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Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service. I have
by dash2 7y ago
Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service.
I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu.
A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a PDF. Via a web interface.
Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.
And then there's the stuff the article talks about: the huge fees universities pay so that our own work can be "open-access".
I hate them. I hope they go bust. I hope their CEO becomes homeless.
- wpietri 7y agoThis is poetry. Thank you! And exactly what I'd expect of an oligopoly player.
- dessant 7y agoThe papers they hold hostage have not been fully backed up [1] and made accessible for everyone. Elsevier does deserve to go bankrupt, but we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/
- jraph 7y agoI had a laugh reading this. > Readers should note that, in many jurisdictions, use of Sci-Hub may constitute copyright infringement. Users of Sci-Hub do so at their own risk. This study is not an endorsement of using Sci-Hub, and its authors and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers. There is a possibility that Sci-Hub users — especially those not using privacy-enhancing services such as Tor — could have their usage history unmasked and face legal or reputational consequences. > Sci-Hub is currently served at domains including https://sci-hub.hk https://sci-hub.hk, https://sci-hub.la https://sci-hub.la, https://sci-hub.mn https://sci-hub.mn, https://sci-hub.name https://sci-hub.name, https://sci-hub.tv https://sci-hub.tv, and https://sci-hub.tw https://sci-hub.tw, as well as at scihub22266oqcxt.onion "We are not telling you to use Sci-Hub, but you can use Tor and here are some addresses where you can find it." > Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals. For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States. "See, Sci-Hub works that well" :-) Managing to have this hosted on a .gov website seems noteworthy.
- jacobolus 7y agoNote that the former and current Editors-in-Chief of that journal are both UC Berkeley biologists (also huge critics of paywalled science).
- duckerude 7y ago> Since the ledger of Bitcoin transactions is public, we can evaluate the donation activity to known Sci-Hub addresses (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM, 14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA, 1EVkHpdQ8VJQRpQ15hSRoohCztTvDMEepm). Subtle
- jraph 7y agoAt this point, this article is a masterpiece. Thanks for the joke praptak.
- praptak 7y agoAlmost like this old joke: "How long can we tolerate this nest of indecency and moral corruption at Smith street 2, pink door on the second floor, knock three times?!"
- tomxor 7y ago> we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged. Hopefully it all gets backed up by sci-hub before that point.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoWhat's preventing Sci-Hub from having it all, and who is backing up Sci-Hub?
- dmitriz 7y agoAll articles are already assured to get salvaged via services like LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and Portico. All we need is to have them go bankrupt, preferably fully, so stories like that won't repeat: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/22 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/22
- Iv 7y agoI was waiting for the "but". Reaching the final period of your sentence was deeply satisfying.
- mxcrossb 7y agoWhile we’re doing “as well as”s about Elsevier... I hate how soulless the journals feel. Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site. Where is the history? Where is the pride? Instead it looks just like any old rubbish journal, and any reader who stumbled upon it would think the same unless they read its history in Wikipedia.
- impendia 7y ago> I hate how soulless the journals feel. I certainly sympathize with you! That said, personally I'm happy about this development. Journals don't really fill a practical need anymore, and (as you point out) they increasingly don't fill an emotional, intangible one either. Perhaps then we will muster the effort to kick the entire industry to the curb.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoWhich journal?
- dmitriz 7y agoAll of them use the same process.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoI was asking about: > Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site The OP is describing how all journals are treated the same, despite the the fact that they are essentially mini societies, some with more important histories than others
- dmitriz 7y agoOf course they won't do it as that would show the world the other 99% of their journals are in fact old rubbish. And they don't buy us drinks as we know... https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/104 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/104
- raister 7y agoIt is hard to say this, but Russia is helping the world fight against Elsevier and all those money funneling institutions... (with scihub, for anyone not knowing that it is a russian 'service')
- vihren 7y agoThe creator of Sci-Hub is Alexandra Elbakyan and she is from Kazakhstan. According to Wikipedia [0] she spend 1 year working for a Moscow company, but that's it. I wouldn't classify it as a Russian service. There is a nice russian service for paywalled ebooks and articles called LibGen [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
- buboard 7y agoi would still use it if it was a russian service
- steve19 7y agoAt one point in time she banned the whole of Russia from accessing sci-hub after she felt that some Russian scientists had been insulting when they named a parasitic insect after her. Late last year Russia banned isps from accessing sci-hub. It may or may not be hosted in Russia, but I agree it is not "Russian". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/sci-hub-blocked-in-russia-following-ruling-by-moscow-court/3009838.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/sci-hub-blocked-in-russi...
- bb101 7y agoThe rot starts at the top: https://www.elsevier.com/about/management https://www.elsevier.com/about/management
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoAm I supposed to magically understand something from that link? If so, I utterly failed. Mind elucidating?
- dmitriz 7y agoIn fact, this was referring to one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20641056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20641056
- mcv 7y agoIf Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still wants to get published in Elsevier's journals, and everybody still wants to read what's in them. If everybody were to just stop, Elsevier would be out of business within a month.
