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I am an academic at a UC who publishes in Elsevier journals. I support this. I don't want copyright for anything I work on. I also work in a field where patent/IP stuff would not be relevant, so I view all of my work as public domain as far as I am concerned. With my code I either do CC0 or MIT licenses.

I have had to publish in journals that are not open access -- mostly I just make pre-prints available to anyone who wants them and encourage my students to use sci-hub if they need to find something we don't subscribe to.

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do you put your author's final version in https://escholarship.org ?

Do you ever use https://oapolicy.universityofcalifornia.edu/ ? (it's only open to senate faculty right now, be we are rolling it out for all ~240k UC employees)

(disclosure, I'm the nominal tech lead for these)

Elsevier requires that authors do not do that - they can only provide copies of their papers in response to requests.

How about we have an autoresponder framework, like MailMain, that can handle mail with messages like

[paper-request] bacterial population analysis under exposure to fox news

And it would respond with the proper paper or papers attached.

Papers have dois so it’s way easier than asking for by name.

And some kind of index that lists possible "request" locations? Perhaps even with some kind of "hyperlinks". I think we may be onto something big here.

https://github.com/Zingle/smtp2http

Does that include HTTP requests? :)

This could be an extremely interesting legal argument, but I suppose the language used requires a request in 'writing' of some sort, which I suppose HTTP requests would fail.

They write your a nice letter with “GET /paper.pdf HTTP/1.1” ;)

how about a request form that ostensibly takes an email address and a name, and an optional text field and then automates the process of sending the paper (or a hidden (unique) link to that paper) to that email address. it need not store those details anywhere, except that it optionally sends an email to the author (if there is a message). the only concern is spam.

One of our academics at Harvard does exactly this via their lab website.

Or better... have an email address like papers@authorname.com which receives requests with the title of the paper in the subject line, and a piece of software then receives the request, waits for a random amount of time (anywhere between 10 mins to a couple hours), and then sends the paper to the requester.

It would seem that the author personally received the email and replied with an attachment as a "professional courtesy", while completely automating the process in the background.

that would be to hard to use. the idea is to make the experience as similar as possible to clicking a link to download without making the document directly available for download, but make it look like a personal request that could be handled manually. by submitting a form, that is achieved. the form ensures that the right document is selected, and the process can be automated without error. but for all we know, it just sends an email to the author who might handle the request personally.

> This could be an extremely interesting legal argument, but I suppose the language used requires a request in 'writing' of some sort, which I suppose HTTP requests would fail.

Are emails not considered communications "in writing"?

Attach a printer to the access logging of your web site ;-)

The last time I published in an Elsevier journal, I was allowed to deposit it in my institutional repository with a 2-year embargo period. Still sucks, but if your repository software supports embargo periods (my university's did), it means you can deposit now and it'll be automatically switched to open public access when the embargo times out, which is at least better than never (and less error-prone than hoping I remember to post it in two years).

I also posted the PDF on my personal website immediately, on the theory that they are probably not going to sue me personally over my own paper. Not impossible, but I haven't gotten a C&D.

That's not exactly true -- they allow authors to post their papers, e.g., on arXiv; and on institutional repositories such as eScholarship after the end of an embargo period. Here is the page with the (very complicated) terms: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing

Elsevier 100% does allow authors to post preprints (most due). However, there are some journals published by Elsevier that don't.

Awesome, thank you for doing that!

> I have had to publish in journals that are not open access

Why is that?

It's your job... publish or perish. It was especially true more than 5 years ago. Most academics have been working 20years or more.

Career progress in academia is mostly based on publications in top-tier journals in your field. If those journals aren't open access, you're required to publish in closed access journals if you want to (1) get a Ph.D., (2) get tenure, etc.

Correction: you do not need to publish in closed access journals to get a PhD. However, getting a tenure-track faculty position in the life sciences at a major US university is almost impossible without publishing in Science, Nature, or Cell (an Elsevier journal), none of which is open-access (without paying an exorbitant fee).

PLOS is a top-tier indexed refereed open-access journal.

If by "top-tier" you mean "sufficient to impress the hiring committees at Stanford or Harvard", sorry, no. Personally, having no interest in faculty jobs to begin with, I'd vastly prefer to deal with PLOS than Elsevier, but good luck persuading the average biosciences postdoc to choose it over the Holy Triad of prestige journals.

Top tier in terms of review practices and reproducibility. If you mean Elsevier, Wiley, Springer by "Holy Triad", you can convince them to publish almost anything as a scientific article if you pay enough and format correctly. PLOS is applied medical sciences only, for now. We need more of PLOS-like journals.

Do you have no academics in your academic hiring committee?

