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If UCLA were serious it would simply walk from the negotiation.

THAT would send a message to all parties. It might actually spur some action on the part of faculty to get off their collective backsides and consider how every day they perpetuate an unsustainable system of scientific communication.

This letter and others like it are moves by third-rate negotiators. Faculty who make publication and review decisions simply don't care about the cost of subscriptions enough. If they did, Elsevier would be on the ropes, not calling the shots.

The letter UCLA sent out will receive widespread acclaim by a vocal minority, and go ignored by everyone else.

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> This letter and others like it are moves by third-rate negotiators

They're perfectly fine negotiators. They just aren't negotiating for open access, but using the threat of defection to extract better terms from Elsevier. That is both rational and achieves, in part and indirectly, one of the open access movement's aims: to reduce the power of journals like Elsevier.

The problem is that this tactic actually empowers Elsevier. Without a credible threat to the status quo, nobody at UCLA or any other university has any reason to change what they're doing.

It's hard to imagine anyone at Elsevier falling for this bluff. They probably came in with a 40% increase knowing they'd only get 20%. After the letter, they drop the increase to 20%, then everyone claims victory and goes home.

But each round in which the OA card is played makes the bluff that much less credible.

> this tactic actually empowers Elsevier

Power and profits are closely entangled. UCLA is extracting better pricing from Elsevier's weakened position as result of open-access competition.

> it's hard to imagine anyone at Elsevier falling for this bluff

What makes you think it was a bluff? When one threatens defection, one doesn't want to defect. That's why the defection is initially threatened, not acted upon.

What do you consider credible?

UCLA and other universities are in trouble because of their own doing. They relied on one publishing system and allowed it to grow so big that now this system is mishandling them for its own profit. Had they been more cautious of implications of their actions they would have avoided current situation.

University should immediately back out of negotiations as what they desire(open access) would never be fulfilled by publisher whose sole mean of income relies on subscription costs and search for/or build an truly open access communication system. Entering into another long-term contract with Elsevier would further delay the much needed reforms in currently unsustainable scientific publication process.

This mixture of self-confidence and uninformedness is somewhat sad.

As but one POI: open access also costs money, and Elsevier runs several open access or mixed journals.

You seem to blame this squarely on the faculty, and yet faculty have the least amount of freedom when it comes to publication venue. It's an unfortunate fact that academic success is inextricably linked to publishing in top journals. I'm not just talking about promotion either -- it's getting grants, compensation, being invited to speak, attracting students and postdocs, ensuring that they get a job later on, having an impact and generally receiving recognition from your peers. All of this is tied to a steady stream of publications in good journals. If Elsevier owns the best journals in your field, your options are to forego all that and hope for the best (works great if you are Tim Gowers or Terry Tao, for the rest of us...) or continue with the status quo. How many people would give up a career they've worked extremely hard to build to stand on principle? Very few. That is what you are asking of faculty here. It's sort of like global warming -- we know very well that the system is broken, but individually are powerless to change it. Concerted action at the national and international level is required.

"It's sort of like global warming -- we know very well that the system is broken, but individually are powerless to change it. Concerted action at the national and international level is required."

Unlike global warming I think that some individuals could really make a massive impact in this case. Funnily enough some of those individuals are studying global warming.

There are already moves at (larger than individual) levels to get to grips with this issue and I think that most affected parties are more than capable of getting to the knowledge source somehow through alternative means when required. If not, then they are in the wrong game.

FFS: Studies that are funded by tax payers or charities or whatever should be freely available. Studies that are peer reviewed by unpaid experts in the field should be published freely. I am happy to pay for journalism - that is something different.

"Studies that are peer reviewed by unpaid experts in the field should be published freely"

Unasked question: How does Elsevier a for profit business get away with having salaried UCLA professors review articles for free?

You say "You seem to blame this squarely on the faculty, and yet faculty have the least amount of freedom when it comes to publication venue"

I assume you are referencing this

> If UCLA were serious it would simply walk from the negotiation. THAT would send a message to all parties. It might actually spur some action on the part of faculty to get off their collective backsides

Then you suggest "Concerted action at the national and international level is required".

