16 ms·

Germany's Leading Technical University Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions

350 points by fpp 14y ago

TomAnthony 14y ago
Background and perspective: Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals. Its archives contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240 million. The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model, which includes "paywalls" and (in their opinion) excessively high subscription charges. Some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as $14,000. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
- masklinn 14y ago
  SV-POW has a number of posts on the subject of open access in general[0] and elsevier in particular[1]. [0] http://svpow.com/category/open-access/ http://svpow.com/category/open-access/ [1] http://svpow.com/category/stinkin-mammals/stinkin-publishers/ http://svpow.com/category/stinkin-mammals/stinkin-publishers...
  - diminish 14y ago
    it is not about only universities who may pay for subscription somehow; independent scientists must be able to have full access to scientific publications for free, long term. otherwise, paywalls and closed software will make a global human science impossible going forward to 21st century.
- hack_edu 14y ago
  > The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model The only way to win the war is through convincing the librarians and administrators who cut the checks for an institution's subscription. They're who drive prices.
  - scott_s 14y ago
    Not necessarily. The academics are the ones who provide both the product and the labor.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    But they are only going to cut checks for journals that the departments are asking for. The more demand for a particular journal, the harder it is for the library to not cut that check.
    - hack_edu 14y ago
      True, but its very rare that an institution subscribes on a journal-by-journal basis. The pricing structure makes this approach ridiculously expensive and impractical. The price of a dozen or two a la carte journals will usually cost as much as a package of all the journals in that subject area (including the ones you want specifically). Some journals, like the journal Nature, are only available when you buy a massively expensive package. Individual journal subscriptions also often come in packages grouped by years; you have to buy a different set if you want a set of volumes from 1890-1940, 1940-1990 or a package that sunsets all volumes over 10 years prior. This isn't as much a problem when you back subscription packages. The downside of purchasing this way is that when your subscription lapses, you lose all the access you had (since you don't 'own' it). Were you to go the a la carte method, you 'own' them but have to pay a $100+ 'hosting fee', per journal on a yearly basis. The ridiculous prices to subscribe to a la carte journals is one of the primary problems, and the biggest gun that he publishers have to our head.
      - meej 14y ago
        I think it's also worthwhile to recognize that librarians have been trying to sound the alarm on this problem for at least a decade. In 2001, Kenneth Frazier, Director of Libraries at UW-Madison, wrote an article in D-Lib Magazine where he named such journal packages the "Big Deal" and urged library administrators not to buy them. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html
cjbprime 14y ago
Just the mathematics department, no?
lamnk 14y ago
This concerns only the math faculty, not the entire university.
- sswezey 14y ago
  And for those not familiar with the German university system, each department of a university is a lot more autonomous than departments in the US. They sometimes have different admissions, different libraries, different policies, etc.
davidacoder 14y ago
The title on HN is incorrect. Only the mathematics department is canceling their subscriptions, not the whole university.
kaha242 14y ago
a) TU Munich is not necessarily the leading Technical University... it depends very much on 1) the department and 2) the criteria one wants to apply b) the announcement is (up to now) only for the math department
debacle 14y ago
I think this is a great step. Publications are an outdated business model and they can't and shouldn't survive at their current (in my opinion egregious) costs.
ktizo 14y ago
Might only be the maths department, but Elsevier is sitting on a whole lot of loose snow right now and this is yet another snowball picking up speed somewhere further up the mountain.
hack_edu 14y ago
Its worth pointing out that Elsevier also controls the whole line of Lexis Nexis products. Academic publishing, especially journal subscriptions and research databases, is one of those most entrenched industries there can be. It might not be as fashionable as hating on Elsevier but Gale, ProQuest, ACS, CSA and company make a hell of a lot of money through exclusive contracts with smaller publishers. Any new entrances to the industry are locked out from all valuable content or choked before they can even get going. This is all at the expense of libraries and universities, and by proxy, your tax dollars and tuition. The industry is in need of massive disruption, has been for a decade now, but wrestling their IP seems an impossible feat.
- draz 14y ago
  I thought PLOS (http://www.plosone.org http://www.plosone.org) was created to be a disruptive agent