I meant Science/Nature/Cell (the exact titles may differ in other fields, but that's how we roll in the life sciences), and no, you can't simply buy your way into these, they are already raking in money from their subscribers anyway. What is extremely common, unfortunately, is scientists exaggerating the meaning and importance of their results to make their manuscript appeal to journal editors, and everyone in the field has their own personal s##t list of high-profile articles that never should have been published, let alone in a prestige journal. Hell, many of the people on hiring committees will agree with me! And yet the hiring practices remain largely the same, year after year.

EDIT: just to be clear, the hiring committees I'm talking about tend to be nearly 100% academics (at least the ones I've seen). University faculty don't let the bean counters make important decisions like this.

That's fine. But that isn't what top tier means in the context of career advancement.

So then why are the people in control of such decisions so corrupt? Shouldn’t there then be a movement of academics seeking to defund these departments captured by corrupt corporate interests and reissued to actual scientists doing scientific research?

If by "corruption" you are implying some kind of quid-pro-quo, that's not how it works. Academia is both extremely decentralized and extremely competitive, and any department that prohibits publishing in non-OA journals is unilaterally disarming and will find hiring and retention very difficult. It's basically the Prisoner's Dilemma in action.

I would love to throw out the entire system and start from scratch (this is not an uncommon sentiment, especially among ex-academics who moved to industry), but the only way this happens is if the major funding agencies impose these decisions from the top down. And that is indeed how the most progress has been made, thanks to the NIH, HHMI, and so on.

Hasn’t there been a strong academic with enough confidence in their work to not publish with these “top tier” journals? Surely if the work is groundbreaking enough it would be able to stand on its own and thus erode the prestige of these journals? I mean, the rest of the world has already moved on to the internet age where prestige is earned through likes/shares/forks/follows/stars/retweets/upvotes, from developers to rock stars, reporters to POTUSes.

There can be only one reasonable explanation how such a strong disequilibrium has been kept in status quo. Money is flowing to the right hands. Which, like it or not, is the definition of corruption.

As I explained in another comment in this thread, it is extremely unlikely that there is any quid-pro-quo exchange of money for favors by the journal publishers. I've heard plenty of third-hand rumors of star professors having an easy route into the prestige journals, but it's always because of a personal connection to an editor and/or exceptionally good reputation. I've never heard any rumors of money changing hands; the incentives are all wrong.

What I've seen actually happen is much pettier; without going into a ton of detail, it's full of perverse incentives and typical sloppy human psychology, even by exceptionally brilliant and otherwise admirable people. Academic communities also tend to be structurally very conservative and decentralized - thousands of tiny feudal lords working in loose collectives, aided by tens of thousands of low-paid apprentices. Organized change-from-within can be exceptionally difficult in this environment, especially since the apprentices are merely temporary workers, but also very smart and ambitious people who are difficult to replace quickly.

I'm basically paraphrasing the words of many more senior and successful former colleagues here, usually spoken in tones of despair or disgust. I suspect most would be happy if Congress simply passed a law forcing liberal OA policies for everything that federal money touches, because that's the money that really matters. So unfortunately we circle back to corruption, as the term normally applies to US politics: some rich person needs to start a crusade and spend millions of dollars competing with the publishing lobby. Everyone, right or left, should want their tax dollars to be spent more effectively than this.

I’m not talking about straightforward exchange of money for favours... rather, it’s a systemic “meta” corruption where money and favours are flowing to the right influencers who are incentivised to maintain status quo.

The impact factor of PLOS is 2.8

Not awful, but certainly not top tier

My boss would prefer to hold a project for six months and add significance versus publishing in something <4

For comparison, Nature is 41.6, Cell 36.2, Science 37.2, according to Google.

More people needs to read and submit articles in order that impact factor to rise. A journal's impact does not increase on its own.

Why would you want a tenure-track position in a department whose existing members aren't capable of evaluating the quality of work themselves, but instead just trust Science, Nature, and Cell to have done a good job at evaluating it?

You know, those journals don't actually do that great a job...

With all respect, this attitude from the researchers side is exactly what maintains the system and what Elsevier and co take advantage of. Signed: a professor who never published with Elsevier.

Well, most of those who did not have that attitude are not in academia any more, so expecting that is not really going to help. It's the ones who cause that (i.e. use journal name as a quality indicator when looking for people to hire) that should be looked towards.

Even if you already have a PhD and tenure, many academic papers are collaborations, and so if the top relevant journals aren't open-access then you need to publish there if one of your co-authors needs a PhD, tenure, etc. Given that much research involves at least one PhD student, it's very hard to move out of the system.

(My personal policy has been to avoid submitting to closed-access venues, but accept it if my coauthors needed it. However, I don't do reviews for these venues.)