Who exactly is supposed to be responsible for organizing national and international action and to do what exactly, disband Elsevier? This is not a practical suggestion. A practical approach would be for the institutions that pay Elsevier for access, i.e the faculty/admins to get better organized and get better at negotiating.

asking faculty to consider the mere act of not reviewing (much less not submitting papers to) these top journals is a third rate negotiating tactic. A strong negotiator would simply walk out at this point. That would send a much stronger message.

> asking faculty to consider the mere act of not reviewing

But do you not think that a mandatory "DO NOT REVIEW" is authoritarian and heavy-handed?

If you are negotiating GitHub licenses, you will mandate that your employees do not contribute to open-source GitHub?

It's a tricky problem. The suggestion at hand was UCLA walk from the negotiation. Would that mean faculty at UCLA are given a mandatory "DO NOT REVIEW" order? I would have assumed their free labor would still be most welcome, especially from experts.

If UCLA walks, that would possibly cause other universities to follow suit, and I bet Elsevier would come back to the table with a better offer.

The way I see things, the universities are not organized at all and are being taken to the cleaners because of things like this. It looks like the people doing the negotiating on behalf of the faculty are in way over their heads and don't even realize how the game is played and are being out maneuvered at every turn by a savvy, massively powerful corporation for which this is pretty much all they do all day, every day.

Uh no actually referencing these comments:

"It might actually spur some action on the part of faculty to get off their collective backsides and consider how every day they perpetuate an unsustainable system of scientific communication ... Faculty who make publication and review decisions simply don't care about the cost of subscriptions enough."

Well I'm on the UCLA faculty and it's definitely being discussed pretty widely amongst my department.

Good to know. How many faculty have indicated in these discussions that they will materially change their behavior?

Email discussion started yesterday; amongst 20 or so faculty half a dozen agreed to not review. We'll probably discuss at the next faculty meeting or the holiday party that's about to start.

What are drawbacks to their careers from agreeing not to review? I understand that reviewing is really a community service and done without tangible or much intengible compensation. And reviewing is anonymous. For tenured professors, there should be few problems and Elsevier probably wont retaliate, or will they?

What are reasons for the controversay besides academic freedom?

Honestly nothing really. It’s more that there are papers that I am often the best person to review them (because of particular expertise). I often just don’t pay attention to where it’s coming from.

UCLA can't walk out and Elsivier knows it. A University which lacks a library containing the currently published scholarship is going to have a really tough time attracting PhD students. How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work?

The UC System should work with other schools to mandate open publishing. The only way to fix this is by removing Elsevier's power.

>>How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work?

Sci-hub?

Does UCLA filter scihub?

A better solution to the closed access problem would be to only cite open access articles. Sometimes that would mean not citing the original article but some open access meta article that made the findings publicly accessible.

I actually think it’s fair to not cite articles that you cannot reach with reasonable effort. It’s the authors choice to make it inaccessible.

Moreover, it is my understanding that if there's a good paper you want to get, you can often just contact one of the authors and get sent a copy.

It is slower and less convenient, but maybe not $10 million a year less convenient...

People regularly don’t respond to those emails. For older publications it might be hard to even find the email.

In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist.

Spending money on automating that process, and you might put most journals out of business.

"In the UK, you can order a photocopy of any journal paper via inter library loans. These often come from the British library, which has everything. I’d assume elsewhere similar solutions exist."

I'm sure I saw a device called a scanner somewhere. It seemed to transcend the worlds of paper and electronics.

I'm also from the UK and am old enough to remember life before "Brentrance" (newly minted term by me - meaning should be obvious) This issue of publication freedom is way more important or at least comparable, to Brexit in my opinion.

I'm not too sure what the perfect knowledgebase would look like but it probably is not the current one. For me it might be something like a curated MediaWiki (the software behind WikiPedia) - for me the killer feature is that an article in a wiki is just text and a few formatting hints. Text is first, formatting and other distractions come second.