  - hack_edu 14y ago
    I'm unfamiliar, are they a business or just a platform? As much as I'd prefer it all be open, the only way to send a message is to work in their sphere. Contracts between publishers and libraries exist in the conference rooms, decided by committees. No librarian or administrator will be convinced without face time a salesman who can convince them to dump their past decades of loyalty. How can a librarian, one trained in maintaining and preserving access to materials, trust that a new and free platform will be around for years? The publishing houses have been around for centuries, literally. Somebody needs to come along and start by making the little, obvious things right. Their next goal is to avoid acquisition long enough to make a difference. Every so often a promising business comes along, only to be bought out by the big guys and slowly dismantled (see SerialsSolutions). Also, science and math journals are only an aspect of journal publishing, albeit the most pricey of subjects of which to build a collection. These subjects have always been the first to lean towards open access but they stand in distinction from the rest of a library's collection.
    - mbreese 14y ago
robertwalsh0 14y ago
It's great to see mathematicians taking up, Tim Gowers's rallying cry and have the courage to step away from Elsevier. The academic publishing industry for periodicals is going the way of the journal industry. Apps like Scholastica (http://scholasticahq.com/ http://scholasticahq.com/) allow anyone to start their own peer reviewed journal and manage its content. Very soon, they'll even be able to publish open access (http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-access-publishing-is-on-the-way-with-scholastica http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-access-p...). Full disclosure: I'm working on this application.
GoodIntentions 14y ago
atm, we seem to be crushing their webserver. If you're feeling kind, don't click. The page copy is just two sentences, one in German, one in English - essentially: "due to unsustainable pricing, the math department has canceled Elsevier subs"
- growt 14y ago
  http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
- fpp 14y ago
  their admins seemed to have blocked access now: "...Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013..." http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nu3pKnbU3FsJ:www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier+http://www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nu3pKnb...
- diggan 14y ago
  Also: >@http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)
  - fpp 14y ago
    sorry for that - hopefully such an unusual event also provides positive feedback to your directors for their decision.
coolowencool 14y ago
Related article published about a month ago in the Guardian about frustrations with journal publishing models: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blo...
keithvan 14y ago
The HN link is giving a 403 -- anyone have an alternative link?
- amouat 14y ago
  There really isn't anything to see except: "Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013."
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  See http://coralcdn.org/ http://coralcdn.org/ - they provided a caching mechanism that I've been using for what seems like a decade or so - you add .nyud.net to the domain part of the URL and you get their cached copy. Hence, this provides a short term mirror of the OP's link: http://www.ma.tum.de.nyud.net/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier http://www.ma.tum.de.nyud.net/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier
amolsarva 14y ago
These things are super expensive. The value they provide is a network effect --> prestige from history + high quality peers reviewing the work that's published The elite universities can "make this" themselves -- they did something like this in philosophy (led out of Michigan) when I was in grad school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_Imprint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_Imprint The reality is these days that most/all papers are shared online in these PDF exchanges long before 'real' publication. And as a result the journal articles hardly matter as much. I would guess this is most true for stuff with less lab work and more "pencil" work like math or logic or philosophy.
auggierose 14y ago
I got my Ph.D. from this university. I am proud of you, TUM!
user24 14y ago
> Low Bandwith Version of this site due to large amount of requests: > Aufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen hat das Direktorium des Zentrums Mathematik beschlossen, alle abonnierten Elsevier-Zeitschriften ab 2013 abzubestellen. > Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013. > @http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)
- stfu 14y ago
  Somewhat odd that "Germany's leading Technical University" isn't able to handle a few Hackernews visitors showing up
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    I remember Reading HN now had a million accounts (btw can anyone confirm?) if that's true then top story at the beginning of the US day could generate a lot of requests, and if the university has a plain cms that is updated once a week by the departmental secretary then it's pretty unlikely they have seen much traffic, ever. To be honest I would be interested if pg could publish what kind of click through rate the various links generate - could even be a counter next to the story.