Is not it better then to publish preprints to some open repositories and reference those repositories in scientific works. And use journals only for career, but never for research. This way they will gradually lose their role.

If this is true, then one way to look at it is that making career progress in academia is ethically untenable, for the time being. I know many people who have chosen not to be in academia, and they are doing fine. Comparing myself with family and friend with PhDs and tenure, and being in academia (them, not me), I am doing fine without any of those.

In statements of the form "if you want to get x, you have to do y", when y is something morally repugnant, then that should lead to questioning whether filling your want for x is the only way to be happy.

I recently had a commenter disagree over my criticism of a company that locked in their customers and then gouged them. The commenter said something along the lines of "well, the people wanted to make more money, so it's OK that they did what they did" (where what they did happened to be very bad for users). No, it's not OK. A personal desire for some end does not make any means whatsoever OK.

But I'm making a general statement there, not criticizing you. I realize this is simply how it's done now in academia, and if you're embedded in that, you mostly get a pass for the time being, but I do admire those who stand up and work against it.

Because academia is a run by a bunch of cronyist elitists who care about impact factor more than they care about science.

There was a window in time, more than a million internet years ago, when all of the good code was written by a bunch of 13 year olds. Assembly was used but machine code was the superior weapon of choice. Something like: These are the opcodes, we calculate things in hex, deal with it you noob. They were always there of course but the academics came in ever larger numbers and tried to forge something prestigious out of the field. These unsophisticated developers who didn't learn how to code started uttering all kinds of authoritatively sounding nonsense. While the 13 year olds bragged about their kung fu being better than yours the professors kept talking about how hard and labor intense everything was. Clear noob talk with a cherry on top. Tears from laughter.... I remember one kid saying: So it has to run on millions of computers and run for millions of cycles but we should sacrifice performance for ease of development? Because those poor developers bla bla bla? There was real elitism among the 13 year olds, no one cared for something that kind of worked, the prestige was all in squeezing out more performance. During academic construction the man behind the curtain was clearly visible. He wrote everything in basic because machine code was ohh so much to hard. His own words.

A long story short: The ferengi alliance hired countless mercenaries and defeated the borg. Today you cant even send an sms message or distribute a text document without paying tribute to the grand nagus one way or another.

...I think I actually understood that.

Not sure whether I should be happy or not, but such is life

Anyway, if my parsing is correct, this poster laments the way that academic publishing was subverted away from doing something unique and covering new ground through actually making substantial scientific breakthroughs in favor of higher visibility and accessibility where the metrics of having published something to be quoted by others became more important than publishing a truly revolutionary piece.

This is paralleled by the shift in attitude w.r.t. programming languages. In the days of computing yore, the emphasis was around trying to wrangle the machine into doing what you wanted it to do, and you stayed as close to the metal while doing as possible to keep it fast, because you had to squeeze as much out of what you had as possible. You were comfortable with the software/hardware boundaries being present because that's what it took. As languages developed however, much of the "skill" at the time was chipped away at in the name of abstraction, modularity(many functions getting implemented as libraries), and linguistic/runtime hand holding by things like garbage collecting VM's. This overhead allowed more accessibility in terms of the initial knowledge and kill barrier to entry to be significantly lowered, as the challenge and prestige of wrestling with the machine to get things done performantly slowly gave way to maintaining an encyclopedic knowledge of libraries and frameworks that can be kludge together to give a roughly working facsimile of the desired system. Programming therefore degenerated from somewhat harder scientific endeavor to make breakthroughs in fully utilizing more performant hardware to the max with highly optimized and performant code, to using increased hardware performance as a buffer to allow sloppier, easier to think about abstractions to do the lifting, making software development a glorified popularity contest where frameworks of the week competed for more programmer mindshare for the sake of competing rather than actually doing something in and of themselves. This had the end goal of making terrible (in terms of minimal footprint to run) software easier to write, and easier to hire people to work with.

That's what the poster seems to mean by "the Ferengi hired tons of mercenaries and defeated the Borg." The Borg being the 13 year old purist, the Ferengi being those that wanted terrible software that did well enough.

Shift this back to academia, and you see the same dynamic. Academics are pushed to publish or perish, so the actual quality of scientific breakthrough has nose dived in favor of throwing as many results out there to be added to someone else's mindshare as possible. The entire network and incentive structure behind it being fiscally motivated by the interest of the closed access journals.

Damn. Not the most straightforwardly worded, but I can see where this guy is coming from.

yes, you should be happy. You not just managed to understand but also managed to translate what I wrote into much more readable form.

That said, I didn't mean to hate on academia. I just wanted to describe what creating a field looks like. They made a lot of effort and had the best of intentions but end of the day they all had to earn a living working for the man. That is the real issue and it lives outside academia for the most part. I also think of academia as the archivers of knowledge. They never take that as a compliment but it really is.

