19 ms·

One of the reasons you are probably seeing this happen are budget cuts. Major university systems have seen their funding be cut by state governments. Elsevier c

One of the reasons you are probably seeing this happen are budget cuts. Major university systems have seen their funding be cut by state governments. Elsevier charges an obscene amount of money to access information that is often publicly funded. If money were no object, you'd probably see less university systems rejecting Elsevier. But money is becoming a bigger issue. Ultimately, this is starting to put major university systems in line with individual users, and we should see an explosion of open-access information in the next decade. Remember when Harvard University said it can't afford journal publishers' price: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...

mgbmtl 8y ago
Perhaps, and budget cuts can justify more risk taking. No one wants to be accused of taking political stances that go against student interests, but budget cuts are budget cuts. In my field, where being Free Software based is a selling argument, I like to joke that recessions are good for our field, and economic booms are good for our field (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgUA1tluVmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgUA1tluVmE). I just adjust my pitch depending on the circumstances (save money or invest in a more powerful platform).
mattigames 8y ago
Is there any in-deep analysis about university finances? It seems that getting around $150.000 from each new student they should have more than enough to sustain and profit.
- taurath 8y ago
  My understanding is they are demand inelastic so their costs naturally go up, and there's been an arms race in the past 20 years to build very nice new buildings, housing, etc to compete on look, prestige and features for students. Reputation of the school is one of the biggest differentiators, so now that they're being run as a business rather than the state costs have no incentive whatsoever to decrease. Now of course, even if the states wanted to be more equitable to their citizens by going back to a more state-funded model, the cost to maintain all of those new features is massively increased. Its like an asset bubble more or less.
  - secabeen 8y ago
    They are not getting $150k per student. That's the nameplate price, which is not the actual price paid by most students. The students who do pay nameplate price see much of their tuition going to fund financial aid for less well-off students. Net tuition and fees for students at private 4-year colleges is about $14,600 in 2018-2019. That results in a total of $58k/student in revenue, not $150k. https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-private-nonprofit-four-year-institutions https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl... As public institutions, UC campuses see even less: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-public-four-year-institution https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
    - apendleton 8y ago
      The arms race issue is real, though, and students are less price-sensitive than you might otherwise expect because so many of them are paying for all of it with debt, and the dollar figure looks so obscene everywhere that I suspect lots of students just choose not to think about it. One school's dining hall being fancier is immediately appreciable on a college tour. One school's ridiculous high number that you won't have to pay for years vs. a slightly different ridiculous number at a different one feels less concrete, even though that difference is what paid for the fancier dining hall. Given that, there are big incentives for schools to go ahead and invest in the fancy things and win the students.
      - mattigames 8y ago
        It is quite real, this reddit thread shreds some light on the issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/7qesj9/why_is_college_in_the_us_so_expensive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/7qesj9/why_i...
        secabeen 8y ago
        I think it is real, but I don't think expenditures drive it all that much. What does drive it is the perceived value through pricing. If the going rate for public schools is $5k/yr, the private colleges put their nameplate rate at $25-30k/yr. Significantly more, but that higher price sends a quality signal, and the students they want don't actually pay it, so they aren't negatively impacted by the high cost. When the state school price increases to $10k/yr or even $15k/yr, the private schools can move up their nameplate price to $40k/yr or $50k/yr and it doesn't seem ridiculous anymore, and still retains the signaling value. There has been some increase in student services costs based on the expenditures numbers I posted (about 4%/yr real increase), but that's not enough to explain the 50-100% increases in nameplate tuition at both public and private schools. That is driven by de-investment in post-secondary education by state legislatures, which directly results in tuition increases by public schools to balance the books, and then the similar increases by private schools to maintain their relative cost.
- secabeen 8y ago
