These people at Elsevier and their ilk are simple thugs who have leveraged their oligopolistic power into a web of extortion and coercion.
They force the people who create their content to give them the copyright, even though they created nothing but the bars of the jail they imprison the content therein.
Firstly, a coercice agreement is not enforceable no matter how they embellish it with soft language. It is like a robber who asks you if you like his gun? Look how pretty it is, and how lethal it is and how badly it could hurt anyone shot by it, so you do not want to get in the way of any bullets do you? By the way, I see you are carrying a heavy burden of valuables, would you let us assist to to carry that burden - good. We will watch over the valuable and test their ability to be spent on good works for the needy (us)<p>So they are simple thugs to be dealt with by police and the law by exposing and cancelling their coercive and forced copyright assignment agreements and placing those copyrights into a copyleft or similar position. This applies to all prior work and all new work going forward. The cost of running this process will be less than 1% of the monster eye breaking gougery that the colleges now bear.<p>It has to come, they have to go.
And recall the way they have kept the poor contries down by denial of access - that has kept the third worlders with first world brains, locked in an unethical cubbyhole.
In the mead time, get a few dozen seed boxes online with the last 20+ years of research data indexed and downloadable for free or very low fees. All well hid by technical means for anonymity.
I wish I could do more, but do this much damage to those evil thugs is already a good days work,
I find it interesting that Elsevier gets blamed, when authors could simply publish in alternative journals.<p>Why don’t they? Because their career is dependent on high impact journals because their bosses don’t care about lesser publications.<p>This problem could be readily solved if they turned their anger against the school administration for pretty much forcing authors to publish in Elsevier journals.
I just read that Elsevier made £2.54 billion in revenue last year. I didn’t know academic publishing was such a lucrative business.<p>By comparison Penguin Random House makes €3.3 billion euros in revenue last yr and they sell a ton of books. Simon and Schuster makes $800m/yr.<p>I guess annuity’s from businesses and non profits using a legacy business model that predates technology beats selling books. No wonder they want to protect the business.
As long as there are 1000 applicants for one tenure job, Elsevier will stay around. Even 100 scientists abandon Elsevier, 10000 PhD students elsewhere queue up to publish their papers in journals owned by Elsevier.
If I'm understanding the idea correctly they are saying that will not review more articles for free as peers, for Elsevier journals. There is a difference between: "I'm boycotting your work" and "[As you bill me for everything] I don't feel obliged to keep working for free for you"
Excellent to see. Scientists are hampered by the kind of informational gatekeeping the current journal system represents, and Elsevier is the most predatory of the bunch -- the late 90s Microsoft of scientific publication.<p>Remember, you can't spell "Elsevier" without E-V-I-L.
Universities should collaborate on creating (or improving existing) open peer review and publishing platform. It can be based on MIT's PubPub[1] or created from scratch. Adding more features like in Authorea[2] and Overleaf[3]. Since PubPub sources are on GitHub[4], it is easy to improve today and now. Enhancing the existing infrastructure around arXiv and bioArXiv will help too. Today many universities trying to pursue their objectives or creating their platforms. But the complexity of the task requires a united effort.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.pubpub.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pubpub.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://authorea.com/" rel="nofollow">https://authorea.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.overleaf.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.overleaf.com/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://github.com/pubpub" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pubpub</a>
I found this page[1] interesting as it explains some of the costs associated with UC's use of Elsevier (<i>"5. Is Elsevier content expensive?"</i>) along with Elsevier's view of the negotiation (<i>"6. What does California Digital Library want, and what has Elsevier offered?"</i>)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.elsevier.com/about/california-digital-library-and-elsevier" rel="nofollow">https://www.elsevier.com/about/california-digital-library-an...</a>
Why does academia still tolerate the archaic scientific publishing world when there is the Internet?<p>The fact that people are still so dependent on these useless hegemonies sickens me.<p>It only takes a little bit of courage and everyone else will join. Scientists are only keeping themselves captive by playing along.
What is the reasoning for having subscriptions for journals? Does the journal work like some sort of filtering system to weed out the bad articles and only provide the user with good articles?