6 ms·

UCLA can't walk out and Elsivier knows it. A University which lacks a library containing the currently published scholarship is going to have a really tough tim

UCLA can't walk out and Elsivier knows it. A University which lacks a library containing the currently published scholarship is going to have a really tough time attracting PhD students. How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? The UC System should work with other schools to mandate open publishing. The only way to fix this is by removing Elsevier's power.

shmel 8y ago
>>How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? Sci-hub?
lixtra 8y ago
Does UCLA filter scihub? A better solution to the closed access problem would be to only cite open access articles. Sometimes that would mean not citing the original article but some open access meta article that made the findings publicly accessible. I actually think it’s fair to not cite articles that you cannot reach with reasonable effort. It’s the authors choice to make it inaccessible.
- ansible 8y ago
  Moreover, it is my understanding that if there's a good paper you want to get, you can often just contact one of the authors and get sent a copy. It is slower and less convenient, but maybe not $10 million a year less convenient...
  - new299 8y ago
    People regularly don’t respond to those emails. For older publications it might be hard to even find the email. In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist. Spending money on automating that process, and you might put most journals out of business.
    - gerdesj 8y ago
      "In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist." I'm sure I saw a device called a scanner somewhere. It seemed to transcend the worlds of paper and electronics. I'm also from the UK and am old enough to remember life before "Brentrance" (newly minted term by me - meaning should be obvious) This issue of publication freedom is way more important or at least comparable, to Brexit in my opinion. I'm not too sure what the perfect knowledgebase would look like but it probably is not the current one. For me it might be something like a curated MediaWiki (the software behind WikiPedia) - for me the killer feature is that an article in a wiki is just text and a few formatting hints. Text is first, formatting and other distractions come second. I studied Civil Engineering in the UK around 1990ish. We had lots of closed off sources and refs (ISIS and others - from memory) - rubbish!
  - pfranz 8y ago
    I've heard of many scenarios where the author loses access to their own paper. After moving on from a project it's easy to leave stuff on a school's server or on some hard drive in a closet.
  - 4thaccount 8y ago
    I've asked several professors for scientific research and always got a paper back, although it was sometimes very slow.
- secabeen 8y ago
  > Does UCLA filter scihub? I work at another UC, and we don't filter Scihub in any way.
buboard 8y ago
this has barely anything to do with the lack of library access. The point is that if they refuse reviews emphatically it might reflect badly in future submissions they make to elsevier's journals.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? #icanhazpdf? It's perfectly good manners to ask a colleague for a reprint.
claudiawerner 8y ago
This is what's getting to me at the moment; I'm a student at a university, so I'm thankful to be getting a lot of the stuff I search for quickly available through my university (Shibboleth login etc.) but what I don't like is the fact that for anyone else, they literally can't see what I'm talking about. Before I was a student, I gave up trying to learn about my area of interest just because every single article was behind a paywall. Maybe it let me read the abstract and see a diagram. I may have fallen out of touch with what sci-hub offers, since I only ever use it to find books now (books which contain articles which one can't find outside the books) but the last time I used it, it didn't have many of the articles I wanted to see. I hate to think that there are others like me who want to get into diverse research only to be stumped at not even being able to read it. This problem seems to be larger in philosophy/Marxian economics/etc. in which you really do have to read the paper to get the argument, simply knowing the results provided isn't nearly enough, because the results often can't be condensed down to data.
ramraj07 8y ago
I doubt any PhD student would consider that as a potential drawback when choosing an institution. I did my phd in an institution with very minimal access to some of these publishers and while it was annoying I would not take it among the top 50 problems I had in my academic life. I can always request an ILL, or ask one of my friends in other universities if I wanted a paper badly. If however the paper is fairly replaceable as a citation I'd just get some other paper that's sufficient and cite that.
- gerdesj 8y ago
  "I doubt any PhD student would consider that as a potential drawback when choosing an institution." Absolutely. I would be rather unimpressed if someone studying to that level was unable to find alternative routes to the "source". It should be at worse a bit of a pain and at best helping to fix a sodding great travesty that has afflicted publication for decades.
  - exergy 8y ago
    You guys must exist in some alternative universe. In mechanical engineering, no access to journals is definitely a top 5 problem, not top 50. How do you guys do goose chase research if only one out of five paper titles that catch your interest are immediately available. Inter library loan is bullshit that takes at least one full day to appear. What do you do until then?
    - sterlind 8y ago
      Sci-hub. You use sci-hub. That's what I've been doing for years; I'm not affiliated with an institution so I can't afford subscriptions, and I need the articles so I can treat my illness. When the system's broken beyond repair and the stakes are high, there's no point playing by the rules. That's why sci-hub was founded in the first place.
      - exergy 8y ago
        That's exactly the thing though. My field is niche enough, and it's applied science anyway, meaning that even the seminal papers are missing from scihub, let alone more modern and less-cited research papers. And no way for me to upload my stash.
paulie_a 8y ago
On the flip side elsiver wouldn't be getting papers published from UCLA right? I don't know how that situation works. But UCLA is pretty big, so I would think they would be losing access to papers also.
stale2002 8y ago
> How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? With sites like sci-hub, of course! Pirating is basically never enforced against the downloaders. (It is more the uploaders that companies go after).
stenl 8y ago
Sweden, all of it, walked out in July and we’re doing fine. I doubt any PhD students avoid our institutions because of it, and we somehow manage to get the papers we need anyway. Asking on twitter is effective, or directly from authors. And there’s always scihub...
- guelo 8y ago
  Is scihub openly encouraged by faculty or librarians?
betterunix2 8y ago
"A University which lacks a library containing the currently published scholarship" When I was a PhD student I don't think I used the university's library to access a single paper. It is not at all hard to find papers on the Internet and the money paid for subscriptions is basically a waste. Even in fields where this is a shocking concept I suspect people would figure it out if they needed to do so. UCLA can and absolutely should walk out of the negotiations, and put Elsevier in their place (the dustbin of history). The academic publishing system that exists today is based on the premise that wide distribution of scientific writing is something that requires industrial equipment, and that is just not true these days. Elsevier's power is an illusion; they are part of an obsolete industry that future generations will have forgotten and they know it.

shmel 8y ago

>>How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? Sci-hub?

lixtra 8y ago

Does UCLA filter scihub? A better solution to the closed access problem would be to only cite open access articles. Sometimes that would mean not citing the original article but some open access meta article that made the findings publicly accessible. I actually think it’s fair to not cite articles that you cannot reach with reasonable effort. It’s the authors choice to make it inaccessible.

ansible 8y ago
Moreover, it is my understanding that if there's a good paper you want to get, you can often just contact one of the authors and get sent a copy. It is slower and less convenient, but maybe not $10 million a year less convenient...
- new299 8y ago
  People regularly don’t respond to those emails. For older publications it might be hard to even find the email. In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist. Spending money on automating that process, and you might put most journals out of business.
  - gerdesj 8y ago
    "In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist." I'm sure I saw a device called a scanner somewhere. It seemed to transcend the worlds of paper and electronics. I'm also from the UK and am old enough to remember life before "Brentrance" (newly minted term by me - meaning should be obvious) This issue of publication freedom is way more important or at least comparable, to Brexit in my opinion. I'm not too sure what the perfect knowledgebase would look like but it probably is not the current one. For me it might be something like a curated MediaWiki (the software behind WikiPedia) - for me the killer feature is that an article in a wiki is just text and a few formatting hints. Text is first, formatting and other distractions come second. I studied Civil Engineering in the UK around 1990ish. We had lots of closed off sources and refs (ISIS and others - from memory) - rubbish!
- pfranz 8y ago
  I've heard of many scenarios where the author loses access to their own paper. After moving on from a project it's easy to leave stuff on a school's server or on some hard drive in a closet.
- 4thaccount 8y ago
  I've asked several professors for scientific research and always got a paper back, although it was sometimes very slow.
secabeen 8y ago
> Does UCLA filter scihub? I work at another UC, and we don't filter Scihub in any way.

buboard 8y ago

this has barely anything to do with the lack of library access. The point is that if they refuse reviews emphatically it might reflect badly in future submissions they make to elsevier's journals.

HarryHirsch 8y ago

How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? #icanhazpdf? It's perfectly good manners to ask a colleague for a reprint.

claudiawerner 8y ago

This is what's getting to me at the moment; I'm a student at a university, so I'm thankful to be getting a lot of the stuff I search for quickly available through my university (Shibboleth login etc.) but what I don't like is the fact that for anyone else, they literally can't see what I'm talking about. Before I was a student, I gave up trying to learn about my area of interest just because every single article was behind a paywall. Maybe it let me read the abstract and see a diagram. I may have fallen out of touch with what sci-hub offers, since I only ever use it to find books now (books which contain articles which one can't find outside the books) but the last time I used it, it didn't have many of the articles I wanted to see. I hate to think that there are others like me who want to get into diverse research only to be stumped at not even being able to read it. This problem seems to be larger in philosophy/Marxian economics/etc. in which you really do have to read the paper to get the argument, simply knowing the results provided isn't nearly enough, because the results often can't be condensed down to data.

ramraj07 8y ago

I doubt any PhD student would consider that as a potential drawback when choosing an institution. I did my phd in an institution with very minimal access to some of these publishers and while it was annoying I would not take it among the top 50 problems I had in my academic life. I can always request an ILL, or ask one of my friends in other universities if I wanted a paper badly. If however the paper is fairly replaceable as a citation I'd just get some other paper that's sufficient and cite that.

gerdesj 8y ago
"I doubt any PhD student would consider that as a potential drawback when choosing an institution." Absolutely. I would be rather unimpressed if someone studying to that level was unable to find alternative routes to the "source". It should be at worse a bit of a pain and at best helping to fix a sodding great travesty that has afflicted publication for decades.
- exergy 8y ago
  You guys must exist in some alternative universe. In mechanical engineering, no access to journals is definitely a top 5 problem, not top 50. How do you guys do goose chase research if only one out of five paper titles that catch your interest are immediately available. Inter library loan is bullshit that takes at least one full day to appear. What do you do until then?
  - sterlind 8y ago
    Sci-hub. You use sci-hub. That's what I've been doing for years; I'm not affiliated with an institution so I can't afford subscriptions, and I need the articles so I can treat my illness. When the system's broken beyond repair and the stakes are high, there's no point playing by the rules. That's why sci-hub was founded in the first place.
    - exergy 8y ago
      That's exactly the thing though. My field is niche enough, and it's applied science anyway, meaning that even the seminal papers are missing from scihub, let alone more modern and less-cited research papers. And no way for me to upload my stash.

paulie_a 8y ago

On the flip side elsiver wouldn't be getting papers published from UCLA right? I don't know how that situation works. But UCLA is pretty big, so I would think they would be losing access to papers also.

stale2002 8y ago

> How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work? With sites like sci-hub, of course! Pirating is basically never enforced against the downloaders. (It is more the uploaders that companies go after).

stenl 8y ago

Sweden, all of it, walked out in July and we’re doing fine. I doubt any PhD students avoid our institutions because of it, and we somehow manage to get the papers we need anyway. Asking on twitter is effective, or directly from authors. And there’s always scihub...

guelo 8y ago
Is scihub openly encouraged by faculty or librarians?

betterunix2 8y ago

"A University which lacks a library containing the currently published scholarship" When I was a PhD student I don't think I used the university's library to access a single paper. It is not at all hard to find papers on the Internet and the money paid for subscriptions is basically a waste. Even in fields where this is a shocking concept I suspect people would figure it out if they needed to do so. UCLA can and absolutely should walk out of the negotiations, and put Elsevier in their place (the dustbin of history). The academic publishing system that exists today is based on the premise that wide distribution of scientific writing is something that requires industrial equipment, and that is just not true these days. Elsevier's power is an illusion; they are part of an obsolete industry that future generations will have forgotten and they know it.