
Sweden ends contract with Elsevier, moving for open access for science articles - rreichman
http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-for-open-access-cancels-agreement-with-elsevier/
======
foo101
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.

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!

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.

~~~
Vinnl
That's because, despite being called "publishers", publishing is not the main
function academic publishers like Elsevier are being used for. Their main
function is identifying and recognising the most valued academics in each
field. So obviously academics are going to pay whatever amount of public money
is needed and available to get that stamp of approval, because otherwise
they'll be out of a job in a _very_ competitive job market.

 _Edit:_ The argument in more detail: [https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-
scholarly-publishing-d...](https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-scholarly-
publishing-decouple-credentialing-from-publishing-29b211f49acc)

~~~
zimbatm
Most of the time the publishers just forward the abstract or sample to peers
and then make their decision based on that.

Imagine HN where you are only allowed to publish your own content and random
users would be selected to evaluate your work.

~~~
petters
> Imagine HN where you are only allowed to publish your own content and random
> users would be selected to evaluate your work.

We should try this!

~~~
contras1970
it's called "the internet"...

------
aurizon
Good, now the Nobel Committee should say it will only consider science
published in open source journals for future Nobel prizes...

~~~
mirimir
Excellent idea. Wish I'd thought of that :)

It's arguable that stuff isn't actually in the public record if access
requires payments.

~~~
aurizon
Elsevier is a criminal enterprise, nothing more, nothing less...

~~~
rreichman
We gotta stop enabling them. If we demand that publicly funded universities
adopt open access Elsevier will be gone in a few years. And of course I'm not
recommending Sci-Hub because it's illegal but worth mentioning it...

~~~
damontal
How will Elsevier be gone if it controls so much of the content used in
citations?

~~~
rreichman
Over time I believe more content will be published in open access journals. In
Machine Learning this is already quite common and it's amazing.

------
digitalmaster
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).

Been considering moving to one of the countries high on the democracy index to
work/code and pay taxes.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index)

~~~
halflings
I've got to say, political debates in Scandinavia have nothing to do with what
you see in the US. People are debating the real problems (education, housing,
healthcare, etc.) instead of focusing on inter-party rivalries.

~~~
vladTheInhaler
I watched the debate between the party leaders recently and the level of
conversation really struck me. That's not to say that there aren't problems -
the Sweden Democrats have basically succeeded in wedging immigration into
every single conversation. But there seems to still be an appreciation for
serious policy and statesmanship.

~~~
adventured
You see the same thing in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, etc.
In the US, on average if you want to see a better form of political discourse,
you have to move toward more local politics (whether state, county, city,
town).

Sweden = local politics. It's a small nation. 25% of their population lives in
just four cities.

Directly comparing the whole of the US to Sweden is absurdity. One would
expect a dramatic increase in messy national politics if you took 33 Swedens
and put them under a Federal authority.

~~~
gremlinsinc
I could see that, maybe the U.S. should just separate into smaller city
states. Let each fend for themselves... It'd be much easier for people to get
what they want out of a national government - they could just move to the
state that actually represents their interests better... Want universal
Healthcare / Legalized Marijuana / try california. Want to make sure nobody
gets handouts at all including SSI, Medicaid, and Medicare move to Louisiana
or Texas.

~~~
neuromantik8086
I've often wondered if the U.S. would work better if there were some sort of
multi-layered federalism wherein each cultural region (Northeast, Deep South,
Cascadia, etc) got their own executive and legislative office above the state
level, but not at the federal level. Doing this would probably eliminate a lot
of the gridlock in DC since people could work on cultural and social issues at
that level rather than across all 50 states (although it would also probably
make things a lot worse for minorities in the South...).

------
unicornporn
Blog spam.