- reallydontask 7y agoIf scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month. As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place
- mcv 7y agoIf everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.
- rumanator 7y ago> If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. That's irrelevant. Researchers are forced to publish in high-impact journals to preserve their career, and any newly created journal has zero impact. Furthermore, some countries/universities enforce a journal whitelist, and evaluate the eir researchers based on the number of papers published in the pre approved list if publications.
- anticensor 7y ago
- n1000 7y agoAnother fun fact about Elsevier: In their contract with university libraries they exclude the right of fair use as described in the US copyright law. That means one can download papers, but technically mustn't use the data found in them without consent. This is just ridiculous.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIsn't that illegal? Or at least, doesn't that cancel the copyright as it explicitly breaches the copyright contract with the demos.
- n1000 7y agoI was wondering too. The librarian that told me about it, is a copyright expert and was outraged. However, it seems like there was not much they could do. I am guessing the fact that this is happening at an Ivy league university means that lawyers are not useful in this matter. They also said that only Elsevier does that.
- michaelmior 7y ago> I hope their CEO becomes homeless. Not having experienced homelessness myself, this still isn't something I would wish in anyone.
- BorRagnarok 7y agoOh I would, and that he may go completely broke too, and die miserable, alone, and in pain. These people's greed has caused enormous harm and cost uncountable lives. That's what keeping this knowledge to yourself does, otherwise our doctors would still be doing bloodletting and sacrificing small animals. And in a certain way, we still are. Which doctor has the money to access all those journals? Lost of clues to a cure for lots of diseases are probably buried somewhere in expensive journals. But noo, please for the love of money withhold the doctor that information, let him pay thousands of dollars for it, so that he will not read any of it, and let his patients suffer and die. Like they did when we were still doing bloodletting.
- michaelmior 7y agoI'm not arguing that what Elsevier is doing is good, but I do think desiring terrible things for others however "bad" we may perceive them to be is ultimately not productive.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI have experienced homelessness. I hope the CEO becomes homeless and then gets kicked out of any squats when they find out that he used to run Elsevier, and has to live in a cardboard box full of dogs under a bridge, before finally finding enlightenment in his tranformation into a modern Diogenes. He will then wander the world, providing modest educational services for free and be finally happy.
- kevinventullo 7y agoHonest question: if you hate Elsevier, why are you submitting to their journals?
- CrazyStat 7y agoIt would be optimal for all researchers to coordinate to move away from Elsevier, but as long as everyone else (or the majority) is publishing in Elsevier the local optimum for each researcher is to continue publishing in Elsevier. I know a few researchers who have publicly committed to not publish in Elsevier journals, but there's a career cost to doing this, particularly for early career researchers. Outside of a small number of colleagues who will actually read your work, most people (including funding organizations and tenure review boards) will judge your research by how much you publish and where you publish, and Elsevier owns many of the most prestigious journals. It varies by field, depending on how many journals Elsevier has managed to capture. I consider myself lucky that Elsevier doesn't own any of the major journals in my specialty, so I've so far been able to avoid them without feeling like I was making career sacrifices to do so.
- bonoboTP 7y agoWhy do the well established and well known, successful researchers not boycott it? It could start a chain reaction.
- lonelappde 7y agoIn math they did. In other fields, they depend on funding from government agencies who support Elsevier.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y agoI'm a tenured professor, so my own position is not in danger if I boycott the likes of Elsevier (salary bonuses and grant money still would be, but at least I could still get a reasonable paycheck every month and keep a good standard of living). But the overwhelming majority of my publications are coauthored with PhD students or young postdocs who are fighting for stable positions, and their career depends on high-impact publications. If I decided to boycott for-profit journals, I would be throwing them under the bus. In mathematics, most publications are single-author, and I suspect this (plus less reliance on funding to buy equipment) is an important factor why they are more successful than other disciplines fighting parasitic publishers, as established tenured professors might as well fight the fight. But for most disciplines, the lock-in is really difficult to escape...
- mikorym 7y agoMathematicians have for a couple of years now started to rely on preprints on ArXiv and this is a successful change in culture. However, the related problem of research not being read (and the more subjective "not being worth read") is still unsolved to a large extent. My single paper on ArXiv has probably not been read and despite that my MSc reviewer commented that the work is suitable to be published (apart from the MSc) I now have a full time job outside of academia and little incentive to get the paper into a reputable journal by extensive formatting and layout changes or self-lobbying, if you will.
- lonelappde 7y agoAre you sure people would read the article just if it were published? Fields of math are small and narrow. Emailing people and posting to forums might be easier and more effective than publishing in a journal.
- dmitriz 7y agoHow can you tell it is not been read?
- mikorym 7y agoI guess I can't.
- dmitriz 7y ago> Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable. We have been recording their (dis)services here, with everyone warmly welcome to add more: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/4 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/4