University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access (sciencemag.org)

The mammoth University of California (UC) system announced this week that it will stop paying to subscribe to journals published by Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher. From a report: Talks to renew a collective contract broke down, the university said, because Elsevier refused to strike a package deal that would provide a break on subscription fees and make all articles published by UC authors immediately free for readers worldwide. The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. The 10-campus system accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output and is among the first American institutions, and by far the largest, to boycott Elsevier over costs. Many administrators and librarians at American universities and elsewhere have complained about what they view as excessively high journal subscription fees charged by commercial publishers.

Comments

Good.

[cmdr_klarg]

One less food source for a parasite.

Story makes california sound wrong

[goombah99]

I totally get the idea of open access. And it's laudable. It's also a choice. You have approximately three choices when you publish: 1.
publish in an open access journal, and pay it's editorial and compositional page charges,

2. Publish in a pay-for access journal, which may have lower compositional page charges

3. publish in some open and free journal (are there any good ones?)

If you go to a pay-for-access journal and ask them to make all of your author's papers free to access you are basically insane. Sure you can ask but you are asking the journal to go bankrupt or at a minimum work at cost. If you add onto that a request to reduce page charges too, well .... At this point you should just ask for a pony as well.

One could imagine that journals should pay authors for their articles. THat makes some logical sense but it just shifts the cost to the access.

I like the pay-to-publish model myself because if there is barrier it can, if used correctly and not as a vanity press, result in a journal I'm more likely to want to read and more proud to publish in too.

The right argument is if in the age of digital publishing we could not find some less expensive process. But that's not what UC is asking.

But the key thing to keep sight of is that the editorial process should try to stamp out crap. That's the whole reason I'm willing to pay. I can't read everything and if every search term has a load of crap then it's useless.

However that's not hopeless. Google ate alta vista's lunch because it provided more relevant searches. So it is possible to beat down the cost and still beat down crap. However, when it comes to science articles I still prefer peer review to key term search as a way to beat down the crap.

Finally, UC should consider just requiring it's authors to put their articles in a non-copyrighted form on Xarciv before sending them to elsevier. They won't save money but if they genuinely want free access to all UC author pubs it's already available to them. I think it's all about money and not about free access

Re:Story makes california sound wrong

[Sique]

It's a commercial negotiation. Elsevier wanted something. UC wanted something else. They couldn't agree, so no contract. Apparently UC has somewhere else to go, and Elsevier does too. Everyone is carrying their business elsewhere. That's how it goes.

There is no point in arguing who was "right" in the negotiations. It's a free market, not marriage counseling.

Re:Story makes california sound wrong

[alvinrod]

But the key thing to keep sight of is that the editorial process should try to stamp out crap. That's the whole reason I'm willing to pay. I can't read everything and if every search term has a load of crap then it's useless.

The people reviewing the publications are often other researchers in the field who aren't paid for their services. These journals aren't employing anyone who understands whether or not the articles are good. They simply manage the entire process of submitting publications, finding people to peer review the work, and communicating responses back to the author. If they're good, they try to keep the whole process reasonably fair and free of potential bias the would come from outside of the research itself.

Obviously none of that's free. The researchers could always collectively do it themselves since outside of the organizational aspects, they're the ones producing and reviewing the research, but most of them would be crap at managing journals or have no interest in doing so. So here we are back to square one again.

The real problem is that because copyright in general has gotten so out of control, we have this interesting side effect that tax-payer funded research can be locked away from tax payers. That's a good enough reason to take issue with this in and of itself. If the government wants to step in and set much more strict copyright limitations on tax-payer funded research that means anything publicly funded becomes publicly available after only a few years, I think that would be a good compromise.

Payment is not guarantee of quality either. There are a lot of predatory journals that prey on the need for researchers to publish or perish and will gladly publish whatever shit anyone cares to crank out as long as you'll pay their fee. That's the problem with fucked up incentive structures. They always beget unscrupulous little cottage industries that spring up around them.

Re:Story makes california sound wrong

[david.emery]

...
The people reviewing the publications are often other researchers in the field who aren't paid for their services. These journals aren't employing anyone who understands whether or not the articles are good. ...

Actually, in my experience, the editors-in-chief (EiC) (who usually do get paid) are chosen from researchers in the field and do understand the basic technology/science/topci, even if they aren't an expert on the specific article in question. Several times I was asked to review an article by an EiC, because he knew if the article wasn't good, I'd do a thorough job skewering it (and he suspected the article was not good.) I finally got mad and said, "You know these are junk. Can't you send me something good to review?" He laughed and said, "OK. It's just you're so good at the negative review. I have problems finding people who will take the time to fully critique a bad article."

My friend who's EiC for a journal in another field (chemistry) and I debated this. He points out, as do other posts here, there are legitimate costs that have to be covered, and being EiC takes A Lot of time. So we need a means for covering that, either by user/reader fees or by writer/contributor fees. My response is "OK, but (1) PROFIT is not a legitimate cost to be covered. (2) Administrative costs need to be minimized, and a for-profit organization has no particular incentive to do that." At that point, we pretty much agreed-to-disagree, but we did agree that the current model was not working well.

Re:Story makes california sound wrong

[reg]

The UC system already requires that all works be deposited in their own OA system (https://escholarship.org/).