Go here: [http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-
fo...](http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-for-open-
access-cancels-agreement-with-elsevier/)

~~~
igravious
Yes. Just came here to say that the linked to site appears to be a content
aggregator and that the original article is here:
[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/sweden-cancels-
els...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/sweden-cancels-elsevier-
contract-open-access-dispute-spreads)

Superb news though, couldn't happen to a nicer company.

------
kqr
> Starting June 30, Swedish researchers will no longer be publishing in
> Elsevier and will not have access to Elsevier magazines.

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...

------
hokus
Here is a dumb thought I just had.

What if in stead of a giant stack of hard to nav papers...

...what if in stead each discipline would aim to publish a book????!

Each chapter would highlight the most important components of which the full
version would be.... another book?

tier 2 of the books would simply refer to papers to provide even more
additional reading.

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.

Each would be freely available online but every self respecting nerd would
want a copy on his bookshelves.

A strict less is more policy would keep the books portable.

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.

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.

A truly absurd idea, there, I said so myself.

------
mirimir
And with Sci-Hub still alive, Sweden etc have more leverage.

~~~
igravious
I had trouble getting to Sci-Hub and LibGen at my uni (this was about a month
ago) and I don't know if it was my uni's firewall or the recent court ruling
smack-downs in earlier this month[0] and last November[1]. I just checked from
home and I found [https://sci-hub.tw/](https://sci-hub.tw/) and
[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/) work okay for me so
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

[0] [https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-pirate-bay-for-science-
secu...](https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-pirate-bay-for-science-security-
certs-revoked-by-comodo-ca-180503/)

[1]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/23/sci_hubs_become_ina...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/23/sci_hubs_become_inactive_following_court_order/)

~~~
Cenk
I try to keep this list up to date with the latest links:
[https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-
scienti...](https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-
articles-free-sci-hub/)

Citationsy also has a similar feature built-in:
[https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-
archives/](https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/)

~~~
Vinnl
Here's a crowdsourced list (based on Wikidata):
[https://whereisscihub.now.sh](https://whereisscihub.now.sh)

------
gforge
Cool, odd that I as a Swedish researcher haven't heard of this... Maybe they
ment Switzerland - people have major difficulties discerning the two.

Tack, ha en bra dag!

~~~
Vinnl
Nope, it's Sweden :) Much is still unclear though, as these negotiations were
done on the level of the universities, so even academic librarians don't fully
know what this might mean to e.g. their budgets, and whether they can invest
the money saved in open research infrastructure.

------
AtomicOrbital
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

------
Ma8ee
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.

[http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-
fo...](http://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/05/16/sweden-stands-up-for-open-
access-cancels-agreement-with-elsevier/)

~~~
progre
Not by the government directly but by a national library organisation reacting
to a goverment mandate for open access.

~~~
Ma8ee
Yes, I think that was what it said in the link I provided. :)

------
mistrial9
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.

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.

------
makecheck
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.)

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 _don’t_
typically have those security elements, making it easy to steal and hard to
authenticate what you’re seeing.

~~~
Vinnl
Journals do usually list the submission date, I believe. Otherwise, submitting
your work to a preprint server can prove that you were first (assuming you
trust the preprint server), although in some fields, journal publication is
still the only thing recognised as planting the pole.

You'd only need blockchain if you don't trust the preprint servers, but I
don't think there's reason not to.

------
Radim
I worked in the scientific publishing industry. Not directly for Elsevier, but
we had dealings with them too.

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.

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…

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.

~~~
mijamo
Many companies fell despite having many smart people working for them.

I would say every semi-big company probably has many smart people working for
them. That does not prevent them from doing very stupid/bad/evil things, and
sometimes disappearing.

The fact that they anticipated the move does not mean anything regarding their
future, just like Kodak with digital photography for instance.

Taken differently, maybe you see a tsunami coming from very far away and are
able to even calculate how strong it is and when it will come, but that does
not mean you will be able to save your house in the seafront ;)

~~~
Radim
Sure. My point was not only did Elsevier see the "tsunami" coming, they also
prepared for it profusely. Using a combination of legislation, regulation,
lobbying and technology.

Obviously any company can fail. I'm just offering a little inside information
that pushes back against the notion that Elsevier is a static, dumb, backward-
facing entity, taken completely by surprise by this new-fangled thing called
"open access". Not the case.

