10 ms·

Elsevier journals – some facts

184 points by kanzure 13y ago

nraynaud 13y ago
I just came here to say that accessing papers is a pain in the butt when you're not an academic. I've not been near an university in the last decade (I hated my time there as a student, I leave them alone now), but I need access to some papers for my personal projects. I resort to begging people in the academic field to send me papers, you can't pay 45€ a paper you don't even know if it will be useful, I read 10s of them. And, even worse, this high price doesn't even pays the authors. A music album costs 10€ and the author gets all his money out of it plus you can listen to it on youtube to decide before buying. Academics tend to cite papers for completely different reasons than for implementation, but you don't know if a paper will be useful for implementation or not from the title. edit: and I couldn't find an option in scholar.google.com to filter only the free to view articles.
- return0 13y ago
  Well there are pirate proxies; the fact that they even exists is indicative of how broken things are
  - throwaway34899 13y ago
    What are the names of these proxies?
    - kanzure 13y ago
      > What are the names of these proxies? http://diyhpl.us/wiki/articles http://diyhpl.us/wiki/articles
      - throwaway34899 13y ago
        Many thanks
- quasque 13y ago
  Despite having what seems to be a reasonable level of access via my university subscription, I too sometimes have the same problem, especially for older papers. Some online resources I quite like for this: http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar - paper requests fulfilled by people who happen to have access http://www.libgen.org/ http://www.libgen.org/ - large collection of scientific articles (and other literature), searchable by DOI http://www.sci-hub.org/ http://www.sci-hub.org/ - proxy service for accessing publisher collections; very unreliable though Hope this helps with your research!
  - nraynaud 13y ago
    thanks
  - Fomite 13y ago
    See also the Twitter hashtag #icanhazpdf
    - RighteousFervor 13y ago
      I didn't find that method helpful, but I guess YMMV.
- tzs 13y ago
  Have you looked at DeepDyve [1]? [1] http://www.deepdyve.com http://www.deepdyve.com
  - jpmattia 13y ago
    Either the fees are hidden on the site or I need more coffee.
    - nraynaud 13y ago
      after a bit of clicking, I had a banner saying $40/month for unlimited
    - tzs 13y ago
      They are somewhat covered in the FAQ, linked to from the bottom of the page. Some excerpts: ------------- The Freelancer Plan is a free plan with the option to purchase $20 packs which allows you to rent any 5 articles for up to 1 year from the start of the plan. Once an article has been rented, it can be read as often as you like until its expiration in 30 days. Any pre-paid rentals that remain unused after 1 year will become void. ------------- The Professional Plan is $40 per month and entitles you to "virtually" unlimited rentals each month, i.e. you can rent up to 40 articles per month and/or purchase and download up to 40 PDFs per month for a 20% discount. If you need even more access, please contact us because you are extraordinary! ------------- 5-minute rentals are a great way to scan through any rentable article, for free. You get to read the complete full-text of an article in your browser for 5 minutes. You can do as many 5-minute rentals as you want for free-- just not the same article twice in the same day. Rental tokens are available for unlimited rental access to the articles for 30 days. Copying, printing, and downloading aren't included with 5-minute rentals.
      - nraynaud 13y ago
        I would gladly skim 40 articles a month. I guess I skim more like 400 internet pages a day, these don't include a lot of scientific paper because it's a pain in the butt to find them (you have to look for them, you never stumble on them), but there's no reason I would not skim 100-200 on month if they where as common as normal webpages.
- frik 13y ago
  search for "filetype:pdf" http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=filetype%3Apdf http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=filetype%3Apdf
  - nraynaud 13y ago
    wonderful, thanks
- MrGunn 13y ago
  There's a filter in Mendeley's research catalog: http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22cat+pictures%22 http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22cat... for showing only open access papers. (disclaimer: my employer)
- fludlight 13y ago
  Emailing the authors also works. They generally like to see humans express interest in their work and emailing you a PDF requires minimal effort on their part. Many publishing contracts will also let them publish a full article PDF on their personal website.
dmunoz 13y ago
This is a long post, with a wealth of information that will take some time to digest. The comment section also has contribution from well targeted participants, and replies from Timothy Gowers himself, so it's probably best to comment anything substantial there. However, I would just like to say that I am very happy to see Timothy Gowers is still on this case.
biehl 13y ago
Impressive work! I guess I ought to FOIA some Danish universities...
robertwalsh0 13y ago
When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine." Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologists-launch-new-online-journal http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologist... (Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)
- paulgb 13y ago
  > You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. Also, recording artists don't receive taxpayer money.
  - nraynaud 13y ago
    note that neither do record companies.
    - teddyh 13y ago
      Actually, yes, record companies do receive taxpayer money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
      - nraynaud 13y ago
        let's talk about proportions and tax law here. I don't find my argument countered in any ways. 1) this is a collection that doesn't go to the general budget, it's a directed levy. 2) it's not as if the record companies main income and business model was to sell to public institutions. Whereas most of the scientific articles are bought by publicly funded laboratories, hospitals, universities (in the non-US world) etc.
jdmitch 13y ago
Why are private universities subject to the FOIA? Or am I wrong in thinking that Oxford and Cambridge are private?
- jvc26 13y ago
  Oxford and Cambridge are not private.
- Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
  There are only four private universities in the UK (and I confess I'd only heard of one of them, Buckingham): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingd...
return0 13y ago
1. Build databases where scientists can enter their methods and their results only, preferably in machine-readable format 2. Make it mandatory for publicly-funded scientists to enter their data into said databases 3. Let them publish all their introductions and discussions to whichever ancient publishing house they want 4. do good science p.s. It really pisses me off when elsevier's sites take 50 seconds to give me the damn pdf. or when their javascript doesn't let me increase the font size. Or to open references in another tab.
