds of specialty journals, but quality is patchy. In fact, I think we may be seeing inherent problems coming to the fore now that journals are more focussed on profits: often there is publication bias towards certain topics; in other cases the bias is towards positive results and breakthroughs, with a lack of enthusiasm for publishing retractions or establishing reproducibility. One thing that always sticks in my craw is that the raw data is very rarely published for analysis. Many may disagree, but I think that by not publishing the raw data for experiments the temptation to commit academic fraud is very high. I often wonder about some of the more recent scandals whether it might have been picked up a lot faster had the data been more readily available. I also have noticed that many journals don't say who the reviewers are after publication. For instance, I was looking at body pyschotherapy the other day and came across something called biodynamic analysis, which appears to be a widely held and well respected view within the subdiscipline. I was amazed to discover that something called "grounding" was a serious concept that underpins this analysis, so I looked at the Wikipedia references and discovered that there was at least one journal citation to The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The article seems to be attempting to make a link between bloody viscosity and electrical grounding of humans to the earth! [1] Now there is another article that shows there is virtually no impact on the body from the same journal, so I started to wonder how this passed peer review. The answer is - I have no way of knowing as they don't make it clear what their review policies and procedures are, and they appear to charge authors to publish work. In other words - it's pseudoscience dressed up in credibility. And it is making a serious impact in the world of psychology! 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576907/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576907/
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- kefka 10y ago
- hanklazard 10y ago"Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading." Exactly. And without the monthly subscription plan (something I wasn't even aware of until this comment thread), the going rate seems to be around $30 per paper--rent-seeking to the point of highway robbery. One thing that these publishing companies could have done long ago was allow some sort of "free preview" of the full text or "full refund within 10 min" option to help deal with this problem. I have no idea how this would be done technically to prevent "pirating" but, as it is, the pay-per-paper system is completely disconnected from the way researchers browse papers.
- tzs 10y agoHave you taken a look at deepdyve.com? $40/month ($30/month if bought as an annual subscription) for unlimited online access to a ton of journals, including a bazillion from IEEE: https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers/ieee https://www.deepdyve.com/browse/publishers/ieee If you create an account but do not subscribe, you can view all the papers but only for 5 minutes each. You can then subscribe to read the ones you need more of, or purchase access to 5 papers for $20. The above is for online reading. If you need PDFs, you can purchase those but they are not cheap. They are usually what the publisher charges on the publisher's site less a 20% discount.
- Alphasite_ 10y agoI have no doubt other universities offer this, but see if you can join a Universities library, for access to the papers?
- 3pt14159 10y agoIf you live in a city with a University, like Toronto, check out getting a library card to their library system. It costs me $300 / year and it's unlimited research papers. The only downside is that it is retrievable in person only, so you kinda need to be either close to the University or keep a list of papers you need before you make the trek out.
- maaku 10y agoYou are paying $300/year for access to information that was given to the world freely, and sacrificing your time and effort to get it? Do you see the problem here?
- umanwizard 10y agoHe didn't claim there wasn't a problem, just gave practical advice for making the most of the unfair situation
- aab0 10y agoEven more practical advice: 'use Libgen'.
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- jcoffland 10y agoThe IEEE is such BS. I was a member but left because of all the SPAM. They continued to SPAM me for years after I left.
- jrjr 10y agoIEEE is not for Engineers, it's a Management Overlay.
- aswanson 10y agoI recognized what a scam IEEE was my first year of grad school. So many fees, sub-society fees, transaction fees...something themselves indeed. Many times over.
- chris_wot 10y agoHas anyone got a breakdown of actual costs incurred by Elsevier? Note I don't include marketing their journals, I mean a breakdown labour costs, rent for buildings (where the building are located) and other production costs. I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish. I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they charge. I, for one, have no sympathy for them.
- youngbullind 10y agoCompletely without source and no breakdown, but I read recently that their margins are in the 20-30% range.
- Blahah 10y agoIn 2014 Elsevier's profit margin was 34% http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/93138f3e-87d6-11e5-90de-f44762bf9896.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/93138f3e-87d6-11e5-90de-f44762bf98...
- philjohn 10y agoWonder what the margin on their e-journals are like, vs printed journals. They get the research papers for free, the editors don't get paid ... it's such a scam, and always has been.
- tomp 10y agoWell, they do need to employ a highly paid CEO... /s
- chinathrow 10y agoYeah and with that setup, 37% seams somehow very low. I wonder what accounting stunts they pull...