  There's plenty. The college board has good data on the cost side: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing And the department of education has good data on the expenditures side: Private: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.a... Public: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.10.a...
- noelsusman 8y ago
  For one they don't get remotely close to $150,000 from each student. The average public 4-year university gets $6,100 per student per school year. That's tuition and fees minus financial aid coming from the school. It covers about half of the cost of educating students, with the other half coming from state funding and federal financial aid.
  - mattigames 8y ago
    The average is $9,970 [0], for private ones is 34,740 [0] https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-us https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance...
    - kd0amg 8y ago
      "Published tuition fees" is a very different figure from what the average student actually pays.
- traek 8y ago
  Universities in the UC system are definitely not getting $150k from each student. Tuition doesn't even cover the cost of educating each student. You can see UCLA's financials here: https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-16-17 https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-16-17 Tuition and fees netted $833MM in 2017. The cost of the undergraduate schools alone was well over a billion dollars.
  - mattigames 8y ago
    Some of those "costs" are self-imposed such as administrative salaries increases, as investigated by the LATimes[0] [0] https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20...
IshKebab 8y ago
The other reason is of course Scihub. You pretty much can't do research without access to Elsevier's journal, so before Scihub, university libraries just didn't have a choice. Now they do. Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over.", but it doesn't take much reading between the lines.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over. Not only do universities not openly admit to SciHub usage, but there are even university administrations that still warn their students and staff against using SciHub. I recently read through a fairly prominent European university’s freshly-revised course for undergraduates on how basic use of the library and research methods (I saw this as part of my job, so naturally I won’t name the institution). Among the course content on how to find journal articles in JSTOR and Web of Science, how to properly cite your sources, etc. were admonitions not to use SciHub because it “is illegal”, and warnings that use of SciHub can lead to failing a course or having one’s student status revoked.
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    Parallel construction it is, then.
    - mjevans 8y ago
      Cite the official published source.
      - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
        I wonder how this dichotomy of "use Wikipedia and SciHub, but you don't cite them directly" affects the ethics of graduates.
waterhouse 8y ago
> when Harvard University said it can't afford journal publishers' price Harvard's endowment is, according to Wikipedia, $39.2 billion as of FY 2018. My first reflex was to say that "can't afford" must be a relative term... A closer look at the article says: "A memo from Harvard Library ... warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year." So I could believe that the Harvard Library is given a certain budget by the main Harvard organization, and that this budget is insufficient to support that bill plus other unavoidable recurring expenses.
- acdha 8y ago
  You're also missing the distinction between an endowment and a revenue stream. Harvard has almost $40B in assets but they are going to be making much smaller annual returns on that — probably 10% at best — and the reason why people donate those funds is to support academic work, not boost profit margins for large companies. Harvard's academics are providing an enormous amount of unpaid work for journals so it's dubious that they are jumping to cut a big check for that rather than, say, scholarships, equipment, etc.
  - waterhouse 8y ago
    I was aware of that distinction while writing my comment. Even if only $30B of Harvard's assets are financial investments, and even if they earn just 5% annually from that, then that's $1.5 billion per year, so $3.5 million is just 0.23% of their income. I'm not saying $3.5 million isn't absurdly high. I'm just objecting to the statement "Harvard University [itself] ... can't afford ...", which is journalistic hyperbole.
burtonator 8y ago
I've been working on an app for auto-discovery and sharing of research and wanted to get your feedback: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It basically manages your research and allows you to tag PDFs and web content. The new feature I'm adding is discovery of DOI information from the papers you're reading to determine if they are 'free' based on unpaywall and other services. I can then use your reading to recommend other papers that are actively being shared by Polar users. The web version with these features is about 2 weeks away but the desktop app is very solid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 The idea is that by sharing papers directly we can avoid using centralized providers like Elsevier that are locked down. Researchers can just add their own papers and tag them as sharable and they will be available to all Polar users. We're also going to ship an API for this as well.