I attempted to illustrate the different mind set [be it poorly]. Academics are respectful by default. 13 year olds are the exact opposite.

To try a thought experiment: Imagine releasing software after you've insulted every programmer you know and made fun of every last bit of code they wrote. To put it mildly: You might want to have another look at your creation. You might want to do that every day for the next 2 weeks. You might want to scrap that feature if you cant sign of on it as the closest thing to perfection humanly possible.

Your university commercialization office will disagree. Check with them. From what I understand, it is illegal to release your code in CC0 or MIT unless you have taken permission from the commercialization office (Some universities allow GPL without explicit permission). Have you checked your contract ? Your work is not yours if it has any value. The value belongs to the university (mostly) - which also means you have no incentive to work on valuable stuff.

I think Elsevier is least of UCs problems. It's a distraction from the real ones.

Grad student at Berkeley. The commercialization office only takes an interest if your work is high profile enough and has enough commercialization potential. Plenty of UC researchers release CC0 or MIT license code without issue.

Elsevier may be only one of many problems for the UC community, but that doesn’t mean it’s a distraction—- millions have been wasted every year subsidizing their profits. And Elsevier’s rent seeking business model is a problem for more than just the UCs. Hopefully this decision will end up being Elsevier’s death knell.

To Elsevier CEO: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It.

Elsevier’s model is being disrupted and there is no going back.

Aren't you assuming the risk though? Like, in practice they might not care, but in writing they could care...

Assuming risk is part of the judgement required in science.

There’s stuff that requires IRB, then there’s a whole bunch of judgement and risk.

As enabled by Bayh–Dole Act [0]. Reversing this law would put publicly funded research back into the hands and minds of the public. This is the very law that creates a perverse incentive for universities to operate as for profit corporations, even with public dollars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

Wouldn't that just put it back in the hands of the Federal Gov where it would languish like it did before?

Work produced by the Federal Government are usually automatically in the public domain.

Clarification: This thread is referring to work funded by the Federal Government (not done by Federal Government). And I would agree with @sitkak - that perhaps that BD act needs to be cut down - for starters. But we do need more to fix Universities.

Surprised that you were downvoted because this was actually the problem that led to the act: IP for work done for the federal government (not by the federal government) was often difficult to make use of.

Those seeking to use government-owned technology found a maze of rules and regulations set out by the agencies in question because there was no uniform federal policy on patents for government-sponsored inventions or on the transfer of technology from the government to the private sector.

From the wikipedia article that was referred to: Prior to the enactment of Bayh-Dole, the U.S. government had accumulated 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5% of those patents were commercially licensed

Not saying I understand the complexities but an outright repeal doesn't seem like it would address this underlying systemic problem. Maybe times have changed.

They haven't changed. Some government agencies excel at basic research (NIH, DOE, NASA, etc.), but for a multitude of reasons, they don't do product development. (And having worked at one of these agencies for several years, I think it would be a terrible mistake to change this - even though I personally have very mixed feelings about how Bayh-Dole has worked out.)

Are more than 5% of university patents commercially licensed these days?

Some large fraction of patents are useless and will never be commercially licensed because it would never make any sense to pay a dime for them. A further fraction would demonstrate market failure if they were licensed - there's something much better that isn't patented, so if people are obliged to do the worse patented thing AND pay commercially for a license then we've made everything worse. So "more than 5%" might be a bad sign anyway.

This is what happened to audio codecs for years for example, several alternatives are superior to MPEG Audio Layer III (today you should use Opus), but the MP3 patent holders could expect their revenue to keep flowing for their inferior alternative anyway.

A certain kind of person really wants a patent, the same way someone might really want to win themselves a Hugo. I guess employer can think of it as a relatively expensive employee retention benefit, OK, we'll pay for your useless patent filing and we'll get you a laminated front page you can pin up in your cubicle. Go you.

Imagine a VC that demanded ownership of 100% of all code you developed and user data you collected in return for accepting any investment from them. Would any good startup take the money? Without Bayh-Dole, the government would be in the same position as that hypothetical VC.

Innovation is about money, not ideals. More money flowing into research universities is a good thing.

> Would any good startup take the money?

I would wager most grants given by the federal government go to universities or non-profits, so it seems like it would make perfect sense to make them release their research publicly.

As a grad student at UCSB, it only took a single email to get formal permission to release all my code under the BSD license.

But did it include clause 3?

FWIW, UC's open source guidelines https://security.ucop.edu/resources/open-source-software-lic...

Grad student at Berkeley for 3+ years. I've never heard of anyone mention or discuss this before among many people constantly publishing reasonably valuable code under open source licenses.

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