11 ms·

UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

262 points by ColinWright 6y ago

tokai 6y ago
Elsevier knows this. We have just finish negotiating a new national contract with them, and to our surprise did they agreed to all of our demands. They know which way the wind is blowing and are trying to pivot as quickly as an old lumbering giant can.
- DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  Curious, what were some of the demands?
  - tokai 6y ago
    The main one was automatic open access on articles written by authors from our institutions with cc license. Better prices and permanent access to some parts of their portfolio was also accepted.
- antwerpz 6y ago
  Losing UC as a subscriber is a huge own goal for Elsevier. Researchers will get used to: 1. always posting preprints, 2. always looking for preprints first, 3. using scihub to get older papers, 4. citing and sharing material using links to preprints or scihub by default. They will spread these habits to their students and colleagues and as they move between institutions. UC is huge across all the constituent colleges and many parts of it are extremely prestigious, so UC grad students are the sort of people who will often end up as professors in other institutions.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    Researchers around the world are already used to (3) and (4). I would guess also (2) but maybe that depends on age and location, and anyway I can't say for sure. We're definitely not there yet when it comes to (1), so - if you're an academic, please make sure to pre-publish all of your research so greedy corporations don't get their grubby IP hands on them.
- a3_nm 6y ago
  The wind is blowing towards gold open access, i.e., the research remains published at Elsevier, it is open-access, but publishing each article costs $1000-$2000 charged to the university via grant money or "subscriptions to publish" in place of the existing subscriptions to read. I don't think Elsevier is really worried. This gold OA model is just sending the same quantities of money to them, just under a different name, and with the side benefit that everyone can read the published articles. The real change will be when researchers stop publishing in the journals that they own -- noting that the costs to publish are so high because the prestige of journals means that fair competition can't happen. Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step -- or even to stop reviewing for these journals for free (see our pledge in this sense, https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/ https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/)
  - hyperbovine 6y ago
    > Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step The incentives are misaligned for that to happen. Who publishes the most? Postdocs, assistant professors, and their grad students. Who has the most to lose from not publishing in top journals? See above.
spzb 6y ago
Article is from February 2020 although not much seems to have changed since https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/uc-and-elsevier/ https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relation...
ramraj07 6y ago
This brings an interesting anecdote from when I suddenly had this question of how my seniors working in the 80s and 90s in a small Indian lab managed to get the literature they want (when their small lab was still one of the most advanced institutions in the state). My senior said they’d pretty much have to write up a literature request letter, attach a cheque and mail it to the main library in New Delhi, and they would typically hear back from them after a month or two either with a copy of the article or saying they can’t get it (roughly half the time). They still did good research, arguably even better than what crap gets spewed out now! Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. It’s definitely annoying but once you’re up to speed in a field you are typically happy with just the abstract and if it’s an important enough paper you find a way to get it one way or another. Especially with a good supportive library and ILL system it’s typically a snap.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. Changing everyone's ability to know things is a much taller order than changing some people's ability to know things. I would not be where I am without Wikipedia or the internet. Growing up, I had no educated adults around me. If I grew up without the internet, I do not see how I could have learned many of the things I did, especially due to time and money constraints. I would certainly dispute the claim that knowing things in a meaningful way (whatever that means) with the internet is worse than without the internet.
- musicale 6y ago
  > Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse) Are you making a claim of knowledge (e.g. epistemology) or of learning (e.g. pedagogy?) If you're talking about learning, then I would say things like Khan academy, MOOCs, online course materials, online textbooks and digital libraries seem like powerful counterexamples. Personally I've learned a lot of interesting and practical things from youtube, github, and HN, not to mention non-paywalled research papers. The internet's enabling of billions of people to get access to thousands if not millions of newspapers, books, television programs, movies, songs, and other sources of information and culture from all over the world, and to talk with each other at minimal cost (compared to traditional telephony), seems like an astonishing achievement If you're making an epistemological claim, I would suggest that the internet era allows you to compare more sources more easily, for example more newspapers than you would have been able to read easily in the pre-internet era. Although it's possible that news outlets have become more opinion-based in the US recently, opinion-based (or opinion-biased if you prefer) print news is basically as old as the printing press, and was certainly well-represented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
meiji163 6y ago
yea... because libgen and scihub are a thing
musicale 6y ago
> The statement added that during negotiations in January 2019, Elsevier proposed an increase in the cost of the UC’s multimillion-dollar subscription while reducing access to several journals Hahaha, no. Well done UC, and goodbye Elsevier.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hedora 6y ago
I hope they find a long term archival approach for the literature that’s no longer being paid for. In CS, there was a transition from older journals to newer publishers around 1980, and much of the literature prior to that is simply inaccessible.
- lumost 6y ago
  Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Yes! Literally the copyright for scientific articles should be 1 year. This is how we fix open access.
    - _jal 6y ago
      OK. Step one: Renegotiate the Berne Convention.
      - corty 6y ago
        Just abandon it. International treaties are mostly hindrances to progress because re-negotiating them is considered hard to impossible. States should aim to be free from such obligations and reduce the amount of applicable treaties as far as possible.
    - Fomite 6y ago
      The NIH and the Wellcome Trust both negotiated effectively this - papers funded by those organizations are open access within 12 months.
    - a3_nm 6y ago
      No, they should be immediately open-access. Why give commercial publishers a 1-year exclusivity window for free?
SubiculumCode 6y ago
It has been somewhat frustrating, but there are ways
whatever1 6y ago
Let’s ask scihub to tell us how much traffic they get from uc*.edu ip addresses
- fao_ 6y ago
  You would have to get a 10 years before / after comparison for it to prove anything. Also, comparing a university against itself is interesting but not at all noteworthy, for bonus points to make the paper actually useful, you could compare against 10 years of traffic from other universities. But then, Science magazine did a segment on this: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    You don't really need 10 years. Each researcher at UC might be confounded by their local network, but you could argue that is just a casual variable anyway. As for statistical power, UC has >30 researchers and each one of those researchers would access several papers a week. Take the ratio of sci-hub vs non-sci-hub papers accessed per week or month and compare to the month before UC's contract with elsevier ran out. Take the mean and do a t-test. Don't even need timeseries! I suspect plotting sci-hub/non-sci-hub papers accessed per week for several weeks before and after the contract expiry would dispense with the need for any statistical analysis.
    - smichel17 6y ago
      Or maybe there's been little noise about the change because everyone was using sci-hub already anyway! I recently introduced a part-time professor to sci-hub, when he was having trouble getting his vpn connection to work, so he could access a paper in a journal. Open access is just easier.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      Does sci-hub release geographic group-by ? She should, I have a corp all access pass to basically everything, and I still sci-hub. The racist, classist control of information has to stop. It should basically be a reverse paywall.
xipho 6y ago
At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published information that they can do other things. They also know that their knowledge-base is worth massive $, they sell medical diagnostic tools, text etc. [0]. It doesn't take a Cellular Biologist to connect the dots to notice the huge potential conflict of interest. Controls publishing (on medical topics), sells diagnostics, $ for all this. I'd bet money they own insurance companies. Is it malicious? Who knows. Is it obvious that it could be abused, with certainty. [0]:https://evolve.elsevier.com/education/medical-insurance-billing-coding/ https://evolve.elsevier.com/education/medical-insurance-bill...
- ta988 6y ago
  Heard from an Elsevier person, their purpose is to own the market from the production to distribution and storage of scientific and medical information. That explains their acquisition of mendeley, their work on lab notebooks, acquisition of medical diagnostics systems...
  - prepend 6y ago
    They own LexisNexis too. It’s an interesting philosophy where they seem to try to corner information that is free, or should. Then charge rents on top of it.
    - ta988 6y ago
      Nice. Didn't know about that one so I had to Wikipedia it: "LexisNexis is a corporation providing computer-assisted legal research (CALR) as well as business research and risk-management services." if anybody is wondering.
      - akiselev 6y ago
colincooke 6y ago
At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the publisher's library. It's to the point now I'd say that all of the grad students and younger PIs insist on posting a pre-print. Pretty great trend especially considering with LaTeX the preprint ends up looking just as good as the published version anyways....
- partingshots 6y ago
  Arxiv was a godsend.
  - SkyMarshal 6y ago
    Also https://eprint.iacr.org/ https://eprint.iacr.org/, https://www.biorxiv.org/ https://www.biorxiv.org/, and https://www.ssrn.com/ https://www.ssrn.com/. Probably others too.
    - gkya 6y ago
      I made a list for linguistics here: https://gkayaalp.com/blog/20200319_lingpreprints.html https://gkayaalp.com/blog/20200319_lingpreprints.html Some of them are general social sciences tho.
- corty 6y ago
  Preprint often looks better. I've had publishers send papers to offshoristan where they redid everything including the graphs to match their layout, introducing tons of errors, typos (yes, really...) and problems that even almost 10 rounds of urgent back-and-forth before the deadline didn't fix entirely.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  Same in cryptography, where the research community manages our own preprint archive (http://eprint.iacr.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/). My experience has been that preprint archives are often used to "mark territory" i.e. get credit for an idea quickly so that it can be discussed more openly.
oefrha 6y ago
It’s outrageous that Elsevier was extracting millions of dollars from UC alone while providing basically negative value-add (yes, paywalling scientific knowledge is negative). That’s funding for ~100 or more PhD students right there. I recall getting offer letters from Berkeley and UCLA back when I was applying to grad school, and immediately hard-passed them since they said something like funding was not guaranteed beyond the first year.
afandian 6y ago
Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a senior dev job opening. This is about metadata, not content, but it's a crucial layer, and we are committed to open data and open infrastructure. https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-developer/ https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev... (but get your application in today if you're interested)
throw11711 6y ago
Good riddance. No need for Elsevier, look elsewhere [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
dafty4 6y ago
Probably the only journal among this "top Elsevier journals" list that one might have difficulty finding pre-prints for is NeuroImage; I'll bet the other medical journals will have preprints on medrxiv: https://blog.typeset.io/top-12-journals-in-elsevier-and-their-templates-4e8229a49eb1 https://blog.typeset.io/top-12-journals-in-elsevier-and-thei...
PaulHoule 6y ago
Part of it is that academics are so busy writing that they don't read all that much. (too busy publishing and perishing)
drallison 6y ago
The headline claiming "limited negative impact" does not refer to fact but to the opinion of library staff based upon complaints. The pricing of Elsevier journals and their access limitation policies keep recent research out of the hands of scholars and researchers--information which helps drive future research. Many authors choose to use Open Access journals with very different access policies.

262 points by ColinWright 6y ago

Elsevier knows this. We have just finish negotiating a new national contract with them, and to our surprise did they agreed to all of our demands. They know which way the wind is blowing and are trying to pivot as quickly as an old lumbering giant can.

DavidPeiffer 6y ago
Curious, what were some of the demands?
- tokai 6y ago
  The main one was automatic open access on articles written by authors from our institutions with cc license. Better prices and permanent access to some parts of their portfolio was also accepted.
antwerpz 6y ago
Losing UC as a subscriber is a huge own goal for Elsevier. Researchers will get used to: 1. always posting preprints, 2. always looking for preprints first, 3. using scihub to get older papers, 4. citing and sharing material using links to preprints or scihub by default. They will spread these habits to their students and colleagues and as they move between institutions. UC is huge across all the constituent colleges and many parts of it are extremely prestigious, so UC grad students are the sort of people who will often end up as professors in other institutions.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Researchers around the world are already used to (3) and (4). I would guess also (2) but maybe that depends on age and location, and anyway I can't say for sure. We're definitely not there yet when it comes to (1), so - if you're an academic, please make sure to pre-publish all of your research so greedy corporations don't get their grubby IP hands on them.
a3_nm 6y ago
The wind is blowing towards gold open access, i.e., the research remains published at Elsevier, it is open-access, but publishing each article costs $1000-$2000 charged to the university via grant money or "subscriptions to publish" in place of the existing subscriptions to read. I don't think Elsevier is really worried. This gold OA model is just sending the same quantities of money to them, just under a different name, and with the side benefit that everyone can read the published articles. The real change will be when researchers stop publishing in the journals that they own -- noting that the costs to publish are so high because the prestige of journals means that fair competition can't happen. Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step -- or even to stop reviewing for these journals for free (see our pledge in this sense, https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/ https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/)
- hyperbovine 6y ago
  > Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step The incentives are misaligned for that to happen. Who publishes the most? Postdocs, assistant professors, and their grad students. Who has the most to lose from not publishing in top journals? See above.

spzb 6y ago

Article is from February 2020 although not much seems to have changed since https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/uc-and-elsevier/ https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relation...

ramraj07 6y ago

This brings an interesting anecdote from when I suddenly had this question of how my seniors working in the 80s and 90s in a small Indian lab managed to get the literature they want (when their small lab was still one of the most advanced institutions in the state). My senior said they’d pretty much have to write up a literature request letter, attach a cheque and mail it to the main library in New Delhi, and they would typically hear back from them after a month or two either with a copy of the article or saying they can’t get it (roughly half the time). They still did good research, arguably even better than what crap gets spewed out now! Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. It’s definitely annoying but once you’re up to speed in a field you are typically happy with just the abstract and if it’s an important enough paper you find a way to get it one way or another. Especially with a good supportive library and ILL system it’s typically a snap.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. Changing everyone's ability to know things is a much taller order than changing some people's ability to know things. I would not be where I am without Wikipedia or the internet. Growing up, I had no educated adults around me. If I grew up without the internet, I do not see how I could have learned many of the things I did, especially due to time and money constraints. I would certainly dispute the claim that knowing things in a meaningful way (whatever that means) with the internet is worse than without the internet.
musicale 6y ago
> Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse) Are you making a claim of knowledge (e.g. epistemology) or of learning (e.g. pedagogy?) If you're talking about learning, then I would say things like Khan academy, MOOCs, online course materials, online textbooks and digital libraries seem like powerful counterexamples. Personally I've learned a lot of interesting and practical things from youtube, github, and HN, not to mention non-paywalled research papers. The internet's enabling of billions of people to get access to thousands if not millions of newspapers, books, television programs, movies, songs, and other sources of information and culture from all over the world, and to talk with each other at minimal cost (compared to traditional telephony), seems like an astonishing achievement If you're making an epistemological claim, I would suggest that the internet era allows you to compare more sources more easily, for example more newspapers than you would have been able to read easily in the pre-internet era. Although it's possible that news outlets have become more opinion-based in the US recently, opinion-based (or opinion-biased if you prefer) print news is basically as old as the printing press, and was certainly well-represented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

meiji163 6y ago

yea... because libgen and scihub are a thing

musicale 6y ago

> The statement added that during negotiations in January 2019, Elsevier proposed an increase in the cost of the UC’s multimillion-dollar subscription while reducing access to several journals Hahaha, no. Well done UC, and goodbye Elsevier.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hedora 6y ago

I hope they find a long term archival approach for the literature that’s no longer being paid for. In CS, there was a transition from older journals to newer publishers around 1980, and much of the literature prior to that is simply inaccessible.

lumost 6y ago
Scientific papers should have more limited copyright protections around distribution. No one except journals benefits from the current situation, and the service they provide around connecting submissions with reviewers seems ripe for replacement if any institution lends their credibility to the matter.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Yes! Literally the copyright for scientific articles should be 1 year. This is how we fix open access.
  - _jal 6y ago
    OK. Step one: Renegotiate the Berne Convention.
    - corty 6y ago
      Just abandon it. International treaties are mostly hindrances to progress because re-negotiating them is considered hard to impossible. States should aim to be free from such obligations and reduce the amount of applicable treaties as far as possible.
  - Fomite 6y ago
    The NIH and the Wellcome Trust both negotiated effectively this - papers funded by those organizations are open access within 12 months.
  - a3_nm 6y ago
    No, they should be immediately open-access. Why give commercial publishers a 1-year exclusivity window for free?

SubiculumCode 6y ago

It has been somewhat frustrating, but there are ways

whatever1 6y ago

Let’s ask scihub to tell us how much traffic they get from uc*.edu ip addresses

fao_ 6y ago
You would have to get a 10 years before / after comparison for it to prove anything. Also, comparing a university against itself is interesting but not at all noteworthy, for bonus points to make the paper actually useful, you could compare against 10 years of traffic from other universities. But then, Science magazine did a segment on this: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...
- ImaCake 6y ago
  You don't really need 10 years. Each researcher at UC might be confounded by their local network, but you could argue that is just a casual variable anyway. As for statistical power, UC has >30 researchers and each one of those researchers would access several papers a week. Take the ratio of sci-hub vs non-sci-hub papers accessed per week or month and compare to the month before UC's contract with elsevier ran out. Take the mean and do a t-test. Don't even need timeseries! I suspect plotting sci-hub/non-sci-hub papers accessed per week for several weeks before and after the contract expiry would dispense with the need for any statistical analysis.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Or maybe there's been little noise about the change because everyone was using sci-hub already anyway! I recently introduced a part-time professor to sci-hub, when he was having trouble getting his vpn connection to work, so he could access a paper in a journal. Open access is just easier.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Does sci-hub release geographic group-by ? She should, I have a corp all access pass to basically everything, and I still sci-hub. The racist, classist control of information has to stop. It should basically be a reverse paywall.