    - oellegaard 14y ago
      Last time when we were at the bottom of HN we got thousands of visits in very short time. I could imagine being at the top is very heavy on bandwidth.
      - brazzy 14y ago
        I've had a Site survive the HN frontpage and a slashdotting on super-cheap shared hosting. But that was a few KB of text and two very small Images.
brazzy 14y ago
Go, TUM! The first time I've actually felt proud of my alma mater :)
random123 14y ago
The link is working again now, but has been replaced with a low bandwidth version. (The original version just contained additional images.) The amount of request generated by this site was unfortunately a bit too much for the web server. (I'm one of the server admins ... and have been in fear of a real DDOS attack during the last couple of minutes. ;) )
- GoodIntentions 14y ago
  If it isn't asking too much, would you mind telling HN about it? what kind of traffic you saw, what hardware/software platform you have in place?
  - random123 14y ago
    The link got about 13000 hits so far, thereof about 5000 hits with a referrer value containing "ycombinator". But as only 3481 hits occured during the 3 days before it was posted on HN, I guess that actually about 9000 hits are due to HN. I think the hardware platform is not really interesting, as the DDOS was only caused by the worker pool of Apache2 being too small. Each hit of the site creates about 30 additional request for css,js,png and gif files. So 9000 hits in 3h mean something like 270.000 requests in 3h. Apparently this was too much for 50 workers.
    - GoodIntentions 14y ago
      so if my math is right approx 25 req/sec put paid to it. interesting. Perhaps I should re-think inlining js and css on landing pages.
    - fpp 14y ago
      That looks as if the majority of the hits went directly over to the google cache links mentioned here (otherwise most likely this would be > 50k hits at least). When the link was hitting the HN front page your site was already blocked - when the first person mentioned that the site was not reachable this HN post had about 60 points - anyway guess its the req/sec that killed you (and no cache - guess you don't have that much static content). Have you seen many facebook referrers from people who repost HN front page stories to Facebook?
aheilbut 14y ago
I wonder what happens to access to archives of electronic journals when subscriptions are cancelled -- with paper journals, at least they're still in the library.
andre3k1 14y ago
The market for the distribution of peer-reviewed academic journals fascinates me. It is ripe for disruption. More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles. Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose. There is a burgeoning movement toward open access journals. More info on the subject available here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis
- bgilroy26 14y ago
  Is really ripe for disruption? I would think that if it was very ripe that the arXiv would serve a broader purpose than it currently does. The problem is a social one -- academics want to post their work to well respected journals, because the respect is the currency that their future career advancement runs on. A market is ripe for disruption when every stakeholder except the entrenched competition wants the product to be different AND that difference is readily available through low-cost solutions. Typically the new, low-cost solutions that haven't already been tried, are only recently available through new technology. Given the maturity of the market and the social nature of the business, (even considering how squeaky clean arXiv's brand is versus Paypal's) I think the same people who aren't very excited about putting arXiv papers on their CV are those who would never dream of taking their money out of a big, traditional bank. Even though all of their money is digital, etc.
its_so_on 14y ago
I'd be interested to know how much money they're saving. On its face, it seems like ONE university in every rich country should pay for 'all there is' (within reason). Or, at least the leading journals in each field, and some of the other resources posters have mentioned above. Like it or not, America spends a huge amount on research as published in journals, and if a country has no subscriptions to it at all they're simply cut off from that. I don't have a horse in this race: I would be very happy if academic publishing were completely different. However, realistically, these things should be 'somewhere' in a country the size (and wealth) of Germany, available for consumption by its interested scholars.
zerostar07 14y ago
Another point worth noting is that many (should be all) papers are readily available (legally) as preprint PDFs (which is usually almost the same as the final version), if the creator bothers to place a preprint online, and most academics would be happy to email you a copy of their work should you ask anyway. So it's not like publishers are forcing someone in a walled garden, it's just that academics still prefer to be in there. So, these attacks on Elsevier are shooting the messenger, but it seems it's the only way to get to the sender here.
- Tobu 14y ago
