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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.
One less food source for a parasite.
THE SOFTWARE, IT NO WORKY!!!
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
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But you have to pay thru the nose to view it...
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.
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 .
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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 ...
Check out my novel.