- omnisci 13y ago
  I'm working on something similar to what you mentioned right now @ stirplate.io However, to "make it mandatory for publicly-funded ..." is the difficult part. I'm with you 100% (I'm a neuroscience PhD) and this needs to happen,but it needs to come from the financial groups such as NIH/NSF who really just aren't good at dealing with this kind of stuff. They do make it mandatory, but they don't provide real resources for scientists to access these tools. Either that, or they are insanely difficult to use, so people don't do it. I'm shooting for getting raw data from scientists, populating a huge f'in database that is linked and categorized, and if/when the group makes the data open, allow scientists to work off of that huge database of raw, unedited data. (this is specific to life sciences) I've learned the following when talking about my company: 1. Investors don't want to hear about open science because they immediately get stuck on "what if they don't share". That tends to end the conversation. 2. Scientists themselves complain about the system, but are unwilling to change behaviors. So we have to address their fears in order to start making change (that is what I'm working on now) 3. Schools and funding agencies are using technology from 1996 and thinking that is sufficient. People need to be educated, and this is hard to do. This isn't impossible and it's happening slowly...the mindset of academics just needs to change. (IMHO)
  - kanzure 13y ago
    Your stirplate.io mail server is rejecting emails ("kgonzales" from your HN profile). I was going to invite you to irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap (we do some non-academic do-it-yourself neurophysiology stuff on occasion).
fsk 13y ago
The problem is that (in the USA), most academic research is funded via taxpayers (either via outright grants or indirectly via student tuition and government tuition assistance). The professors write and edit and referee the papers for free. Then, that research is copyrighted and owned by a corporation, who is allowed to extract economic rent by charging for access. Professors have to publish in the top journals (owned by these corporations), because that's how they advance their careers. BUT, if all the professors switched AT THE SAME TIME, it would work. If you're the only professor who switches, you're just ruining your own career.
- Brakenshire 13y ago
  Or, if the funding body mandates the switch, as is starting to happen: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&page=browse http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&p...
fdej 13y ago
Elsevier is just a symptom of the disease that is academic publishing. We need to get away entirely from the 17th century approach to disseminating scientific knowledge. But as long as your chance to get a job in academia is proportional to (number of publications * exp(nobleness of journals)), most scientists will just continue playing the same game, and publishers will continue exploiting them.
dougmccune 13y ago
Throwing this out there for anyone working on a startup in the academic journal space. I'm on the board of SAGE Publications, which is (depending on how you count), the 5th or so largest publisher in the space. See this diagram for where SAGE fits: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_publishers.png http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_pub... If you’re doing a startup in this space and want to reach out, please contact me. I live in SF and would happily take you out for coffee or meet up for a beer. My contact details are on my HN profile. SAGE is a 100% family owned business. My grandmother is chairwoman, my dad and I are on the board. I'm a coder working in an unrelated startup for my day job, living in SF. We’re not dinosaurs trying to bleed the system dry until our business model collapses, but at the same time I wholeheartedly acknowledge the fundamentals of the journals business are antiquated and I believe they will radically change eventually. Academia is incredibly complicated and moves at a glacial pace. So if you’re interested in seeing the world of academic journals from the inside, please get in touch. I can get you in contact with anyone in the SAGE organization at every level.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pizza_boy 13y ago
  Hi Doug. Cool graphic. I'm one of the founders of https://publons.com https://publons.com. Our mission is to speed up academic publishing by turning peer review into a measurable research output. Would love to take you up on your offer to meet for a beer and have sent you an email.
- RichardPrice 13y ago
  I like Doug a lot, and his family who run the business. His grandmother is terrific. She and her husband started the business several decades ago. I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years talking to Doug and others at Sage about the future of academic publishing. I've always enjoyed the conversations, and they have always been open to hearing my radical views :) (I'm the founder of Academia.edu).
nraynaud 13y ago
there is some kind of drug dealer spirit in the idea that the current price depends on the past price, and you can't really cancel.
username223 13y ago
> How easy is it on average to find on the web copies of Elsevier articles that can be read legally and free of charge? It was quite a bit easier while CiteSeer still worked, and before Google started indexing stuff behind paywalls. Usually it was easy to find a draft or pre-print.
knz42 13y ago
There's a article coming up at the TRUST workshop this year (co-located with PLDI) which addresses this issue: http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e (workshop: http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/ http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/) It describes a new dissemination model where journals are entirely dismissed (including open access), in favor of a true peer-to-peer network, open reviews, guaranteed timestamps, and free access to articles. Hopefully the full text of the article will be online as the workshop date comes close...
dredmorbius 13y ago
Related: "No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?[1] ", by Frank Thadeusz at Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-l... [O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900. Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom. Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire. I've posted a few more thoughts (and more on copyright) here: http://redd.it/23xrkd http://redd.it/23xrkd
delinquentme 13y ago
This is written like an academic paper. Shorten it. Seriously. I know it takes more mental processing to simplify things but you're limiting your feedback pool to people who have 30 minutes to read something.
robertwalsh0 13y ago
Also: here's the a treatment of the post as an infographic: http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographic-view-of-gowerss-elsevier-expose http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographi...

