I am surprised that it took so long after the invention of the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, these journals used to play a significant role in distributing research papers in physical paper form. It made sense then. There was no way to copy a 10 page research paper from Germany to China with a few finger taps at low cost. But with the advent of the Internet and its pervasiveness, it no longer makes sense to rely on a costly media based on physical printing, distribution, and centralized organizations milking money out of it.<p>I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!<p>It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.
The more democratic you are as a nation, the more time elected officials spend thinking about ways to improve the lives of ordinary people (not just those in power).<p>Been considering moving to one of the countries high on the democracy index to work/code and pay taxes. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index</a>
> Starting June 30, Swedish researchers will no longer be publishing in Elsevier and will not have access to Elsevier magazines.<p>Legality aside, given how high the usability of Sci-Hub is these days, I have no doubt in my mind about who got the short end of this stick...
Here is a dumb thought I just had.<p>What if in stead of a giant stack of hard to nav papers...<p>...what if in stead each discipline would aim to publish a book????!<p>Each chapter would highlight the most important components of which the full version would be.... another book?<p>tier 2 of the books would simply refer to papers to provide even more additional reading.<p>The whole thing would keep it self up to date using version control and the closer to the front page of tier 1 the more extremely critical the review would be. An as-large-as-possible crowd sourced budget should be dedicated to reviewing and rewriting each of the book.<p>Each would be freely available online but every self respecting nerd would want a copy on his bookshelves.<p>A strict less is more policy would keep the books portable.<p>Technicality of the tier 1 books should be limited as much as possible in order to fit in a little encyclopedia of terms and methods.<p>By exposing the most important parts of a field to an audience as large as possible scientists would finally get the recognition they deserve which in turn would stimulate allocation of public funds.<p>A truly absurd idea, there, I said so myself.
Cool, odd that I as a Swedish researcher haven't heard of this... Maybe they ment Switzerland - people have major difficulties discerning the two.<p>Tack, ha en bra dag!
Knowledge will eventually be communicated by adding new information to a universal network which represents all known truths ... the act of ~publishing~ will be to add new nodes and/or edges ... this network will get launched by seeding it from culling all existing published papers however once it goes live the very idea of publishing research to any journal will become obsolete and counterproductive
Some more details for those of us who would like to know who “Sweden” is in these circumstances. This kind of decisions are usually not taken on the level of the national government.<p><a href="http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-for-open-access-cancels-agreement-with-elsevier/" rel="nofollow">http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-fo...</a>
long ago, while working at a science software company, I was casually told by a co-worker that in Japan, science publishing is run by their mafia.. The scientists I saw were so busy, so intent and so disciplined, that no management topics were ever discussed. So I went to a US business school library and looked up some management-side statistics about profit-per-employee.. and saw that the science companies of the time had less than half the number of employees, typically, with large revenue.<p>Some number of people are just predatory over profits, whatever the level of intelligence, legality and social status. Whatever the origins of this science conglomorate, you can bet that over the years, a crude extraction of profits via control of players, emerged.
As with other online transfers, actually publishing/reading material has become the easy part and a whole pile of issues with security cropped up instead. (You don’t even really need a publisher to help with notoriety, if your stuff already shows up easily on Google.)<p>I wish that Elsevier was being paid to solve a bunch of hard security problems but they seem to just be an expensive paywall. For example, do they provide a block chain or other trusted time stamp solution to make it easy to prove that a publication was “first” (no matter who decides to steal a file and copy/paste their own name as author instead)? I’d really like to see those kinds of things become mainstream defaults for publishing. Right now the main downside to just throwing files on random web sites is that they <i>don’t</i> typically have those security elements, making it easy to steal and hard to authenticate what you’re seeing.
I worked in the scientific publishing industry. Not directly for Elsevier, but we had dealings with them too.<p>Many people here view Elsevier as this evil nebulous entity. Leaving "evil" aside, like every large business, Elsevier is composed to people, some of them very smart.<p>Which is to say Elsevier has seen this "open access" movement coming for a better part of a decade now, just like everyone else. As far back as 2011 the industry has been inventing ways to make "open access" as profitable as the current system (ideally, even more). Green open access, gold open access, diamond and hybrid; moving walls, paywalls, article processing charges…<p>Having seen the sausage made, I guess I'm a little cynical about "open access". I see it devoid of the idealistic "stick it to the man" connotations, and more like another feel-good buzzword scam.