
Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community - haimau
https://www.hrk.de/press/press-releases/press-release/meldung/deal-and-elsevier-negotiations-elsevier-demands-unacceptable-for-the-academic-community-4409/
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zaarn
"Elsevier [...] is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a
nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic
community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially
sustainable."

Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here
pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use
where I can just get knowledge and science that I need for projects. Elsevier
simply destroys that out of pure greed and nothing else.

~~~
teilo
Elzevier isn't the only one, either. While not as egregious, there is
Proquest, who locks private researchers out of many databases and digital
works (mostly historical works) that are not available anywhere else. If one
is not an enrolled student or faculty member of an institution that pays for
an institutional subscription, there is no way to gain access to their
databases.

This type of intellectual elitism disgusts me. It's particularly bad when I
would _pay_ for access to some of their databases, but I'm not even given the
choice.

~~~
betterunix2
One thing to keep in mind is that European universities have encouraged this
situation by insisting that faculty publish in "legitimate" journals, where
"legitimate" means "published by one of the major academic publishing
companies." It has been a problem for CS faculty who have to convince
universities that conference proceedings carry more weight in CS than journal
articles, which is why you see Springer publishing "official" copies of so
many conference papers (while "unofficial" copies can typically be found at
the authors' personal webpage).

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rotorblade
Their journals are not even doing their job properly and have published a
plagiarised version of a paper already in Nature:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_plagiarism_in_a_peerreviewed_journal/)

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metakermit
I hope to see more open source online journals like
[https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/) in the future. With hosting being
so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't
see a need for private publishing companies.

~~~
betterunix2
Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate"
journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically,
if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that
she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they
will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published
by the big companies, because those are what are considered "legitimate."

Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet
was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the
crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research
papers ([https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/)), there is still
a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.

~~~
kilotaras
distill.pub IS a legitimate journal.

From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google
Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.

~~~
betterunix2
Not according to European universities, at least for the purpose of judging
faculty CVs when making hiring or tenure decisions.

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Azareus
Hell yeah.

I am so, so glad that Open Access is being fought for instead of being
appeased with concessions.

~~~
elliotpage
Agreed.

The folding of other consortia modelled after DEAL during negotiations has
been shameful so I am glad that DEAL are standing firm.

------
steve19
I can't help but think sci-hub has something to do with their ability to walk
away.

~~~
Vinnl
That's pretty much undeniable. That said, German academic libraries have also
supposedly spent a lot of effort into making sure that accessing the content
is still as painless as possible, e.g. through making Inter-library Loan
easier.

------
DocTomoe
There is a semi-successful media campaign against studies published in "less
than reputable" journals in Germany right now. Elsevier always features
prominently as "a good example", while Open Access often is associated with
"bad practices".

Geez, I wonder who might have paid for that campaign.

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mpfundstein
A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor. We should
boycott all of them

~~~
tmalsburg2
The most powerful boycott would be not to submit papers to Elsevier journals.
But given current academic hiring practices this is hardly going to happen, at
least not in my field.

~~~
nasmorn
German Universities could no longer accept Elsevier papers for hiring purposes
going forward. If they did it with 2 years lead time maybe they can tip the
scales without punishing the researchers

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dantheman
I think this is great. Hopefully the entire academic world will switch to Open
Access for all future publishing. Then by fixing copyright lengths we can just
wait them out.

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Havoc
Strikes me as a lost war for Elsevier

~~~
mnl
They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them,
because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't
access legally decades of references you and your institution have this
problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are
liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be
solved with a new legal framework for IP (good luck with that) or ad hoc laws,
they can't be forced to give up the golden eggs goose otherwise and they know
it.

In the meantime, it would be nice if everybody uploaded their reviewed papers
to arXiv. No one should have to pay for new content already been paid by the
taxpayers.

~~~
zaarn
IIRC it won't be that easy in germany. Copyright is non-transferable so
Elsevier has a license. Additionally we have the Verwertungsrecht, which is
part of the non-transferabl part of the copyright law and gives the author of
a work the exclusive and inalienable right to publish, copy and transmit their
work as they see fit.

In Germany, there stands nothing in the way of all the professors and students
simply republishing their work elsewhere and Elsevier could not nothing about
it.

What they can't do is publish copies of works that Elsevier has edited
(significantly). So if Elsevier contributed to the document then the editor as
Elsevier and by proxy Elsevier has the copyright on those parts _IF_ they are
significant enough (significant is a huge burden of proof here, spelling
mistakes being corrected don't count).

~~~
mnl
That's very good news, yet I imagine the publisher can claim rights over
composition, layout, typesetting and the pdfs themselves. This is quite a
problem as who's going to do all that again, particularly when it comes to
dead authors (ocr won't cut it). Nowadays you have your own digital version
and you could simply distribute that (if we ignore keeping track of published
page numbers), but what you get for papers up to more or less the 90s is
scanned documents, it's unlikely that you can find other versions around. The
transition to a sane model won't be frictionless nor fast, it might be cheaper
to make a bid for the publishing companies outright (fees of subscriptions are
simply absurd, their whole business model is a legal racket).

~~~
zaarn
For dead authors, the inheritance regulates who gets to control the copyright.
Usually inheritance works out, the state puts a lot of money into finding lost
relatives if everything else fails.

The publisher to my knowledge cannot claim copyright over composition, layout,
typesetting or the PDF unless they can show they had significant copyrightable
work in each step. (Copyright in Germany first requires you to do some
significant intellectual work, where significant changes based on what you do
but science usually has a higher barrier)

If the PDF contains a trademark of theirs then that's a problem.

Generally a pre-print PDF should be available in almost all cases and could be
published without Elsevier's input. If not that, Universities do archive the
Tex files (or similar inputs) if possible so they could take those.

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rurban
Great, because this leads to less references to Elsevier papers, which will
cause their importance to decline. Papers and academics "worth" are measured
by the number of references. If the papers are not free to access for
academics, their importance declines.

I had the same trouble with the ANSI, ISO and Lisp papers behind expensive
paywalls and just chose to ignore those. In the end the free versions won and
the greedy elitists lost.

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vbtemp
﻿Gigantum ([https://docs.gigantum.com/docs](https://docs.gigantum.com/docs)
\--- [https://gigantum.com/](https://gigantum.com/)) is trying to solve this
and related problems by making the whole research environment open-access and
reproducible (code, data, results.. not just the manuscript).