184 points by kanzure 13y ago

I just came here to say that accessing papers is a pain in the butt when you're not an academic. I've not been near an university in the last decade (I hated my time there as a student, I leave them alone now), but I need access to some papers for my personal projects. I resort to begging people in the academic field to send me papers, you can't pay 45€ a paper you don't even know if it will be useful, I read 10s of them. And, even worse, this high price doesn't even pays the authors. A music album costs 10€ and the author gets all his money out of it plus you can listen to it on youtube to decide before buying. Academics tend to cite papers for completely different reasons than for implementation, but you don't know if a paper will be useful for implementation or not from the title. edit: and I couldn't find an option in scholar.google.com to filter only the free to view articles.

return0 13y ago
Well there are pirate proxies; the fact that they even exists is indicative of how broken things are
- throwaway34899 13y ago
  What are the names of these proxies?
  - kanzure 13y ago
    > What are the names of these proxies? http://diyhpl.us/wiki/articles http://diyhpl.us/wiki/articles
    - throwaway34899 13y ago
      Many thanks
quasque 13y ago
Despite having what seems to be a reasonable level of access via my university subscription, I too sometimes have the same problem, especially for older papers. Some online resources I quite like for this: http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar - paper requests fulfilled by people who happen to have access http://www.libgen.org/ http://www.libgen.org/ - large collection of scientific articles (and other literature), searchable by DOI http://www.sci-hub.org/ http://www.sci-hub.org/ - proxy service for accessing publisher collections; very unreliable though Hope this helps with your research!
- nraynaud 13y ago
  thanks
- Fomite 13y ago
  See also the Twitter hashtag #icanhazpdf
  - RighteousFervor 13y ago
    I didn't find that method helpful, but I guess YMMV.
tzs 13y ago
Have you looked at DeepDyve [1]? [1] http://www.deepdyve.com http://www.deepdyve.com
- jpmattia 13y ago
  Either the fees are hidden on the site or I need more coffee.
  - nraynaud 13y ago
    after a bit of clicking, I had a banner saying $40/month for unlimited
  - tzs 13y ago
    They are somewhat covered in the FAQ, linked to from the bottom of the page. Some excerpts: ------------- The Freelancer Plan is a free plan with the option to purchase $20 packs which allows you to rent any 5 articles for up to 1 year from the start of the plan. Once an article has been rented, it can be read as often as you like until its expiration in 30 days. Any pre-paid rentals that remain unused after 1 year will become void. ------------- The Professional Plan is $40 per month and entitles you to "virtually" unlimited rentals each month, i.e. you can rent up to 40 articles per month and/or purchase and download up to 40 PDFs per month for a 20% discount. If you need even more access, please contact us because you are extraordinary! ------------- 5-minute rentals are a great way to scan through any rentable article, for free. You get to read the complete full-text of an article in your browser for 5 minutes. You can do as many 5-minute rentals as you want for free-- just not the same article twice in the same day. Rental tokens are available for unlimited rental access to the articles for 30 days. Copying, printing, and downloading aren't included with 5-minute rentals.
    - nraynaud 13y ago
      I would gladly skim 40 articles a month. I guess I skim more like 400 internet pages a day, these don't include a lot of scientific paper because it's a pain in the butt to find them (you have to look for them, you never stumble on them), but there's no reason I would not skim 100-200 on month if they where as common as normal webpages.
frik 13y ago
search for "filetype:pdf" http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=filetype%3Apdf http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=filetype%3Apdf
- nraynaud 13y ago
  wonderful, thanks
MrGunn 13y ago
There's a filter in Mendeley's research catalog: http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22cat+pictures%22 http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22cat... for showing only open access papers. (disclaimer: my employer)
fludlight 13y ago
