Here's an amusing anecdote that happened in my own veterinary school a few years ago.<p>An exchange student from south america came and used our (european and valid) school licence to mass-download veterinary papers (not sure if it was for use in his school or for piracy, the story doesn't tell). Our school also got IP-banned by publishers, even though they pay the rights to access them.<p>This is really crazy, I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.
Some people are wondering what is happening inside of Elsevier. Here is my speculation. When any large corporation sees the writing on the wall that it has a major threat to its business (Comcast, RIAA, MPAA) due to the fact that something is disrupting it they will take a really hard defensive position. This entails lowering of customer service and everything else in response.<p>Eventually the market kills them off and the situation changes. The large disruptor is Discrete Analysis which is a journal that has nearly no overhead. <a href="https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal/" rel="nofollow">https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...</a>
So LSU has a license with Elsevier, and LSU's School of Veterinary Medicine had a license with Elsevier.<p>How come LSU acquired two licenses in the first place? Was there a merger of LSU School of Veterinary Medicine with LSU? Has LSU SVM always been under LSU? Was the LSU license negotiated after?
Does anyone know what's going on inside Elsevier? Publicly at least, they're acting like the music industry acted in the 90s. Are they doing anything internally to make sure they stay in business in ten years, other than fighting for every crumb of business they have now? Is there anyone there seriously looking ahead?<p>In a lot of ways they're in a worse position than the music industry was, or than Netflix was a few years ago, since at least those guys had the content-creation side to work on. I don't know what Elsevier can do when there's no money in distribution. The editors don't add that much.