- batmenace 8y ago
  I like the idea, but why would I use this instead of Mendeley or EndNote, for example? Especially since Mendeley is free, and has a word plugin for writing and referencing.
  - burtonator 8y ago
    Polar is better for managing reading vs managing citations. I'm still trying to figure out if Polar should implement citation management or focus on managing reading of existing material.
  - acdha 8y ago
    Mendeley is owned by Elsevier so they’re likely to continue user-hostile things like locking down your data to prevent interoperability: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
    - mbreese 8y ago
      Which is one reason I switched to using Zotero years ago...
drewda 8y ago
Yeah, budgets are, in part, motivating the push for open access journals. But I don't think university-wide budgets are the most relevant ones to consider. If you look more closely at university _library_ budgets, you'll usually see that journal/e-journal/database subscriptions have been eating up bigger and bigger chunks of the pie. The ever-increasing price of a subscription to ScienceDirect.com is directly taking away money from buying monographs (books), maintaining archives and special collections, and keeping university libraries open late at night for students to study.
xorand 8y ago
"Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription" So it's a move against both traditional paywalled publishing and Gold OA. The argument that some universities refuse to pay because they are "scholarly poor" [1] is only propaganda. [1] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/google-translate-helps-the-scholarly-poor/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/google-tran...
Certhas 8y ago
Well... the other reason might be that the German Universities got together to negotiate with the big publishers. While agreements are in reach or have been reached with most of them, Elsevier continued to try to throw it's weight around leading to most German academic institutions letting the subscription to Elsevier journals lapse (or cancelled) at the end of 2017, with the remaining important ones following suite at the end of 2018. Currently almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier. Here is the full list of German Universities and Labs currently not subscribed to Elsevier: https://www.projekt-deal.de/vertragskundigungen-elsevier-2018/ https://www.projekt-deal.de/vertragskundigungen-elsevier-201... Elsevier did not actually shut down access to its journals for German institutions. Wiley on the other hand has just signed a contract with DEAL, and negotiations with Springer Nature are going well enough so interim contracts are in place until they are concluded. https://www.projekt-deal.de/ https://www.projekt-deal.de/
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Agnosco 8y ago
Maybe, and just maybe, if money was not an issue, research would also be more open.
toomim 8y ago
Actually, the overall budgets of universities have increased substantially— they've more than made up for the lost state funding by raising tuition and other fundraising. U.C. Berkeley, for instance, has increased its overall operating budget by from $1.6B in 2006 to $2.7B in 2018. That's a 68% increase over just the last 12 years! [1] Universities are spending, and taking in, more than ever. Even with all this cash, Elsevier's subscriptions are not cheap. The estimated cost for U.C. Berkeley is $1.15M per year. [2] [1] https://controller.berkeley.edu/home/uc-berkeley-financial-reports https://controller.berkeley.edu/home/uc-berkeley-financial-r... [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-for-a-university-subscription-to-the-entire-Elsevier-database-with-unlimited-views-and-downloads-for-an-academic-year https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-for-a-university-subs...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- kyralis 8y ago
  Just for reference, and this does not diminish the parent's point significantly, inflation accounts for approximately 24% of that increase. That's still a 36% real increase in operating budget assuming student size held constant.
  - rwl 8y ago
    > assuming student size held constant It did not: https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/enroll-history.html https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/enroll-hi... During this period, the undergraduate student population grew about 20%. I was at Berkeley during most of this period. The undergraduate population swelled at the same time that the university was dealing with difficult budget cuts. The growth was significant enough that many students had, and still have, difficulty signing up for the courses they needed. (I believe the cuts and the student population increase were related: admitting more students, especially out of state students, brought in more revenue. But there could have been other factors, like more students wanting a college degree after the financial crisis.)
Vinnl 8y ago
Maybe, but subscriptions costs have also been rising for years, while at the same time academia has also started paying, higher and higher, publishing fees.
devy 8y ago
> Ultimately, this is starting to put major university systems in line with individual users So the side effect of budget cuts is actually a good thing?