  I've seen the occasional clueless student tell me they didn't think it was legal for them to upload their own papers (they might have signed some contracts with illegal clauses to that effect for all I know). Counting on the authors to unbreak academic publishing works if you already know what you want and can deal with a bit of hassle searching and e-mailing, but it doesn't work at all for skimming or looking at complete proceedings. I suspect the publishers are fighting a bit harder against competing archives. For example, because they are sometimes involved in organising conferences, they can entrench themselves by offering an archive to the participants (giving a small sponsorship in exchange for the understanding the organisers won't offer the same archive), locking out the rest.
thespin 14y ago
Mathematics Departments are going to be the heros in lowering the costs to access scholarly journals, in all disciplines. It has to start somewhere. Low cost, online education, which is a popular topic here on HN, is a neat idea. But to really make it worthwhile, the student needs full access to all academic journals. For that to happen, the paywalls have to come down.
- zerostar07 14y ago
  I agree, besides maths and physics have arxiv. The difficult part is forcing the life sciences people out of their antiquated ways of thinking.
planetguy 14y ago
So what's the endgame here? Drive Elsevier out of business? Watch as its hundreds of journals (some great, some not so great) vanish? What happens to the zillions of papers in existence in those journals, currently available from their website with a few clicks? (What does happen to the copyright holdings of an entity that goes out of business?)
- m_for_monkey 14y ago
  Many would gladly pay a reasonable price.
- zerostar07 14y ago
  The authors of the papers are also copyright holders.I believe this is worth pointing out: Elsevier is not offering some irreplaceable service by having a web server. Their value mostly lies in setting up the journal review teams and process, and making sure they live up to their standards.
  - xamuel 14y ago
    Negative. To publish in an Elsevier journal you must sign away your copyright. The authors do NOT hold copyright. And that's part of why the situation is so ridiculous and urgently needs to be fixed.
    - zerostar07 14y ago
      I stand corrected then. But they can still distribute a preprint according to their terms: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes (with some exceptions such as The Lancet and Cell Press. See also our information on electronic preprints for a more detailed discussion on these points)* Unfortunately, that excludes some of their best publications.
- xamuel 14y ago
vga256 14y ago
Fucking A. Twas about time. Also read Scott Aaronson's thoughts on this issue in general. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=912 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=912 Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring
bborud 14y ago
Good. Very good. Something needs to be done about scientific publishing and the excessively high tolls on knowledge. The publishing industry may claim that it performs some vital role, but I find it extremely unlikely that this is the optimal way of reviewing and disseminating knowledge. I think we are morally obliged to do a lot better. To me the paywalls around scientific publishing is a lot more than a question of principles -- it may end up impacting my life. Five months ago I was diagnosed with kidney failure. If left untreated, this will kill me. What I do the next months may have a big impact on my quality of life. When your doctor tells you that you have a condition that will kill you, I would assume that most of you would try to educate yourselves on the topic. This includes reading recent papers. Well, good luck with that. For absolutely every aspect that I have looked into I keep bumping my head into paywalls. Some articles are only available if I pay a lot of money -- and I have no way of knowing up front if the article will be worth it. Kidney disease is a narrow enough subject for publications to be very expensive. I am continually asked what the hell I need access to these articles for since I am not a doctor. Imagine that: people acquiring knowledge because they need it and not because the publishing industry needs the money... I think it is time academia started taking knowledge seriously.
- imeikas 14y ago
  You may try to contact the authors in the papers directly. In addition to getting the paper you might even get to discuss the issues directly with the authors.
  - bborud 14y ago
    At this stage I am mostly trying to get an overview and trying to find out what I need to know. This means reading a few books to give me the background knowledge I know and it means surveying what is being published to identify topics I need to explore. This usually means _skimming_ a lot of material to determine if it is worth my time right now. If I need to contact the author, that slows the process down a lot.
  - kragen 14y ago
    Yes, there is a tradition in academic publishing of sending several unbound copies of the printed article to the original author, which they will then send to people who write to them requesting them; these copies are called "offprints". Your mileage requesting copies of articles from surviving authors might vary, but mine has generally been very good.
eleitl 14y ago
Just the Mathematics department, not the whole university.