I studied Civil Engineering in the UK around 1990ish. We had lots of closed off sources and refs (ISIS and others - from memory) - rubbish!

I've heard of many scenarios where the author loses access to their own paper. After moving on from a project it's easy to leave stuff on a school's server or on some hard drive in a closet.

I've asked several professors for scientific research and always got a paper back, although it was sometimes very slow.

> Does UCLA filter scihub?

I work at another UC, and we don't filter Scihub in any way.

this has barely anything to do with the lack of library access. The point is that if they refuse reviews emphatically it might reflect badly in future submissions they make to elsevier's journals.

How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work?

#icanhazpdf? It's perfectly good manners to ask a colleague for a reprint.

This is what's getting to me at the moment; I'm a student at a university, so I'm thankful to be getting a lot of the stuff I search for quickly available through my university (Shibboleth login etc.) but what I don't like is the fact that for anyone else, they literally can't see what I'm talking about. Before I was a student, I gave up trying to learn about my area of interest just because every single article was behind a paywall. Maybe it let me read the abstract and see a diagram.

I may have fallen out of touch with what sci-hub offers, since I only ever use it to find books now (books which contain articles which one can't find outside the books) but the last time I used it, it didn't have many of the articles I wanted to see.

I hate to think that there are others like me who want to get into diverse research only to be stumped at not even being able to read it. This problem seems to be larger in philosophy/Marxian economics/etc. in which you really do have to read the paper to get the argument, simply knowing the results provided isn't nearly enough, because the results often can't be condensed down to data.

I doubt any PhD student would consider that as a potential drawback when choosing an institution.

I did my phd in an institution with very minimal access to some of these publishers and while it was annoying I would not take it among the top 50 problems I had in my academic life. I can always request an ILL, or ask one of my friends in other universities if I wanted a paper badly. If however the paper is fairly replaceable as a citation I'd just get some other paper that's sufficient and cite that.

"I doubt any PhD student would consider that as a potential drawback when choosing an institution."

Absolutely. I would be rather unimpressed if someone studying to that level was unable to find alternative routes to the "source". It should be at worse a bit of a pain and at best helping to fix a sodding great travesty that has afflicted publication for decades.

You guys must exist in some alternative universe. In mechanical engineering, no access to journals is definitely a top 5 problem, not top 50.

How do you guys do goose chase research if only one out of five paper titles that catch your interest are immediately available. Inter library loan is bullshit that takes at least one full day to appear. What do you do until then?

Sci-hub. You use sci-hub. That's what I've been doing for years; I'm not affiliated with an institution so I can't afford subscriptions, and I need the articles so I can treat my illness.

When the system's broken beyond repair and the stakes are high, there's no point playing by the rules. That's why sci-hub was founded in the first place.

That's exactly the thing though. My field is niche enough, and it's applied science anyway, meaning that even the seminal papers are missing from scihub, let alone more modern and less-cited research papers. And no way for me to upload my stash.

Let's say your school's subscription ended. Would you throw your hands in the air and give up, or would you and others in your field work out a way to get the papers you need? Maybe you would just email each other asking for papers at first (at least in my field it is not uncommon for papers to be passed around by email despite the ease with which papers are accessed), and eventually someone with the time would just create some kind of unauthorized archive for your niche field (which new grad students would learn about from more senior grad students). There are plenty of other ways it might play out, but I doubt your ability to publish research would be seriously impacted by a lack of subscriptions to journals.

The question isn't so much whether life will move on. I agree with you that it will. The point is that it will be a top 5 problem. All the stuff that you say will almost undoubtedly be a massive impediment in the face of the kind of "I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it" types of research that PhD often involves.

I was always fascinated how people used to get access to articles from uncommon journals back in the days before the internet.

In fact I asked a researcher in India that question. He said that they will write a letter to the biggest library in India and attach a check for 10 rupees (like ten cents today) and they will eventually mail a copy of the article after a month.

We are all super used to having instant gratification access to whatever article we need that it can be quite surprising how people used to do (arguably better) research in older days.