Emailing the authors also works. They generally like to see humans express interest in their work and emailing you a PDF requires minimal effort on their part. Many publishing contracts will also let them publish a full article PDF on their personal website.

dmunoz 13y ago

This is a long post, with a wealth of information that will take some time to digest. The comment section also has contribution from well targeted participants, and replies from Timothy Gowers himself, so it's probably best to comment anything substantial there. However, I would just like to say that I am very happy to see Timothy Gowers is still on this case.

biehl 13y ago

Impressive work! I guess I ought to FOIA some Danish universities...

robertwalsh0 13y ago

When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine." Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologists-launch-new-online-journal http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologist... (Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)

paulgb 13y ago
> You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. Also, recording artists don't receive taxpayer money.
- nraynaud 13y ago
  note that neither do record companies.
  - teddyh 13y ago
    Actually, yes, record companies do receive taxpayer money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
    - nraynaud 13y ago
      let's talk about proportions and tax law here. I don't find my argument countered in any ways. 1) this is a collection that doesn't go to the general budget, it's a directed levy. 2) it's not as if the record companies main income and business model was to sell to public institutions. Whereas most of the scientific articles are bought by publicly funded laboratories, hospitals, universities (in the non-US world) etc.

jdmitch 13y ago

Why are private universities subject to the FOIA? Or am I wrong in thinking that Oxford and Cambridge are private?

jvc26 13y ago
Oxford and Cambridge are not private.
Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
There are only four private universities in the UK (and I confess I'd only heard of one of them, Buckingham): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingd...

return0 13y ago

1. Build databases where scientists can enter their methods and their results only, preferably in machine-readable format 2. Make it mandatory for publicly-funded scientists to enter their data into said databases 3. Let them publish all their introductions and discussions to whichever ancient publishing house they want 4. do good science p.s. It really pisses me off when elsevier's sites take 50 seconds to give me the damn pdf. or when their javascript doesn't let me increase the font size. Or to open references in another tab.

omnisci 13y ago
I'm working on something similar to what you mentioned right now @ stirplate.io However, to "make it mandatory for publicly-funded ..." is the difficult part. I'm with you 100% (I'm a neuroscience PhD) and this needs to happen,but it needs to come from the financial groups such as NIH/NSF who really just aren't good at dealing with this kind of stuff. They do make it mandatory, but they don't provide real resources for scientists to access these tools. Either that, or they are insanely difficult to use, so people don't do it. I'm shooting for getting raw data from scientists, populating a huge f'in database that is linked and categorized, and if/when the group makes the data open, allow scientists to work off of that huge database of raw, unedited data. (this is specific to life sciences) I've learned the following when talking about my company: 1. Investors don't want to hear about open science because they immediately get stuck on "what if they don't share". That tends to end the conversation. 2. Scientists themselves complain about the system, but are unwilling to change behaviors. So we have to address their fears in order to start making change (that is what I'm working on now) 3. Schools and funding agencies are using technology from 1996 and thinking that is sufficient. People need to be educated, and this is hard to do. This isn't impossible and it's happening slowly...the mindset of academics just needs to change. (IMHO)
- kanzure 13y ago
  Your stirplate.io mail server is rejecting emails ("kgonzales" from your HN profile). I was going to invite you to irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap (we do some non-academic do-it-yourself neurophysiology stuff on occasion).