350 points by fpp 14y ago

Background and perspective: Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals. Its archives contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240 million. The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model, which includes "paywalls" and (in their opinion) excessively high subscription charges. Some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as $14,000. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

masklinn 14y ago
SV-POW has a number of posts on the subject of open access in general[0] and elsevier in particular[1]. [0] http://svpow.com/category/open-access/ http://svpow.com/category/open-access/ [1] http://svpow.com/category/stinkin-mammals/stinkin-publishers/ http://svpow.com/category/stinkin-mammals/stinkin-publishers...
- diminish 14y ago
  it is not about only universities who may pay for subscription somehow; independent scientists must be able to have full access to scientific publications for free, long term. otherwise, paywalls and closed software will make a global human science impossible going forward to 21st century.
hack_edu 14y ago
> The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its business model The only way to win the war is through convincing the librarians and administrators who cut the checks for an institution's subscription. They're who drive prices.
- scott_s 14y ago
  Not necessarily. The academics are the ones who provide both the product and the labor.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  But they are only going to cut checks for journals that the departments are asking for. The more demand for a particular journal, the harder it is for the library to not cut that check.
  - hack_edu 14y ago
    True, but its very rare that an institution subscribes on a journal-by-journal basis. The pricing structure makes this approach ridiculously expensive and impractical. The price of a dozen or two a la carte journals will usually cost as much as a package of all the journals in that subject area (including the ones you want specifically). Some journals, like the journal Nature, are only available when you buy a massively expensive package. Individual journal subscriptions also often come in packages grouped by years; you have to buy a different set if you want a set of volumes from 1890-1940, 1940-1990 or a package that sunsets all volumes over 10 years prior. This isn't as much a problem when you back subscription packages. The downside of purchasing this way is that when your subscription lapses, you lose all the access you had (since you don't 'own' it). Were you to go the a la carte method, you 'own' them but have to pay a $100+ 'hosting fee', per journal on a yearly basis. The ridiculous prices to subscribe to a la carte journals is one of the primary problems, and the biggest gun that he publishers have to our head.
    - meej 14y ago
      I think it's also worthwhile to recognize that librarians have been trying to sound the alarm on this problem for at least a decade. In 2001, Kenneth Frazier, Director of Libraries at UW-Madison, wrote an article in D-Lib Magazine where he named such journal packages the "Big Deal" and urged library administrators not to buy them. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html

cjbprime 14y ago

Just the mathematics department, no?

lamnk 14y ago

This concerns only the math faculty, not the entire university.

sswezey 14y ago
And for those not familiar with the German university system, each department of a university is a lot more autonomous than departments in the US. They sometimes have different admissions, different libraries, different policies, etc.

davidacoder 14y ago

The title on HN is incorrect. Only the mathematics department is canceling their subscriptions, not the whole university.

kaha242 14y ago

a) TU Munich is not necessarily the leading Technical University... it depends very much on 1) the department and 2) the criteria one wants to apply b) the announcement is (up to now) only for the math department

debacle 14y ago

I think this is a great step. Publications are an outdated business model and they can't and shouldn't survive at their current (in my opinion egregious) costs.

ktizo 14y ago

Might only be the maths department, but Elsevier is sitting on a whole lot of loose snow right now and this is yet another snowball picking up speed somewhere further up the mountain.

hack_edu 14y ago

Its worth pointing out that Elsevier also controls the whole line of Lexis Nexis products. Academic publishing, especially journal subscriptions and research databases, is one of those most entrenched industries there can be. It might not be as fashionable as hating on Elsevier but Gale, ProQuest, ACS, CSA and company make a hell of a lot of money through exclusive contracts with smaller publishers. Any new entrances to the industry are locked out from all valuable content or choked before they can even get going. This is all at the expense of libraries and universities, and by proxy, your tax dollars and tuition. The industry is in need of massive disruption, has been for a decade now, but wrestling their IP seems an impossible feat.

