MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations (2020)
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
This isn't some wild conspiracy theory. I was there, plus I've been on the internet-history mailing list, where Internet pioneers still walk the Earth (the ones still living). I recently instigated a discussion on GOSIP (1990), which was supposed to finally drive a stake in the heart of TCP.
Nearly everyone in academia and the non-profit sector jumped on TCP early in the 80s and before, and accumulated decades of actual operational experience with it. If you were choosing a protocol for your network, you knew all the devices ran TCP and could talk to each other. Anything new you bought surely would, too. Interop conferences were held, where vendors showed up and made sure they could play, too.
For OSI, not so much. Which OSI "profile" did they support, for one thing?
All this happened because while the telecoms and governments were swearing that OSI would win in the end, the people actually in the field were making TCP just work.
So if you say that scientists prefer sci-hub and other open access: that's how we win. Let's tackle the issues with it if there are any, patiently, one by one. Eventually it'll be a fait accompli.
Also there are many places to ask for a paper if you really need it like on reddit ( I don't remember the sub reddit name). people do have groups on Facebook and Twitter to ask and provide pdfs. For really desperate people with rare cases if that all does not work, sending a message to thr author asking for a version never gets no. people like when others are interested in their work.
If we're going to allow authors to do that then we could reduce the workload by uploading all the papers to central servers, like some sort of hub, and just letting people download them.
The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright. Also USA exporting ever longer copyright terms.
Limit what counts as an artistic work (or what counts asa derivative, extracting data is not artistically derivative).
Limit period of copyright to 20y like for patents.
Bosh.
Entirely my own personal opinions.
Whether works funded by government dollars should be copyrightable is of course a different question.
In copyright there is already a concept (in UK caselaw at the very least) that things that can only be presented in a limited way are effectively not artistic enough to gain copyright. A scientific paper can have artistic prose and such, but the purpose is to make a factual presentation. I'd be happy to allow people to chose to state that their paper is not a presentation of facts, but such things should not be accepted into scientific corpus and should be excluded when considering if an author has fulfilled a contract to produce a scientific paper, or fulfilled a duty to do scientific research.
Photographs which are slavish reproductions---which a photo of apparatus needs to be in order to be scientifically useful---are not artistic works, for example. You can choose puce headings with lilac lines for your table but if it's in a scientific paper the purpose is informational [if that wasn't your purpose then you shouldn't have done it]. Coloured diagrams, sure, if they're used outside the context of the paper, and were manually manipulated, then allow them to be considered artistic works; but in the context of the paper they're presentations of supposed facts.
I don't doubt you can lawyer your way into arguing your scientific paper is a trademark, or a registered design, but it seems entirely reasonable to simply prevent such things with ab exclusion clause in the legislation like "scientific papers are not subject to IP laws and can be shared freely". Of course you need to say what a paper is (something published as if it were a paper, or submitted to a journal as it were a paper, or made available publicly as if were a paper).
While they are perhaps not artistic creations, I see scientific papers as the creative work of one or more humans. Most computer code is not an artistic creation, but is a creative work nonetheless. My comment here is not artistic…
Not in general artitistic though. Shoe-horning [ie forcing] computer code into the frame of copyright is also a bad move. It needs its own IPR really.
It's normally standard academic journal licensing terms that the author is permitted to distribute the work in pre-print form on a person-to-person basis.
To my knowledge preprint repositories are popular in physics, math, CS, bio, but not much elsewhere. I work in research in mechanical engineering and no one uses arxiv or anything like it (unfortunately).
That said scihub has not failed me often.
That is a hack, not a solution. As you noted, it is illegal.
Workarounds are good as a fast fix, but sooner at later we need to look at the system and fix what is not working. This not only fixes this problem but it may fix other copyright/publication/papers problems.
I'm sure that publishers will try and fight back, just like with music copying.
Open. The journals. Stop. Having them be closed.
Being legal makes a difference.
It's an minor risk I would imagine, compared to the benefits of reading the articles. But paying for the articles you cite or reference in presentations seems like a good decision for the same reason as you don't want some "pirated version" notification popping up while you give a presentation at a conference. The risk is a lot lower, but it's the same logic.
Considering the cost of that handful of articles versus the budget for a company's coffee supplies it seems like probably the right decision. I don't think I'd go for an actual journal subscription though, that seems like ridiculous overkill unless you're the size of Google.
In many cases, these sorts of crackdowns can come long after-the-fact. The statute-of-limitations is short (3 years, I think), but a lot of courts start the clock ticking when the violation is discovered. If your organization pirates for 30 years, and a publisher does an investigation in 2022, and discovers all 30 years of violations, they would likely file in such a venue.
In most cases, the liability comes in when a business is failing, and goes into don't-give-an-f territory. If Elsevier / Google / Amazon / Coke / [insert random successful business] starts suing researchers when they're big, they're liabile to be hated for it, which endangers their brand and their existing business.
If Elsevier goes into bankruptcy and those copyrights get bought up by parasites, or otherwise starts struggling to survive (as inevitably happens with almost any business eventually) those sorts of retroactive lawsuits often come into play. Most businesses I worked with in the nineties went into owned-by-sleazeballs territory at some point in the forty years since.
It makes things more annoying on some levels, but between the two sides of university library versus Elsevier the large majority of scientists agree with Elsevier being wrong so the annoyance is generally acceptable. Ideally this entire system changes for the better but we can make it work in the short term. Not to mention that even before this we often ran into journals we didn't have access to, so some of these annoyances would have existed regardless.
I wonder what I missed? I guess researchers will get to use the communications pages of Elsevier journals to make fun of MIT without anyone noticing!
More seriously, I do wonder what scholarship by researchers who choose to publish there that I missed. Oh well, too expensive to find out...
How’s open access publishing coming along in your corner of the world? Improvements?
The only notable exception is Google DeepMind, that has a nasty habit of using Springer Nature. I am assuming it is because of the perceived prestige and disregard for the standards we otherwise have set as a community.
On a personal level, I refuse to review for any entity that maintains closed access journals. It is not sufficient that you offer open access, it should be the norm.
Lastly, all is not fun and games when it comes to open access. Even if your field and publications are always open, you are likely to be forced to upload your work to approved repositories (which always come with horrendous, slow, and fragile user interfaces). You must remember to do this within a given time window or suffer punishments akin to if you had published your work as closed access, marking the work as ineligibility to count towards funding, etc.
Won’t one be hurting the careers of students by not publishing in the venue with the broadest audience?
However, I do not expect that the audience that matters will not have access to your work in some way, even without open access. If your university is a good one, they will have subscriptions. Plus, there will be networks of researchers illegally passing around documents. Rather, closed access hurts researchers at less privileged institutions and the general public, as they are unlikely to gain access.
The one problem I'm aware of is those who want to get positions in universities that don't know how the field works, because their selection committees tend to complain that you have no journal papers. If that's your plan then you can submit to journals such as CL. But again, that's not where the broadest audience is.
Sci-hub has been a huge help though. Our library subscriptions cover probably 80-90% of what I'm interested in and scihub covers the vast majority of the remaining fraction. For the last 1 or 2 %, I turn to emailing friends/contacts in other universities to ask them if they have a subscription and can get me a copy. Our library also offers the same service (inter library loans for papers) but charges 2$ and has a 1-2 week delay.
It replaced a closed source vendor product. It's been very successful - however, there's a pretty consistent minority who are very vocal and unhappy about having their materials freely available. Embargo negotiation and publishing policy is a regular argument.
It's reminiscent of Real Estate agents.
Elsevier is still in business and as noxious as ever, so no.
Edit: I checked the OP's history and he sends at least one link every hour every day for a total of about 600 links in the last two weeks. So I'm guessing it's just a repost bot.
The administration's actions showed no admission of fault, guilt, or changed behavior.