UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020)

That explains their acquisition of mendeley, their work on lab notebooks, acquisition of medical diagnostics systems...

If they actually do that, that is not represented in the link you provided. The whole page is about teaching materials about the field, and one piece of software to _simulate_ "real-world patient data systems".

On their whole website I couldn't find a single product/service that a company would use in their direct operative work (in contrast to training).

Why can't you just upload to arxiv and perhaps places like researchgate or academia.edu ?

They will spread these habits to their students and colleagues and as they move between institutions. UC is huge across all the constituent colleges and many parts of it are extremely prestigious, so UC grad students are the sort of people who will often end up as professors in other institutions.

I don't think Elsevier is really worried. This gold OA model is just sending the same quantities of money to them, just under a different name, and with the side benefit that everyone can read the published articles.

The real change will be when researchers stop publishing in the journals that they own -- noting that the costs to publish are so high because the prestige of journals means that fair competition can't happen. Sadly, it doesn't look like researchers are willing to take such a step -- or even to stop reviewing for these journals for free (see our pledge in this sense, https://nofreeviewnoreview.org/)

That's a strong word. Just because something is not digitized doesn't mean it's not there. Have you talked to a reference librarian? Material in archives may be inaccessible because of legal stipulations or just simply unindexed, or writings are known to exist only in manuscript - but "not online" or "in off-site storage" doesn't qualify.

Other notable efforts, mostly envisioned and led by librarians, are "dark" digital archives (LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico, etc) which usually have a mechanism to flip and "trigger" public access if the publisher vanishes; microfilming and other microform throughout the 20th century; Hathitrust / Google Books; and as others have mentioned, scalable and sustainable (cost-wise) off-campus depositories.

Changing everyone's ability to know things is a much taller order than changing some people's ability to know things. I would not be where I am without Wikipedia or the internet. Growing up, I had no educated adults around me. If I grew up without the internet, I do not see how I could have learned many of the things I did, especially due to time and money constraints.

I would certainly dispute the claim that knowing things in a meaningful way (whatever that means) with the internet is worse than without the internet.

Are you making a claim of knowledge (e.g. epistemology) or of learning (e.g. pedagogy?)

If you're talking about learning, then I would say things like Khan academy, MOOCs, online course materials, online textbooks and digital libraries seem like powerful counterexamples. Personally I've learned a lot of interesting and practical things from youtube, github, and HN, not to mention non-paywalled research papers. The internet's enabling of billions of people to get access to thousands if not millions of newspapers, books, television programs, movies, songs, and other sources of information and culture from all over the world, and to talk with each other at minimal cost (compared to traditional telephony), seems like an astonishing achievement

If you're making an epistemological claim, I would suggest that the internet era allows you to compare more sources more easily, for example more newspapers than you would have been able to read easily in the pre-internet era. Although it's possible that news outlets have become more opinion-based in the US recently, opinion-based (or opinion-biased if you prefer) print news is basically as old as the printing press, and was certainly well-represented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

What are you talking about? Wikipedia substantially changed everyone's ability to know things.

In fact, Wikipedia was so good at increasing everyone's ability to know things, I wonder if we're now having to build back a way to synthesize and ponder our desired context for all those things. That problem may be exaggerated due to unregulated app casinos sucking out any surplus time to reflect and wonder, but I think the problem is definitely there either way.

What are limiting steps?

I would not be as extreme, wiki* (data, pedia,...) and Internet made a lot of research possible. Internet enhanced collaborations across the globe (no need to be a big name so people talk to you) and openly accessible data I believe facilitates understanding (ok not deep understanding, but enough for creating common bases for communication).

But then, Science magazine did a segment on this: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...

Put you in the shoes of a grad student.

What would you choose (ethics aside) navigate to the website of your library do 20 clicks through a shitty interface to finally get a paper, and thats if you are lucky, or just paste a DOI and wait 5 seconds...