For a year or two my University library was particularly bad at getting access to articles and in that time while it was annoying that I couldn't instantly check references I just learned to read the abstract very carefully and only request articles that I really need to read fully.

Besides, if the university is truly trying to be ranked among the best I'm sure they will at least make sure that alternative options are smoother. That's what my uni did - it made ILLs free.

I'm in no way saying that the older days were better. Of course, scientists should have ready access to all the literature they can consume. I'm just saying again that reform in the Grant and tenure process, discrimination, overworking, the graduate student system, lack of mental health support for stressful jobs, lack of permanent jobs other than professorship, shitty metrics by which researchers are evaluated, research misconduct, impact factor based dick measurements, etc are far more important problems for me than journal access.

> ask one of my friends in other universities if I wanted a paper badly

Surely, you see the problem here?

That would only be a problem if sci-hub also didn't exist

First of all, piracy is a workaround and not a legitimate solution to any problem. Second, it doesn't solve the root issue here--somebody has to have paid the inflated cost of an Elsevier subscription. Sci-hub doesn't exist in a vacuum.

piracy is a workaround and not a legitimate solution

Why not?

Piracy is a problem for content generation because somebody needs to get paid to generate the content. Elsevier does not generate content, it's a (parasitic?) gatekeeper using network effects to extract rents.

If content generation would be healthier and more vibrant without Elsevier, then piracy seems an appropriate and just solution. I don't see content creators lining up to defend Elsevier; quite the opposite.

(It's possible that someone could argue that Elsevier adds significant value for their cut, but I haven't heard anyone make that claim)

Why is it not a legitimate solution? Sometimes laws fail to catch up with technology, and copyright is a good example of that. Copyright law is based on the assumption that mass distribution is an industrial activity; today mass distribution can be done by ordinary people using common tools that we carry in our pockets.

I get the idea that skirting the law is not something we should generally encourage as the solution, but let's not get carried away and act like copyrights are some divine commandment and grad students using scihub are a bunch of evildoers.

Maybe it is a self correcting problem. Perhaps the moment Elsevier is so out of vogue that you can’t find a library or peer at another university with access is also the inflection point where Elsevier loses its network effect. Why would you license your work to a journal for which your peers and their institutions have no direct access?

If it were ever to reach that point, sure, I'll give you that.

This is what scihub & libgen are for.

On the flip side elsiver wouldn't be getting papers published from UCLA right? I don't know how that situation works. But UCLA is pretty big, so I would think they would be losing access to papers also.

> How are they supposed to cite relevant work without being able to read the work?

With sites like sci-hub, of course!

Pirating is basically never enforced against the downloaders. (It is more the uploaders that companies go after).

Sweden, all of it, walked out in July and we’re doing fine. I doubt any PhD students avoid our institutions because of it, and we somehow manage to get the papers we need anyway. Asking on twitter is effective, or directly from authors. And there’s always scihub...

Is scihub openly encouraged by faculty or librarians?

"A University which lacks a library containing the currently published scholarship"

When I was a PhD student I don't think I used the university's library to access a single paper. It is not at all hard to find papers on the Internet and the money paid for subscriptions is basically a waste. Even in fields where this is a shocking concept I suspect people would figure it out if they needed to do so.

UCLA can and absolutely should walk out of the negotiations, and put Elsevier in their place (the dustbin of history). The academic publishing system that exists today is based on the premise that wide distribution of scientific writing is something that requires industrial equipment, and that is just not true these days. Elsevier's power is an illusion; they are part of an obsolete industry that future generations will have forgotten and they know it.

UCLA may not have the power to walk away completely by itself. Outside research grants depend on publications in top journals and a single university still need those names.

What if bigger entities negotiate together? European nations, NIH, NSF, major foundations and UC system can propose creating top journals to compete with Elsevier. Or direct their grant recipients to publish in alternative open access journals.

Funders hold research money and universities grant prestige and job security. Elsevier is a big gatekeeper for both. If funders and universities work together, they can topple the status quo.

I think you are misreading the situation. Rather than a weak move, this is a small step in a long march. They are killing Elsevier but slowly enough to avoid disruption.

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