The reporting in this is a little vague - not sure if that's just the standard of journalism or intentional. The negotiations broke down because the UC system wanted Elsevier to waive their OA publishing fee since they were already paying an access fee (basically Elsevier want full access fees for journals with both closed and open articles), and Elsevier refused - they insist on being paid to on both ends by the UC system for OA articles (both for publishing costs and access costs).

Elsevier are fighting a losing battle for their livelihood here - the world is going OA, and once it does Elsevier (and their ScienceDirect platform which gate-keeps academic publishing metrics) is going to collapse. They're trying to squeeze every last cent out now, and if they give in to the UC system here, then every university on the planet will demand the same deal.

What is not clear right now is if the UC system is going to limit faculty involvement in Elsevier journals. At one point in the negotiations they had threatened to prevent UC faculty from being editors or reviewers for Elsevier journals. It is not clear if they can force that on Senate members (tenured faculty), but the Senate can force that on their own members (like they did the OA policy which precipitated this renegotiation). In addition to OA and access fees, Elsevier gets an in-kind contribution of millions of dollars in free labor from UC faculty.

Re:Story makes california sound wrong

[Solandri]

Elsevier are fighting a losing battle for their livelihood here - the world is going OA, and once it does Elsevier (and their ScienceDirect platform which gate-keeps academic publishing metrics) is going to collapse.

Open access has nothing to do with it. Elsevier began and established its business model in an age when publishing, distribution, cataloging, and searching research papers were relatively expensive. It provided that service and charged a reasonable fee for it. I'm reminded of when the Cold Fusion paper first made the rounds when I was in college - researchers were sending each other faxes of faxes of fax copies of the paper, to the point where it was nearly illegible, because they were too anxious to wait for the paper to make it through the regular journal publishing and distribution process.

The Internet and modern computer databases have driven the cost (both in dollars and time) of those things to nearly zero (and the copies are as pristine as the original, unlike faxes). That's what's squeezing Elsevier out. It could've been OA or another service offering the same service at a lower price. Both would've squeezed it the same. The fundamental driving force behind the change is the Internet, not OA.

Elsevier's Response is Available...

[dark.nebulae]

But you have to pay thru the nose to view it...

Elsevier publised fake journals anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when they were caught selling fake journals with fake studies/articles to actual doctors, to get them to prescribe Merck pharmaceuticals to patients, even when that is a worse or dangerous choice?

Yeah, that is literal bodily harm and potentially murder ... for profit.
And a corporate culture like that does not just change. You can bet that that was just the tip of the iceberg.

So fuck Elsevier. In reality's eyes they are in one category with mass-murderers.

I agree with California

[GLMDesigns]

These journals should be available to all.

A generation ago when the journals had to be printed and distributed then of course there had to be a hefty fee. But now, it should be placed on the web. The submitters do the research and the work writing the article (and they're not paid); reviewers aren't paid; submitters do the formatting (so there is no cost there).

The cost is almost entirely website access and data storage .

Re:I agree with California

[GLMDesigns]

I would say that a small fee should allow you to access all articles, in all journals, that are in electronic format.

I miss not being able to read the journals (yes, I'm a geek).

Paywalls Hamper Research

[Only Time Will Tell]

Good! Nothing is more frustrating than when you're searching for research articles only to hit a paywalled article your library or company hasn't paid for. Worse, you often don't know if the article is even relevant and don't want to spend $30-50 or so to see if it is. I was last trying to find some writings on sulfide bridge formation, and found only papers that were completely offtopic, or were out of date, and the only way you could determine this was to read the first several pages in (abstracts are the worst). These journal conglomerates need to adjust their business models so that end user scientists can get what they need without paying through the nose for mostly irrelevant info. Even allowing say 50 free articles a month would help.

Good!

[thomst]

It's about time!

Elsevier has been paywalling scientific research - most, if not all of which was paid for in part or in whole by taxpayers throughout the developed world - since 1947. It's way past time that what amounts to its systematic theft of what should be completely public data came to a screeching, grinding, clattering halt.

Yes, yes, it's also been responsible for any number of unethical practices, including offering Amazon gift vouchers to researchers who agreed to give the company a 5-star rating on the platform, and publishing sham journals, but that's not the main reason it deserves to die. Nor is its campaign to persuade governments and academic institutions alike to shut down open access publication of scientific research, not just by lobbying for legislative restrictions, but by filing lawsuits against universities for allowing their academic researchers to publish open-access copies of their own research papers on their employers' servers.

No, Elsevier deserves to die because it has deliberately misused its virtual monopoly on academic publishing to prevent both researchers and the public from reading an enormous library of published studies, access to which is vital for new research to be conducted in a staggering number of disciplines. It should die because it insists on standing in the way of progress.

If the UC system doesn't allow Elsevier to bribe it into reversing its decision to divorce itself from the company's extortion-based business model, I suspect the remainder of the USA's public universities will swiftly follow its lead. I certainly hope they do - because every other college and university on the planet will undoubtedly follow suit.

The very next step after that should be that the state and national governments which provided funding for the researchers whose articles are still locked behind Elsevier's paywall demand the company surrender them to the public domain.

And fuck Elsevier's shareholders. They've been gorging at the public trough for far too long, as it stands ...