xipho 6y ago

At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published information that they can do other things. They also know that their knowledge-base is worth massive $, they sell medical diagnostic tools, text etc. [0]. It doesn't take a Cellular Biologist to connect the dots to notice the huge potential conflict of interest. Controls publishing (on medical topics), sells diagnostics, $ for all this. I'd bet money they own insurance companies. Is it malicious? Who knows. Is it obvious that it could be abused, with certainty. [0]:https://evolve.elsevier.com/education/medical-insurance-billing-coding/ https://evolve.elsevier.com/education/medical-insurance-bill...

ta988 6y ago
Heard from an Elsevier person, their purpose is to own the market from the production to distribution and storage of scientific and medical information. That explains their acquisition of mendeley, their work on lab notebooks, acquisition of medical diagnostics systems...
- prepend 6y ago
  They own LexisNexis too. It’s an interesting philosophy where they seem to try to corner information that is free, or should. Then charge rents on top of it.
  - ta988 6y ago
    Nice. Didn't know about that one so I had to Wikipedia it: "LexisNexis is a corporation providing computer-assisted legal research (CALR) as well as business research and risk-management services." if anybody is wondering.
    - akiselev 6y ago

colincooke 6y ago

At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the publisher's library. It's to the point now I'd say that all of the grad students and younger PIs insist on posting a pre-print. Pretty great trend especially considering with LaTeX the preprint ends up looking just as good as the published version anyways....

partingshots 6y ago
Arxiv was a godsend.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  Also https://eprint.iacr.org/ https://eprint.iacr.org/, https://www.biorxiv.org/ https://www.biorxiv.org/, and https://www.ssrn.com/ https://www.ssrn.com/. Probably others too.
  - gkya 6y ago
    I made a list for linguistics here: https://gkayaalp.com/blog/20200319_lingpreprints.html https://gkayaalp.com/blog/20200319_lingpreprints.html Some of them are general social sciences tho.
corty 6y ago
Preprint often looks better. I've had publishers send papers to offshoristan where they redid everything including the graphs to match their layout, introducing tons of errors, typos (yes, really...) and problems that even almost 10 rounds of urgent back-and-forth before the deadline didn't fix entirely.
betterunix2 6y ago
Same in cryptography, where the research community manages our own preprint archive (http://eprint.iacr.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/). My experience has been that preprint archives are often used to "mark territory" i.e. get credit for an idea quickly so that it can be discussed more openly.

oefrha 6y ago

It’s outrageous that Elsevier was extracting millions of dollars from UC alone while providing basically negative value-add (yes, paywalling scientific knowledge is negative). That’s funding for ~100 or more PhD students right there. I recall getting offer letters from Berkeley and UCLA back when I was applying to grad school, and immediately hard-passed them since they said something like funding was not guaranteed beyond the first year.

afandian 6y ago

Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a senior dev job opening. This is about metadata, not content, but it's a crucial layer, and we are committed to open data and open infrastructure. https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-developer/ https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev... (but get your application in today if you're interested)

throw11711 6y ago

Good riddance. No need for Elsevier, look elsewhere [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

dafty4 6y ago

Probably the only journal among this "top Elsevier journals" list that one might have difficulty finding pre-prints for is NeuroImage; I'll bet the other medical journals will have preprints on medrxiv: https://blog.typeset.io/top-12-journals-in-elsevier-and-their-templates-4e8229a49eb1 https://blog.typeset.io/top-12-journals-in-elsevier-and-thei...

PaulHoule 6y ago

Part of it is that academics are so busy writing that they don't read all that much. (too busy publishing and perishing)

drallison 6y ago

The headline claiming "limited negative impact" does not refer to fact but to the opinion of library staff based upon complaints. The pricing of Elsevier journals and their access limitation policies keep recent research out of the hands of scholars and researchers--information which helps drive future research. Many authors choose to use Open Access journals with very different access policies.