fsk 13y ago

The problem is that (in the USA), most academic research is funded via taxpayers (either via outright grants or indirectly via student tuition and government tuition assistance). The professors write and edit and referee the papers for free. Then, that research is copyrighted and owned by a corporation, who is allowed to extract economic rent by charging for access. Professors have to publish in the top journals (owned by these corporations), because that's how they advance their careers. BUT, if all the professors switched AT THE SAME TIME, it would work. If you're the only professor who switches, you're just ruining your own career.

Brakenshire 13y ago
Or, if the funding body mandates the switch, as is starting to happen: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&page=browse http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&p...

fdej 13y ago

Elsevier is just a symptom of the disease that is academic publishing. We need to get away entirely from the 17th century approach to disseminating scientific knowledge. But as long as your chance to get a job in academia is proportional to (number of publications * exp(nobleness of journals)), most scientists will just continue playing the same game, and publishers will continue exploiting them.

dougmccune 13y ago

Throwing this out there for anyone working on a startup in the academic journal space. I'm on the board of SAGE Publications, which is (depending on how you count), the 5th or so largest publisher in the space. See this diagram for where SAGE fits: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_publishers.png http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_pub... If you’re doing a startup in this space and want to reach out, please contact me. I live in SF and would happily take you out for coffee or meet up for a beer. My contact details are on my HN profile. SAGE is a 100% family owned business. My grandmother is chairwoman, my dad and I are on the board. I'm a coder working in an unrelated startup for my day job, living in SF. We’re not dinosaurs trying to bleed the system dry until our business model collapses, but at the same time I wholeheartedly acknowledge the fundamentals of the journals business are antiquated and I believe they will radically change eventually. Academia is incredibly complicated and moves at a glacial pace. So if you’re interested in seeing the world of academic journals from the inside, please get in touch. I can get you in contact with anyone in the SAGE organization at every level.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pizza_boy 13y ago
Hi Doug. Cool graphic. I'm one of the founders of https://publons.com https://publons.com. Our mission is to speed up academic publishing by turning peer review into a measurable research output. Would love to take you up on your offer to meet for a beer and have sent you an email.
RichardPrice 13y ago
I like Doug a lot, and his family who run the business. His grandmother is terrific. She and her husband started the business several decades ago. I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years talking to Doug and others at Sage about the future of academic publishing. I've always enjoyed the conversations, and they have always been open to hearing my radical views :) (I'm the founder of Academia.edu).

nraynaud 13y ago

there is some kind of drug dealer spirit in the idea that the current price depends on the past price, and you can't really cancel.

username223 13y ago

> How easy is it on average to find on the web copies of Elsevier articles that can be read legally and free of charge? It was quite a bit easier while CiteSeer still worked, and before Google started indexing stuff behind paywalls. Usually it was easy to find a draft or pre-print.

knz42 13y ago

There's a article coming up at the TRUST workshop this year (co-located with PLDI) which addresses this issue: http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e (workshop: http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/ http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/) It describes a new dissemination model where journals are entirely dismissed (including open access), in favor of a true peer-to-peer network, open reviews, guaranteed timestamps, and free access to articles. Hopefully the full text of the article will be online as the workshop date comes close...

dredmorbius 13y ago

Related: "No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?[1] ", by Frank Thadeusz at Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-l... [O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900. Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom. Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire. I've posted a few more thoughts (and more on copyright) here: http://redd.it/23xrkd http://redd.it/23xrkd

delinquentme 13y ago

This is written like an academic paper. Shorten it. Seriously. I know it takes more mental processing to simplify things but you're limiting your feedback pool to people who have 30 minutes to read something.

robertwalsh0 13y ago

Also: here's the a treatment of the post as an infographic: http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographic-view-of-gowerss-elsevier-expose http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographi...