6 ms·

MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations (2020)

91 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

Jolter 4y ago
Any particular reason that this is of interest today?
- ur-whale 4y ago
  > Any particular reason that this is of interest today? Elsevier is still in business and as noxious as ever, so no.
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  I learned this week that Elsevier has raised 10x the price of one of their products for the company where I'm currently working. I don't think that's why OP sent it, but I do wonder whether the two are correlated. Edit: I checked the OP's history and he sends at least one link every hour every day for a total of about 600 links in the last two weeks. So I'm guessing it's just a repost bot.
  - Jolter 4y ago
    Ah, that explains it. Link flagged.
  - ddtaylor 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - the_biot 4y ago
      Why do you do it?
beowulfey 4y ago
Two years later and I’ve not heard any complaints. Anyone doing research at MIT care to chime in on how it’s been?
- toxik 4y ago
  My university similarly dropped its Elsevier contract a couple of years ago. Have not noticed at all.
- siver_john 4y ago
  I am not an MIT researcher however my university dropped Elsevier at some point and I think generally the experience and sentiment is similar across universities and fields from the admittedly small sample size I have. It makes things more annoying on some levels, but between the two sides of university library versus Elsevier the large majority of scientists agree with Elsevier being wrong so the annoyance is generally acceptable. Ideally this entire system changes for the better but we can make it work in the short term. Not to mention that even before this we often ran into journals we didn't have access to, so some of these annoyances would have existed regardless.
- gaze 4y ago
  It's fine. Haven't really noticed.
- neltnerb 4y ago
  This is the first time I've thought about it since the original announcement. I wonder what I missed? I guess researchers will get to use the communications pages of Elsevier journals to make fun of MIT without anyone noticing! More seriously, I do wonder what scholarship by researchers who choose to publish there that I missed. Oh well, too expensive to find out...
carbonatedmilk 4y ago
evolve2k 4y ago
Anyone here doing research/work in a University? How’s open access publishing coming along in your corner of the world? Improvements?
- toxik 4y ago
  Not noticeably in my field. It’s all IEEE. In practice, people publish the unedited manuscripts on arxiv before peer review anyway.
- Prcmaker 4y ago
  Honestly whenever someone at the uni, staff or student, couldn't get access to a paper we just turned to scihub. That was current as of late 2021.
- ninjin 4y ago
  Faculty member here, conducting research on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. For me, 99% or more of all research that is worth reading these days is open access and published for free in non-profit, community-run journals and conferences. The only time I stumble upon pay walls is when I venture into older work or neighbouring research areas. The only notable exception is Google DeepMind, that has a nasty habit of using Springer Nature. I am assuming it is because of the perceived prestige and disregard for the standards we otherwise have set as a community. On a personal level, I refuse to review for any entity that maintains closed access journals. It is not sufficient that you offer open access, it should be the norm. Lastly, all is not fun and games when it comes to open access. Even if your field and publications are always open, you are likely to be forced to upload your work to approved repositories (which always come with horrendous, slow, and fragile user interfaces). You must remember to do this within a given time window or suffer punishments akin to if you had published your work as closed access, marking the work as ineligibility to count towards funding, etc.
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    This is more or less my experience as well. I’m not as involved as I used to be, but the only time I couldn’t get access to something I wanted in ML was Google’s TPUv4 paper. But a quick trip to https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar solved that.
abirch 4y ago
Elsevier's business model was valid in the 1990s and 2000s when most people used paper. Unfortunately the world has changed but their business model hasn't. It's reminiscent of Real Estate agents.
- hash872 4y ago
  In no way defending real estate agents, but people have been predicting that the Internet would obsolete their business model since the Clinton administration. It's yet to happen, and arguably they have more of a hold on real estate transactions than they did previously. The web never disrupted their business model, sadly
  - abirch 4y ago
    Not yet for real estate agents nor Elsevier.
elashri 4y ago
Why would anyone complaint while sci-hub is there. I know that it is still illegal and people don't talk or encourage this but it is used and a lot. It maybe just a new fact added to unwritten rules in academia. Because I don't think the current situation with publishing industry gets any support inside the community.
- siver_john 4y ago
  I had this problem a few months ago, but because Sci-Hub doesn't have supporting information currently. Yes, I understand normally that is free anyways on journals but for whatever reason this journal (owned by Elsevier ofc) did not have its SI available without a subscription and my institution did not have access to this journal. So no, just use sci-hub is not a valid alternative as it stands today and because of its legal jeopardy means we probably shouldn't become reliant on it.
- agarsev 4y ago
  There are many articles not on sci-hub, especially if they are more or less recent or in niche (and not so niche) topics.
  - elashri 4y ago
    I get that but they are that much (at least not 2021 papers because of Indian court case). Also for many fields (steam) the papers usually show up in preprinted repositories like arxiv, biorxiv...etc Also there are many places to ask for a paper if you really need it like on reddit ( I don't remember the sub reddit name). people do have groups on Facebook and Twitter to ask and provide pdfs. For really desperate people with rare cases if that all does not work, sending a message to thr author asking for a version never gets no. people like when others are interested in their work.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub. If we're going to allow authors to do that then we could reduce the workload by uploading all the papers to central servers, like some sort of hub, and just letting people download them. The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright. Also USA exporting ever longer copyright terms. Limit what counts as an artistic work (or what counts asa derivative, extracting data is not artistically derivative). Limit period of copyright to 20y like for patents. Bosh. Entirely my own personal opinions.
SMAAART 4y ago
Remembering Aaron Swartz.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- blagie 4y ago
  If you'd like to remember Aaron Swartz, you should remember MIT continued to use CFAA to extort people, right up to the time it was overturned (Van Buren). The administration's actions showed no admission of fault, guilt, or changed behavior.
AlbertCory 4y ago
The Internet beat out OSI because of the sort of people who use sci-hub. We can kill Elsevier the same way. This isn't some wild conspiracy theory. I was there, plus I've been on the internet-history mailing list, where Internet pioneers still walk the Earth (the ones still living). I recently instigated a discussion on GOSIP (1990), which was supposed to finally drive a stake in the heart of TCP. Nearly everyone in academia and the non-profit sector jumped on TCP early in the 80s and before, and accumulated decades of actual operational experience with it. If you were choosing a protocol for your network, you knew all the devices ran TCP and could talk to each other. Anything new you bought surely would, too. Interop conferences were held, where vendors showed up and made sure they could play, too. For OSI, not so much. Which OSI "profile" did they support, for one thing? All this happened because while the telecoms and governments were swearing that OSI would win in the end, the people actually in the field were making TCP just work. So if you say that scientists prefer sci-hub and other open access: that's how we win. Let's tackle the issues with it if there are any, patiently, one by one. Eventually it'll be a fait accompli.