- Blahah 10y agoI've done a lot of work on tools that interface with the academic publishing infrastructure. Elsevier not only make a huge profit margin, but they operate at a staggering level of inefficiency. They are haemorrhaging money and producing precisely nothing of value, and still making profit for their investors hand over fist. Quite incredible.
- nailer 10y agoI don't understand academia (genuinely): Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc? Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?
- a_bonobo 10y agoYour career is based on how "good" the journals are that you publish in. If I publish a paper in Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, etc. then I can hand-pick my next position. The more glam-journals I publish in, the better my chances for tenure.
- oarsinsync 10y agoCan you cross-publish / self-publish as well?
- rspeer 10y agoIn practice, people often just put a "draft" of the paper on their personal website without telling their publisher. Papers in fancy journals are more prestigious, but the papers that get cited the most are the ones with full text freely available on the Web. So, when they can, scientists choose both. (The better way to do this is to support a publisher that's both high-quality and open-access and submit to their journal.)
- JupiterMoon 10y agoIt depends upon your field and your country but many journals require a copyright assignment. They also often require that the work has not been published elsewhere previously.
- Vespasian 10y agoIt depends on the venue. In my field of computer science (visual analytics / visualizations) at least some of the leading journals/conferences officially allow you to put a version of the paper on your website. Just today we submitted a paper where the copyright form explicitly mentions that.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI am with you, since pretty much any scientist would love to be cited by another's research, any scientist will send you a copy of their paper if you ask them for it. And since the creator of the work is willing to give it away to you for free, it cannot possibly be "piracy".
- nkurz 10y agoAnd since the creator of the work is willing to give it away to you for free, it cannot possibly be "piracy". My client (who will remain unnamed) insists that I advocate for his position: Just as a work-for-hire belongs to the party who paid the creator, surely it matters that the creator signed a contract with a publisher giving up rights to distribute the work in return for invaluable services? Are you implying that the creator retains some sort of "moral right" to distribute copies of the work to whomever despite the explicit stipulations of the contract?
- ChuckMcM 10y agoYou might ask your client to consider whether or not the contract the author signed was under duress when the contract was signed. It is well known that publishing in "impactful" journals is a pre-requisite for academic advancement and success, failing to sign that contract would do grave economic and reputational harm to the author. The journal, taking advantage of the pressure being applied by the author's employer, exploits that advantage to achieve an unearned and involuntarily given economic benefit at the cost of the author.
- nkurz 10y agoDuress? You might do better concentrating on the "freshness of a fine morning when you're young and the taste of food when you're hungry."[1] Duress is a tricky defense, as I think it typically requires that the threat of harm be illegal, and not just the workings of capitalism as it's designed.[2] Next you'll want to tell me that just because the free market price of an essential medicine is prohibitive, one government should be allowed to flaunt another government's lawfully issued patent just for the benefit of its citizens! Much as you might wish otherwise, in the eyes of the law there simply is no "clear bright line" between infringing on copyright and slaughtering a ship's crew at sea in pursuit of treasure to bury. [1] http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/upload/_FILE_1370804282.pdf http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/upload/_FILE_1370804282.pdf Apologies for the spurious copyright notice at the top. Clearly it's not under copyright, since the author died over 70 years ago! 73, in fact.[3] [2] http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/duress http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/duress [3] So as to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", in 1976 Congress passed a 47 year extension to the previous 28 year copyright term (for works that had not yet entered the public domain) giving them a total term of 75 years. Then in 1998 (shortly before the copyright for Mickey Mouse was set to expire[4]) it was realized that even greater progress could be obtained with a slightly longer term. To further promote said progress, the duration of copyright was retroactively extended to be the greater of 75 years since publication or 70 years after the death of the author. Unless it's a work of corporate authorship. Since corporations don't have a natural lifespan, it's only fair to extend the copyright on these works to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. In any case, it's clear that "Blackmask Online" couldn't hold any copyright, since all they did is format a public domain text into a PDF! [4] http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyright-law/ http://artlawjournal.com/mickey-mouse-keeps-changing-copyrig...
- onetwotree 10y agoThis is an interesting point: if the law allows rent-seeking, people will correct it by breaking the law, at enormous personal risk (for real, it's riskier than selling heroin in terms of prison time). Obviously, the best solution would be to change the law, but good luck with that, given the influence of corporate money.
- alexqgb 10y agoI'v got a hard time calling this piracy when the "owners" have next to nothing invested in the material's production, and provide even less in return to those who do. What Elsevier is doing is more like kidnapping.