mgbmtl 8y ago

Perhaps, and budget cuts can justify more risk taking. No one wants to be accused of taking political stances that go against student interests, but budget cuts are budget cuts. In my field, where being Free Software based is a selling argument, I like to joke that recessions are good for our field, and economic booms are good for our field (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgUA1tluVmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgUA1tluVmE). I just adjust my pitch depending on the circumstances (save money or invest in a more powerful platform).

mattigames 8y ago

Is there any in-deep analysis about university finances? It seems that getting around $150.000 from each new student they should have more than enough to sustain and profit.

taurath 8y ago
My understanding is they are demand inelastic so their costs naturally go up, and there's been an arms race in the past 20 years to build very nice new buildings, housing, etc to compete on look, prestige and features for students. Reputation of the school is one of the biggest differentiators, so now that they're being run as a business rather than the state costs have no incentive whatsoever to decrease. Now of course, even if the states wanted to be more equitable to their citizens by going back to a more state-funded model, the cost to maintain all of those new features is massively increased. Its like an asset bubble more or less.
- secabeen 8y ago
  They are not getting $150k per student. That's the nameplate price, which is not the actual price paid by most students. The students who do pay nameplate price see much of their tuition going to fund financial aid for less well-off students. Net tuition and fees for students at private 4-year colleges is about $14,600 in 2018-2019. That results in a total of $58k/student in revenue, not $150k. https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-private-nonprofit-four-year-institutions https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl... As public institutions, UC campuses see even less: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-public-four-year-institution https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
  - apendleton 8y ago
    The arms race issue is real, though, and students are less price-sensitive than you might otherwise expect because so many of them are paying for all of it with debt, and the dollar figure looks so obscene everywhere that I suspect lots of students just choose not to think about it. One school's dining hall being fancier is immediately appreciable on a college tour. One school's ridiculous high number that you won't have to pay for years vs. a slightly different ridiculous number at a different one feels less concrete, even though that difference is what paid for the fancier dining hall. Given that, there are big incentives for schools to go ahead and invest in the fancy things and win the students.
    - mattigames 8y ago
      It is quite real, this reddit thread shreds some light on the issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/7qesj9/why_is_college_in_the_us_so_expensive/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/7qesj9/why_i...
      - secabeen 8y ago
        I think it is real, but I don't think expenditures drive it all that much. What does drive it is the perceived value through pricing. If the going rate for public schools is $5k/yr, the private colleges put their nameplate rate at $25-30k/yr. Significantly more, but that higher price sends a quality signal, and the students they want don't actually pay it, so they aren't negatively impacted by the high cost. When the state school price increases to $10k/yr or even $15k/yr, the private schools can move up their nameplate price to $40k/yr or $50k/yr and it doesn't seem ridiculous anymore, and still retains the signaling value. There has been some increase in student services costs based on the expenditures numbers I posted (about 4%/yr real increase), but that's not enough to explain the 50-100% increases in nameplate tuition at both public and private schools. That is driven by de-investment in post-secondary education by state legislatures, which directly results in tuition increases by public schools to balance the books, and then the similar increases by private schools to maintain their relative cost.
secabeen 8y ago
There's plenty. The college board has good data on the cost side: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing And the department of education has good data on the expenditures side: Private: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.30.a... Public: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_334.10.a...
noelsusman 8y ago
For one they don't get remotely close to $150,000 from each student. The average public 4-year university gets $6,100 per student per school year. That's tuition and fees minus financial aid coming from the school. It covers about half of the cost of educating students, with the other half coming from state funding and federal financial aid.
- mattigames 8y ago
  The average is $9,970 [0], for private ones is 34,740 [0] https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-us https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance...
  - kd0amg 8y ago
    "Published tuition fees" is a very different figure from what the average student actually pays.
traek 8y ago
Universities in the UC system are definitely not getting $150k from each student. Tuition doesn't even cover the cost of educating each student. You can see UCLA's financials here: https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-16-17 https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-16-17 Tuition and fees netted $833MM in 2017. The cost of the undergraduate schools alone was well over a billion dollars.
- mattigames 8y ago
  Some of those "costs" are self-imposed such as administrative salaries increases, as investigated by the LATimes[0] [0] https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20151011-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-uc-spending-20...

IshKebab 8y ago

The other reason is of course Scihub. You pretty much can't do research without access to Elsevier's journal, so before Scihub, university libraries just didn't have a choice. Now they do. Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over.", but it doesn't take much reading between the lines.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over. Not only do universities not openly admit to SciHub usage, but there are even university administrations that still warn their students and staff against using SciHub. I recently read through a fairly prominent European university’s freshly-revised course for undergraduates on how basic use of the library and research methods (I saw this as part of my job, so naturally I won’t name the institution). Among the course content on how to find journal articles in JSTOR and Web of Science, how to properly cite your sources, etc. were admonitions not to use SciHub because it “is illegal”, and warnings that use of SciHub can lead to failing a course or having one’s student status revoked.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  Parallel construction it is, then.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    Cite the official published source.
    - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
      I wonder how this dichotomy of "use Wikipedia and SciHub, but you don't cite them directly" affects the ethics of graduates.

waterhouse 8y ago

> when Harvard University said it can't afford journal publishers' price Harvard's endowment is, according to Wikipedia, $39.2 billion as of FY 2018. My first reflex was to say that "can't afford" must be a relative term... A closer look at the article says: "A memo from Harvard Library ... warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year." So I could believe that the Harvard Library is given a certain budget by the main Harvard organization, and that this budget is insufficient to support that bill plus other unavoidable recurring expenses.

acdha 8y ago
You're also missing the distinction between an endowment and a revenue stream. Harvard has almost $40B in assets but they are going to be making much smaller annual returns on that — probably 10% at best — and the reason why people donate those funds is to support academic work, not boost profit margins for large companies. Harvard's academics are providing an enormous amount of unpaid work for journals so it's dubious that they are jumping to cut a big check for that rather than, say, scholarships, equipment, etc.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  I was aware of that distinction while writing my comment. Even if only $30B of Harvard's assets are financial investments, and even if they earn just 5% annually from that, then that's $1.5 billion per year, so $3.5 million is just 0.23% of their income. I'm not saying $3.5 million isn't absurdly high. I'm just objecting to the statement "Harvard University [itself] ... can't afford ...", which is journalistic hyperbole.

