Elsevier’s David Tempest explains subscription-contract confidentiality clauses

Websites that offer products/services but don't list any pricing information other than contact forms for quotes might be my biggest industry pet peeve. I will find a way to not need that product and go with a competitor or an open-source implementation. It's what led me to do research on e-discovery companies and confirm what people like David Tempest fear - if law firms knew how cheap it was to develop their own technologies there's no way they'd pay what they do except to prevent discovery in the first place.

Except in this case, there is no way or extremely limited ways of getting the same information so they get to profit from that as well. Hopefully the academic community comes together on this topic and maybe forms some large alliance with the resources to compete.

These clauses are aggressively anti-librarian, and unfortunately librarians don't have a choice but to subscribe at whatever price. Academic papers don't exist in a competitive marketplace; once a non-open access paper is published it's considered part of the permanent academic literature, which academics are professionally required to read and cite. Yet each paper is only available from the publisher that owns its copyright.

It's no wonder why Elsevier draws such ire from the librarian community... an analogy would be if a company legally disallowed its employees from discussing their salaries with anyone, in order to reduce the information available when any other employee negotiates a salary or raise.

And even though David Tempest argues that the main reason for these clauses is to maintain price differentiation between countries, I'd guess that this policy is equally designed to convince small but well-funded US research institutes to keep their non-discount subscriptions, while giving relatively steep discounts to large accounts like the UC system that have negotiating power due to their size.

Fundamentally, the ecosystem of subscription journals is full of non-market dynamics and requires extensive legal management (think NDAs, copyright transfer agreements, DMCA takedowns and copyright infringement enforcement). On the other hand, the rise of Open Access journals has produced a healthy competitive market, where authors can choose where to publish based on a variety of factors including cost, quality of peer review, user-friendly submission tools, and prestige of the journal brand. Plus, copyright is largely a non-issue for open access: authors keep their copyright and there's no cost to the publisher for enforcing against infringement.

I think the more market-driven nature of OA, plus the obvious desire to have publicly-funded research be publicly available, will compound its growth and cause it to eventually overtake the subscription journal model.

Elsevier employees should just quit and work somewhere else. It's just a matter of time before their business implodes. It will be a miserable process and anything to speed it up benefits everyone.

Sure, the board has fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to drag this out as long as possible. But the employees should just walk. Elsevier is a travesty and employees should feel ashamed to be associated with it.

Best comment ever "is he admitting to price fixing?"

For a CS student or professional, not nearly so irritating as the ACM and IEEE duopoly.

My university subscribes to ACM and IEEE databases, so I should be in a better position than most, but somehow that doesn't include IEEE conference proceedings, which is where the papers that (possibly) matter appear. It's not a mystery why people in this field are so crap at staying on top of this kind of stuff: the stuff is hidden.

I'd hope that all costs are transparent at public universities.

Elsevier is a leech on society and should be destroyed.