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Comment by hack_edu | Hacker News Reader

Its worth pointing out that Elsevier also controls the whole line of Lexis Nexis products. Academic publishing, especially journal subscriptions and research databases, is one of those most entrenched industries there can be. It might not be as fashionable as hating on Elsevier but Gale, ProQuest, ACS, CSA and company make a hell of a lot of money through exclusive contracts with smaller publishers. Any new entrances to the industry are locked out from all valuable content or choked before they can even get going.

This is all at the expense of libraries and universities, and by proxy, your tax dollars and tuition. The industry is in need of massive disruption, has been for a decade now, but wrestling their IP seems an impossible feat.

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Great point. I had a friend who worked as a salesmen at Thomson West when they still owned Thomson Learning which published all their academic materials. To say the industry is entrenched is an understatement. My friend told me once a publisher was in with a university, there was virtually no way other publishers could get in there. Even the professors had little or no say who they could buy their books from.

It's a few steps removed from organized crime.

That's weird to hear. Lots of professors use their own textbooks in their undergrad and (especially) graduate classes (e.g., Yaser Abu-Mostafa uses his own textbook for http://www.work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html).

Also, there are certain canonical texts that are used almost universally across all universities during a certain time frame (say, the CLR algorithms book, or the Cover and Thomas information theory book).

I thought PLOS (http://www.plosone.org) was created to be a disruptive agent

I'm unfamiliar, are they a business or just a platform? As much as I'd prefer it all be open, the only way to send a message is to work in their sphere. Contracts between publishers and libraries exist in the conference rooms, decided by committees. No librarian or administrator will be convinced without face time a salesman who can convince them to dump their past decades of loyalty. How can a librarian, one trained in maintaining and preserving access to materials, trust that a new and free platform will be around for years? The publishing houses have been around for centuries, literally.

Somebody needs to come along and start by making the little, obvious things right. Their next goal is to avoid acquisition long enough to make a difference. Every so often a promising business comes along, only to be bought out by the big guys and slowly dismantled (see SerialsSolutions).

Also, science and math journals are only an aspect of journal publishing, albeit the most pricey of subjects of which to build a collection. These subjects have always been the first to lean towards open access but they stand in distinction from the rest of a library's collection.

PLoS is a non-profit publisher. All of their journals are open-access and are paid for by publication fees. They have only been around for a few years, but in that time, their top-line journals (PLoS Biology, Comp Bio, Medicine, Genetics, etc...) have become top-tier class journals (one notch below Science, Nature and Cell, depending on who you talk to).

They are no lightweight in the biomedical research journal landscape.

The publishing houses have been around for centuries, literally.

One of the interesting things about scientific publishing is that the current arrangement is a recent phenomenon. Many journals started out as independent or university-affiliated publications which charged to cover costs; then were gradually spun off or bought out by for-profit institutions through the 60s and 70s. The accretion of publishers into a small number of companies, each with a virtual monopoly on critical journals in the field, resulted in the insane balance of power we currently experience. Inelastic demand for information (it's extremely difficult to do research without access to the major journals in your field) means Elsevier et al can jack up prices almost arbitrarily.

PLoS is free to access, but not free to publish, it's quite well established, and financially doing fine. There is no reason to assume they will just shut down any time sooner than the ancient paywall-powered publishing houses. And, believe it or not, the people behind PLoS actually care about open science, so it's not likely they will sell off either.

Besides, it's not just PLoS , there's Frontiers (frontiersin.org) and many other open access publishers. In fact many paywall-journals allow authors to make their papers open access by paying an additional fee.

Yes. I think some of the other publishers are more egregious than Elsevier. Everything is bundled together as you say and access is monopolised that way.

But things have to start somewhere. Maybe it's only with Elsevier and maybe it with Maths faculty and only with the journals they publish in. But the whole system is so despicable in light of today's technology and publishing costs that once it's brought to light how much better things could be, I think change will come fairly quick.

Didn't at least one library try threatening a publisher that the univerity's faculty would no longer publish in that publisher's journals if fees were not made reasonable?

Is that a viable strategy?

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