91 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

Jolter 4y ago

Any particular reason that this is of interest today?

ur-whale 4y ago
> Any particular reason that this is of interest today? Elsevier is still in business and as noxious as ever, so no.
probably_wrong 4y ago
I learned this week that Elsevier has raised 10x the price of one of their products for the company where I'm currently working. I don't think that's why OP sent it, but I do wonder whether the two are correlated. Edit: I checked the OP's history and he sends at least one link every hour every day for a total of about 600 links in the last two weeks. So I'm guessing it's just a repost bot.
- Jolter 4y ago
  Ah, that explains it. Link flagged.
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - the_biot 4y ago
    Why do you do it?

beowulfey 4y ago

Two years later and I’ve not heard any complaints. Anyone doing research at MIT care to chime in on how it’s been?

toxik 4y ago
My university similarly dropped its Elsevier contract a couple of years ago. Have not noticed at all.
siver_john 4y ago
I am not an MIT researcher however my university dropped Elsevier at some point and I think generally the experience and sentiment is similar across universities and fields from the admittedly small sample size I have. It makes things more annoying on some levels, but between the two sides of university library versus Elsevier the large majority of scientists agree with Elsevier being wrong so the annoyance is generally acceptable. Ideally this entire system changes for the better but we can make it work in the short term. Not to mention that even before this we often ran into journals we didn't have access to, so some of these annoyances would have existed regardless.
gaze 4y ago
It's fine. Haven't really noticed.
neltnerb 4y ago
This is the first time I've thought about it since the original announcement. I wonder what I missed? I guess researchers will get to use the communications pages of Elsevier journals to make fun of MIT without anyone noticing! More seriously, I do wonder what scholarship by researchers who choose to publish there that I missed. Oh well, too expensive to find out...

carbonatedmilk 4y ago

evolve2k 4y ago

Anyone here doing research/work in a University? How’s open access publishing coming along in your corner of the world? Improvements?

