Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community | Hacker News Reader

Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community

hrk.de

172 pointshaimau37 comments

"Elsevier [...] is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable."

Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use where I can just get knowledge and science that I need for projects. Elsevier simply destroys that out of pure greed and nothing else.

Elzevier isn't the only one, either. While not as egregious, there is Proquest, who locks private researchers out of many databases and digital works (mostly historical works) that are not available anywhere else. If one is not an enrolled student or faculty member of an institution that pays for an institutional subscription, there is no way to gain access to their databases.

This type of intellectual elitism disgusts me. It's particularly bad when I would pay for access to some of their databases, but I'm not even given the choice.

One thing to keep in mind is that European universities have encouraged this situation by insisting that faculty publish in "legitimate" journals, where "legitimate" means "published by one of the major academic publishing companies." It has been a problem for CS faculty who have to convince universities that conference proceedings carry more weight in CS than journal articles, which is why you see Springer publishing "official" copies of so many conference papers (while "unofficial" copies can typically be found at the authors' personal webpage).

Their journals are not even doing their job properly and have published a plagiarised version of a paper already in Nature:

https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_...

I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.

Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those are what are considered "legitimate."

Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.

distill.pub IS a legitimate journal.

From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.

Not according to European universities, at least for the purpose of judging faculty CVs when making hiring or tenure decisions.

Hell yeah.

I am so, so glad that Open Access is being fought for instead of being appeased with concessions.

Agreed.

The folding of other consortia modelled after DEAL during negotiations has been shameful so I am glad that DEAL are standing firm.

I can't help but think sci-hub has something to do with their ability to walk away.

That's pretty much undeniable. That said, German academic libraries have also supposedly spent a lot of effort into making sure that accessing the content is still as painless as possible, e.g. through making Inter-library Loan easier.

There is a semi-successful media campaign against studies published in "less than reputable" journals in Germany right now. Elsevier always features prominently as "a good example", while Open Access often is associated with "bad practices".

Geez, I wonder who might have paid for that campaign.

A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor. We should boycott all of them

It would probably be better to attend the members meetings of the professional societies that manage such conferences and voicing your objection to Elsevier.

The most powerful boycott would be not to submit papers to Elsevier journals. But given current academic hiring practices this is hardly going to happen, at least not in my field.

German Universities could no longer accept Elsevier papers for hiring purposes going forward. If they did it with 2 years lead time maybe they can tip the scales without punishing the researchers

I think this is great. Hopefully the entire academic world will switch to Open Access for all future publishing. Then by fixing copyright lengths we can just wait them out.

Strikes me as a lost war for Elsevier

The war is fought on more places than apparent.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j...

They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good luck with that) or ad hoc laws, they can't be forced to give up the golden eggs goose otherwise and they know it.

In the meantime, it would be nice if everybody uploaded their reviewed papers to arXiv. No one should have to pay for new content already been paid by the taxpayers.

IIRC it won't be that easy in germany. Copyright is non-transferable so Elsevier has a license. Additionally we have the Verwertungsrecht, which is part of the non-transferabl part of the copyright law and gives the author of a work the exclusive and inalienable right to publish, copy and transmit their work as they see fit.

In Germany, there stands nothing in the way of all the professors and students simply republishing their work elsewhere and Elsevier could not nothing about it.

What they can't do is publish copies of works that Elsevier has edited (significantly). So if Elsevier contributed to the document then the editor as Elsevier and by proxy Elsevier has the copyright on those parts IF they are significant enough (significant is a huge burden of proof here, spelling mistakes being corrected don't count).

That's very good news, yet I imagine the publisher can claim rights over composition, layout, typesetting and the pdfs themselves. This is quite a problem as who's going to do all that again, particularly when it comes to dead authors (ocr won't cut it). Nowadays you have your own digital version and you could simply distribute that (if we ignore keeping track of published page numbers), but what you get for papers up to more or less the 90s is scanned documents, it's unlikely that you can find other versions around. The transition to a sane model won't be frictionless nor fast, it might be cheaper to make a bid for the publishing companies outright (fees of subscriptions are simply absurd, their whole business model is a legal racket).

For dead authors, the inheritance regulates who gets to control the copyright. Usually inheritance works out, the state puts a lot of money into finding lost relatives if everything else fails.

The publisher to my knowledge cannot claim copyright over composition, layout, typesetting or the PDF unless they can show they had significant copyrightable work in each step. (Copyright in Germany first requires you to do some significant intellectual work, where significant changes based on what you do but science usually has a higher barrier)

If the PDF contains a trademark of theirs then that's a problem.

Generally a pre-print PDF should be available in almost all cases and could be published without Elsevier's input. If not that, Universities do archive the Tex files (or similar inputs) if possible so they could take those.

They may have all past assets, but in the absence of agreement and Elsevier's reputation for not dealing fairly, people are going elsewhere and will continue to do this in in greater numbers.

I think Elsevier can achieve temporary stalemate at best.

you can still access the old articles, university libraries usually have the paper editions and cancelling the subscription does not disallow anyone from using the paper editions they once bought.

Those were the days, but going back to photocopy world won't be very good for productivity and maybe the quality of research. Being able to check everything easily is an incredible advantage. And then there's this problem of disappearing or lost issues that some might remember fondly. Quite frankly, if it comes to this everybody will get pirated copies or ask a colleague for theirs. I love paper though, a few things exist solely on it (and maybe they are in another country, how much better digital copies are cannot be overstated).

I don't doubt people will get pirated copies instead of using the paper versions, but the existence of the paper versions allows them to pretend they read the paper in a legit way. I'm not taking sides for that sort of behaviour or against it, just that I expect that will be the workflow.

Nobody has to pretend to have read articles in a legitimate way; a researcher only has to be able to give a legitimate citation for the article. Citations should be sufficient for other researchers to find the article in question and BibTeX data is easy to find for most published work. I frequently google the title, authors, and sometimes year (if there are multiple versions from different years) and download a PDF from wherever (rarely the official publisher, because logging in is too difficult), and then just find BibTeX data as needed when I am writing a paper.

So just don't reference not accessible references. Win win for all.

Elsevier is an European publisher. I wonder if EU countries could choose to nationalize it.

Nationalise Elsevier? EU does not simply "nationalise" companies on a whim.

Simply fine them into bankruptcy first.

Nice meme

I wonder when they'll finally give up.

Great, because this leads to less references to Elsevier papers, which will cause their importance to decline. Papers and academics "worth" are measured by the number of references. If the papers are not free to access for academics, their importance declines.

I had the same trouble with the ANSI, ISO and Lisp papers behind expensive paywalls and just chose to ignore those. In the end the free versions won and the greedy elitists lost.

Gigantum (https://docs.gigantum.com/docs --- https://gigantum.com/) is trying to solve this and related problems by making the whole research environment open-access and reproducible (code, data, results.. not just the manuscript).

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