burtonator 8y ago

I've been working on an app for auto-discovery and sharing of research and wanted to get your feedback: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ It basically manages your research and allows you to tag PDFs and web content. The new feature I'm adding is discovery of DOI information from the papers you're reading to determine if they are 'free' based on unpaywall and other services. I can then use your reading to recommend other papers that are actively being shared by Polar users. The web version with these features is about 2 weeks away but the desktop app is very solid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 The idea is that by sharing papers directly we can avoid using centralized providers like Elsevier that are locked down. Researchers can just add their own papers and tag them as sharable and they will be available to all Polar users. We're also going to ship an API for this as well.

batmenace 8y ago
I like the idea, but why would I use this instead of Mendeley or EndNote, for example? Especially since Mendeley is free, and has a word plugin for writing and referencing.
- burtonator 8y ago
  Polar is better for managing reading vs managing citations. I'm still trying to figure out if Polar should implement citation management or focus on managing reading of existing material.
- acdha 8y ago
  Mendeley is owned by Elsevier so they’re likely to continue user-hostile things like locking down your data to prevent interoperability: https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db
  - mbreese 8y ago
    Which is one reason I switched to using Zotero years ago...

drewda 8y ago

Yeah, budgets are, in part, motivating the push for open access journals. But I don't think university-wide budgets are the most relevant ones to consider. If you look more closely at university _library_ budgets, you'll usually see that journal/e-journal/database subscriptions have been eating up bigger and bigger chunks of the pie. The ever-increasing price of a subscription to ScienceDirect.com is directly taking away money from buying monographs (books), maintaining archives and special collections, and keeping university libraries open late at night for students to study.

xorand 8y ago

"Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription" So it's a move against both traditional paywalled publishing and Gold OA. The argument that some universities refuse to pay because they are "scholarly poor" [1] is only propaganda. [1] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/google-translate-helps-the-scholarly-poor/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/google-tran...

Certhas 8y ago

Well... the other reason might be that the German Universities got together to negotiate with the big publishers. While agreements are in reach or have been reached with most of them, Elsevier continued to try to throw it's weight around leading to most German academic institutions letting the subscription to Elsevier journals lapse (or cancelled) at the end of 2017, with the remaining important ones following suite at the end of 2018. Currently almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier. Here is the full list of German Universities and Labs currently not subscribed to Elsevier: https://www.projekt-deal.de/vertragskundigungen-elsevier-2018/ https://www.projekt-deal.de/vertragskundigungen-elsevier-201... Elsevier did not actually shut down access to its journals for German institutions. Wiley on the other hand has just signed a contract with DEAL, and negotiations with Springer Nature are going well enough so interim contracts are in place until they are concluded. https://www.projekt-deal.de/ https://www.projekt-deal.de/

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Agnosco 8y ago

Maybe, and just maybe, if money was not an issue, research would also be more open.

toomim 8y ago

Actually, the overall budgets of universities have increased substantially— they've more than made up for the lost state funding by raising tuition and other fundraising. U.C. Berkeley, for instance, has increased its overall operating budget by from $1.6B in 2006 to $2.7B in 2018. That's a 68% increase over just the last 12 years! [1] Universities are spending, and taking in, more than ever. Even with all this cash, Elsevier's subscriptions are not cheap. The estimated cost for U.C. Berkeley is $1.15M per year. [2] [1] https://controller.berkeley.edu/home/uc-berkeley-financial-reports https://controller.berkeley.edu/home/uc-berkeley-financial-r... [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-for-a-university-subscription-to-the-entire-Elsevier-database-with-unlimited-views-and-downloads-for-an-academic-year https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-cost-for-a-university-subs...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kyralis 8y ago
Just for reference, and this does not diminish the parent's point significantly, inflation accounts for approximately 24% of that increase. That's still a 36% real increase in operating budget assuming student size held constant.
- rwl 8y ago
  > assuming student size held constant It did not: https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/enroll-history.html https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/enroll-hi... During this period, the undergraduate student population grew about 20%. I was at Berkeley during most of this period. The undergraduate population swelled at the same time that the university was dealing with difficult budget cuts. The growth was significant enough that many students had, and still have, difficulty signing up for the courses they needed. (I believe the cuts and the student population increase were related: admitting more students, especially out of state students, brought in more revenue. But there could have been other factors, like more students wanting a college degree after the financial crisis.)

Vinnl 8y ago

Maybe, but subscriptions costs have also been rising for years, while at the same time academia has also started paying, higher and higher, publishing fees.

devy 8y ago

> Ultimately, this is starting to put major university systems in line with individual users So the side effect of budget cuts is actually a good thing?