draz 14y ago
I thought PLOS (http://www.plosone.org http://www.plosone.org) was created to be a disruptive agent
- hack_edu 14y ago
  I'm unfamiliar, are they a business or just a platform? As much as I'd prefer it all be open, the only way to send a message is to work in their sphere. Contracts between publishers and libraries exist in the conference rooms, decided by committees. No librarian or administrator will be convinced without face time a salesman who can convince them to dump their past decades of loyalty. How can a librarian, one trained in maintaining and preserving access to materials, trust that a new and free platform will be around for years? The publishing houses have been around for centuries, literally. Somebody needs to come along and start by making the little, obvious things right. Their next goal is to avoid acquisition long enough to make a difference. Every so often a promising business comes along, only to be bought out by the big guys and slowly dismantled (see SerialsSolutions). Also, science and math journals are only an aspect of journal publishing, albeit the most pricey of subjects of which to build a collection. These subjects have always been the first to lean towards open access but they stand in distinction from the rest of a library's collection.
  - mbreese 14y ago

robertwalsh0 14y ago

It's great to see mathematicians taking up, Tim Gowers's rallying cry and have the courage to step away from Elsevier. The academic publishing industry for periodicals is going the way of the journal industry. Apps like Scholastica (http://scholasticahq.com/ http://scholasticahq.com/) allow anyone to start their own peer reviewed journal and manage its content. Very soon, they'll even be able to publish open access (http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-access-publishing-is-on-the-way-with-scholastica http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-access-p...). Full disclosure: I'm working on this application.

GoodIntentions 14y ago

atm, we seem to be crushing their webserver. If you're feeling kind, don't click. The page copy is just two sentences, one in German, one in English - essentially: "due to unsustainable pricing, the math department has canceled Elsevier subs"

growt 14y ago
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
fpp 14y ago
their admins seemed to have blocked access now: "...Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013..." http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nu3pKnbU3FsJ:www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier+http://www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nu3pKnb...
diggan 14y ago
Also: >@http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)
- fpp 14y ago
  sorry for that - hopefully such an unusual event also provides positive feedback to your directors for their decision.

coolowencool 14y ago

Related article published about a month ago in the Guardian about frustrations with journal publishing models: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scientific-journals http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blo...

keithvan 14y ago

The HN link is giving a 403 -- anyone have an alternative link?

amouat 14y ago
There really isn't anything to see except: "Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013."
pbhjpbhj 14y ago
See http://coralcdn.org/ http://coralcdn.org/ - they provided a caching mechanism that I've been using for what seems like a decade or so - you add .nyud.net to the domain part of the URL and you get their cached copy. Hence, this provides a short term mirror of the OP's link: http://www.ma.tum.de.nyud.net/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier http://www.ma.tum.de.nyud.net/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier

amolsarva 14y ago

These things are super expensive. The value they provide is a network effect --> prestige from history + high quality peers reviewing the work that's published The elite universities can "make this" themselves -- they did something like this in philosophy (led out of Michigan) when I was in grad school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_Imprint http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_Imprint The reality is these days that most/all papers are shared online in these PDF exchanges long before 'real' publication. And as a result the journal articles hardly matter as much. I would guess this is most true for stuff with less lab work and more "pencil" work like math or logic or philosophy.

auggierose 14y ago

I got my Ph.D. from this university. I am proud of you, TUM!

user24 14y ago

> Low Bandwith Version of this site due to large amount of requests: > Aufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen hat das Direktorium des Zentrums Mathematik beschlossen, alle abonnierten Elsevier-Zeitschriften ab 2013 abzubestellen. > Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013. > @http://news.ycombinator.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/ visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)

stfu 14y ago
Somewhat odd that "Germany's leading Technical University" isn't able to handle a few Hackernews visitors showing up
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  I remember Reading HN now had a million accounts (btw can anyone confirm?) if that's true then top story at the beginning of the US day could generate a lot of requests, and if the university has a plain cms that is updated once a week by the departmental secretary then it's pretty unlikely they have seen much traffic, ever. To be honest I would be interested if pg could publish what kind of click through rate the various links generate - could even be a counter next to the story.
  - oellegaard 14y ago
    Last time when we were at the bottom of HN we got thousands of visits in very short time. I could imagine being at the top is very heavy on bandwidth.
    - brazzy 14y ago
      I've had a Site survive the HN frontpage and a slashdotting on super-cheap shared hosting. But that was a few KB of text and two very small Images.