toxik 4y ago
Not noticeably in my field. It’s all IEEE. In practice, people publish the unedited manuscripts on arxiv before peer review anyway.
Prcmaker 4y ago
Honestly whenever someone at the uni, staff or student, couldn't get access to a paper we just turned to scihub. That was current as of late 2021.
ninjin 4y ago
Faculty member here, conducting research on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. For me, 99% or more of all research that is worth reading these days is open access and published for free in non-profit, community-run journals and conferences. The only time I stumble upon pay walls is when I venture into older work or neighbouring research areas. The only notable exception is Google DeepMind, that has a nasty habit of using Springer Nature. I am assuming it is because of the perceived prestige and disregard for the standards we otherwise have set as a community. On a personal level, I refuse to review for any entity that maintains closed access journals. It is not sufficient that you offer open access, it should be the norm. Lastly, all is not fun and games when it comes to open access. Even if your field and publications are always open, you are likely to be forced to upload your work to approved repositories (which always come with horrendous, slow, and fragile user interfaces). You must remember to do this within a given time window or suffer punishments akin to if you had published your work as closed access, marking the work as ineligibility to count towards funding, etc.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  This is more or less my experience as well. I’m not as involved as I used to be, but the only time I couldn’t get access to something I wanted in ML was Google’s TPUv4 paper. But a quick trip to https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar solved that.

abirch 4y ago

Elsevier's business model was valid in the 1990s and 2000s when most people used paper. Unfortunately the world has changed but their business model hasn't. It's reminiscent of Real Estate agents.

hash872 4y ago
In no way defending real estate agents, but people have been predicting that the Internet would obsolete their business model since the Clinton administration. It's yet to happen, and arguably they have more of a hold on real estate transactions than they did previously. The web never disrupted their business model, sadly
- abirch 4y ago
  Not yet for real estate agents nor Elsevier.

elashri 4y ago

Why would anyone complaint while sci-hub is there. I know that it is still illegal and people don't talk or encourage this but it is used and a lot. It maybe just a new fact added to unwritten rules in academia. Because I don't think the current situation with publishing industry gets any support inside the community.

siver_john 4y ago
I had this problem a few months ago, but because Sci-Hub doesn't have supporting information currently. Yes, I understand normally that is free anyways on journals but for whatever reason this journal (owned by Elsevier ofc) did not have its SI available without a subscription and my institution did not have access to this journal. So no, just use sci-hub is not a valid alternative as it stands today and because of its legal jeopardy means we probably shouldn't become reliant on it.
agarsev 4y ago
There are many articles not on sci-hub, especially if they are more or less recent or in niche (and not so niche) topics.
- elashri 4y ago
  I get that but they are that much (at least not 2021 papers because of Indian court case). Also for many fields (steam) the papers usually show up in preprinted repositories like arxiv, biorxiv...etc Also there are many places to ask for a paper if you really need it like on reddit ( I don't remember the sub reddit name). people do have groups on Facebook and Twitter to ask and provide pdfs. For really desperate people with rare cases if that all does not work, sending a message to thr author asking for a version never gets no. people like when others are interested in their work.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub. If we're going to allow authors to do that then we could reduce the workload by uploading all the papers to central servers, like some sort of hub, and just letting people download them. The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright. Also USA exporting ever longer copyright terms. Limit what counts as an artistic work (or what counts asa derivative, extracting data is not artistically derivative). Limit period of copyright to 20y like for patents. Bosh. Entirely my own personal opinions.

SMAAART 4y ago

Remembering Aaron Swartz.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
blagie 4y ago
If you'd like to remember Aaron Swartz, you should remember MIT continued to use CFAA to extort people, right up to the time it was overturned (Van Buren). The administration's actions showed no admission of fault, guilt, or changed behavior.

AlbertCory 4y ago

The Internet beat out OSI because of the sort of people who use sci-hub. We can kill Elsevier the same way. This isn't some wild conspiracy theory. I was there, plus I've been on the internet-history mailing list, where Internet pioneers still walk the Earth (the ones still living). I recently instigated a discussion on GOSIP (1990), which was supposed to finally drive a stake in the heart of TCP. Nearly everyone in academia and the non-profit sector jumped on TCP early in the 80s and before, and accumulated decades of actual operational experience with it. If you were choosing a protocol for your network, you knew all the devices ran TCP and could talk to each other. Anything new you bought surely would, too. Interop conferences were held, where vendors showed up and made sure they could play, too. For OSI, not so much. Which OSI "profile" did they support, for one thing? All this happened because while the telecoms and governments were swearing that OSI would win in the end, the people actually in the field were making TCP just work. So if you say that scientists prefer sci-hub and other open access: that's how we win. Let's tackle the issues with it if there are any, patiently, one by one. Eventually it'll be a fait accompli.