brazzy 14y ago

Go, TUM! The first time I've actually felt proud of my alma mater :)

random123 14y ago

The link is working again now, but has been replaced with a low bandwidth version. (The original version just contained additional images.) The amount of request generated by this site was unfortunately a bit too much for the web server. (I'm one of the server admins ... and have been in fear of a real DDOS attack during the last couple of minutes. ;) )

GoodIntentions 14y ago
If it isn't asking too much, would you mind telling HN about it? what kind of traffic you saw, what hardware/software platform you have in place?
- random123 14y ago
  The link got about 13000 hits so far, thereof about 5000 hits with a referrer value containing "ycombinator". But as only 3481 hits occured during the 3 days before it was posted on HN, I guess that actually about 9000 hits are due to HN. I think the hardware platform is not really interesting, as the DDOS was only caused by the worker pool of Apache2 being too small. Each hit of the site creates about 30 additional request for css,js,png and gif files. So 9000 hits in 3h mean something like 270.000 requests in 3h. Apparently this was too much for 50 workers.
  - GoodIntentions 14y ago
    so if my math is right approx 25 req/sec put paid to it. interesting. Perhaps I should re-think inlining js and css on landing pages.
  - fpp 14y ago
    That looks as if the majority of the hits went directly over to the google cache links mentioned here (otherwise most likely this would be > 50k hits at least). When the link was hitting the HN front page your site was already blocked - when the first person mentioned that the site was not reachable this HN post had about 60 points - anyway guess its the req/sec that killed you (and no cache - guess you don't have that much static content). Have you seen many facebook referrers from people who repost HN front page stories to Facebook?

aheilbut 14y ago

I wonder what happens to access to archives of electronic journals when subscriptions are cancelled -- with paper journals, at least they're still in the library.

andre3k1 14y ago

The market for the distribution of peer-reviewed academic journals fascinates me. It is ripe for disruption. More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles. Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose. There is a burgeoning movement toward open access journals. More info on the subject available here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

bgilroy26 14y ago
Is really ripe for disruption? I would think that if it was very ripe that the arXiv would serve a broader purpose than it currently does. The problem is a social one -- academics want to post their work to well respected journals, because the respect is the currency that their future career advancement runs on. A market is ripe for disruption when every stakeholder except the entrenched competition wants the product to be different AND that difference is readily available through low-cost solutions. Typically the new, low-cost solutions that haven't already been tried, are only recently available through new technology. Given the maturity of the market and the social nature of the business, (even considering how squeaky clean arXiv's brand is versus Paypal's) I think the same people who aren't very excited about putting arXiv papers on their CV are those who would never dream of taking their money out of a big, traditional bank. Even though all of their money is digital, etc.

its_so_on 14y ago

I'd be interested to know how much money they're saving. On its face, it seems like ONE university in every rich country should pay for 'all there is' (within reason). Or, at least the leading journals in each field, and some of the other resources posters have mentioned above. Like it or not, America spends a huge amount on research as published in journals, and if a country has no subscriptions to it at all they're simply cut off from that. I don't have a horse in this race: I would be very happy if academic publishing were completely different. However, realistically, these things should be 'somewhere' in a country the size (and wealth) of Germany, available for consumption by its interested scholars.

zerostar07 14y ago

Another point worth noting is that many (should be all) papers are readily available (legally) as preprint PDFs (which is usually almost the same as the final version), if the creator bothers to place a preprint online, and most academics would be happy to email you a copy of their work should you ask anyway. So it's not like publishers are forcing someone in a walled garden, it's just that academics still prefer to be in there. So, these attacks on Elsevier are shooting the messenger, but it seems it's the only way to get to the sender here.

Tobu 14y ago
I've seen the occasional clueless student tell me they didn't think it was legal for them to upload their own papers (they might have signed some contracts with illegal clauses to that effect for all I know). Counting on the authors to unbreak academic publishing works if you already know what you want and can deal with a bit of hassle searching and e-mailing, but it doesn't work at all for skimming or looking at complete proceedings. I suspect the publishers are fighting a bit harder against competing archives. For example, because they are sometimes involved in organising conferences, they can entrench themselves by offering an archive to the participants (giving a small sponsorship in exchange for the understanding the organisers won't offer the same archive), locking out the rest.

thespin 14y ago

Mathematics Departments are going to be the heros in lowering the costs to access scholarly journals, in all disciplines. It has to start somewhere. Low cost, online education, which is a popular topic here on HN, is a neat idea. But to really make it worthwhile, the student needs full access to all academic journals. For that to happen, the paywalls have to come down.

zerostar07 14y ago
I agree, besides maths and physics have arxiv. The difficult part is forcing the life sciences people out of their antiquated ways of thinking.

planetguy 14y ago

So what's the endgame here? Drive Elsevier out of business? Watch as its hundreds of journals (some great, some not so great) vanish? What happens to the zillions of papers in existence in those journals, currently available from their website with a few clicks? (What does happen to the copyright holdings of an entity that goes out of business?)

m_for_monkey 14y ago
Many would gladly pay a reasonable price.
zerostar07 14y ago
The authors of the papers are also copyright holders.I believe this is worth pointing out: Elsevier is not offering some irreplaceable service by having a web server. Their value mostly lies in setting up the journal review teams and process, and making sure they live up to their standards.
- xamuel 14y ago
  Negative. To publish in an Elsevier journal you must sign away your copyright. The authors do NOT hold copyright. And that's part of why the situation is so ridiculous and urgently needs to be fixed.
  - zerostar07 14y ago
    I stand corrected then. But they can still distribute a preprint according to their terms: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes (with some exceptions such as The Lancet and Cell Press. See also our information on electronic preprints for a more detailed discussion on these points)* Unfortunately, that excludes some of their best publications.
xamuel 14y ago

vga256 14y ago

Fucking A. Twas about time. Also read Scott Aaronson's thoughts on this issue in general. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=912 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=912 Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring

bborud 14y ago

Good. Very good. Something needs to be done about scientific publishing and the excessively high tolls on knowledge. The publishing industry may claim that it performs some vital role, but I find it extremely unlikely that this is the optimal way of reviewing and disseminating knowledge. I think we are morally obliged to do a lot better. To me the paywalls around scientific publishing is a lot more than a question of principles -- it may end up impacting my life. Five months ago I was diagnosed with kidney failure. If left untreated, this will kill me. What I do the next months may have a big impact on my quality of life. When your doctor tells you that you have a condition that will kill you, I would assume that most of you would try to educate yourselves on the topic. This includes reading recent papers. Well, good luck with that. For absolutely every aspect that I have looked into I keep bumping my head into paywalls. Some articles are only available if I pay a lot of money -- and I have no way of knowing up front if the article will be worth it. Kidney disease is a narrow enough subject for publications to be very expensive. I am continually asked what the hell I need access to these articles for since I am not a doctor. Imagine that: people acquiring knowledge because they need it and not because the publishing industry needs the money... I think it is time academia started taking knowledge seriously.

imeikas 14y ago
You may try to contact the authors in the papers directly. In addition to getting the paper you might even get to discuss the issues directly with the authors.
- bborud 14y ago
  At this stage I am mostly trying to get an overview and trying to find out what I need to know. This means reading a few books to give me the background knowledge I know and it means surveying what is being published to identify topics I need to explore. This usually means _skimming_ a lot of material to determine if it is worth my time right now. If I need to contact the author, that slows the process down a lot.
- kragen 14y ago
  Yes, there is a tradition in academic publishing of sending several unbound copies of the printed article to the original author, which they will then send to people who write to them requesting them; these copies are called "offprints". Your mileage requesting copies of articles from surviving authors might vary, but mine has generally been very good.

eleitl 14y ago

Just the Mathematics department, not the whole university.