

The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier. - adeelk
http://thecostofknowledge.com

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jackfoxy
If you are interested in this topic, you should also be interested in efforts
in Congress to allow publicly funded research to go behind pay walls.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3494910>

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jvdh
Thank you HackerNews for bringing the original news about the RWA to my
attention. I'm from the Netherlands and was able to throw this up into my
network, and managed to get this issue on the agenda of the Dutch Surf
Foundation and the Knowledge Exchange effort[1].

[1]: <http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/>

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damontal
Are you verifying their identities? Can people just make up names and put them
there?

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jasonwatkinspdx
I really wish our industry could be exerting the same sort of pressure on the
ACM over their digital library.

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jvdh
What exactly is the "radically change" that you're after? You want them to
charge more for what they do? Your site does not specify what you're actually
trying to achieve...

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DanBC
See also Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog post from 2009 about Merck paying
Elsevier to have a "fake" journal produced.

([http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/elsevier-get-into-
fanzines...](http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/elsevier-get-into-fanzines/))

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yfyf
Someone needs to make a poster for this, I'd put it up in our department.

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stfu
Let me play a bit devil's advocate here:

I am still undecided if boycotting Elsevir is makes that much sense. In my
opinion the essential interest in the whole peer-review process is mainly
based on a Journal's Ranking. Academia will not move any time soon away from
rating and ranking journals (and neither should they).

Therefore the only option I see is either pushing up the rankings of open-
publishing journals or convincing a reputed journal to move into open
publishing. Most researchers will care very little about by whom a journal is
published - as long as it is ranked well. And the money factors won't appeal
that much either since these factors are usually all handled by the
library/service department.

~~~
spoor
Several Journals (such as PNAS) now provide the option for authors to make
their papers "open access". Usually by paying an extra fee (around $1,500 for
PNAS). Some authors do this since it can increase their visibility.

In other cases, it is a condition of funding that that the paper eventually be
freely available (sometimes with an embargo of about a year).

In all, I think the open access model will become more widely accepted, with
the exception, maybe, of papers published in the top journals, such as Nature
or Science.

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DevX101
What happens if I were to write in Stephen Hawkings's name?

You should have an email verification using the public email addresses for
these academics.

~~~
tylerneylon
Agreed. I just added email verification. I plan to check that the emails match
the names and school while it's practical to do so (while the list is not
crazy long).

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ColinWright
The HN discussion on the Gowers blog post that started it all:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3494340>

~~~
lazyjeff
Maybe I missed something -- was there something about Elsevier that was
particular bad? Worse than Wiley, and Springer? Would it make sense to boycott
all the major publishers, or does Elsevier charge particularly more...

~~~
tylerneylon
I think Elsevier is a good position to act as a kingpin in the math world when
it comes to the academic publishing racket. I'm not sure which publisher is
worse than others, but I do think it's more likely that success will come
against a particular target (more researchers will take the pledge), and that
things would change with all publishers as a result. Elsevier has a long list
of well-respected math journals, so a victory with them could be most
meaningful in the eyes of the mathematicians who choose where to submit their
papers.

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tylerneylon
I created this page this weekend as one small thing I could do to help the
math world and academia in general with this problem.

Would anyone be willing to help me add improvements to the page? It's become
popular more quickly than I expected, and I would appreciate the help. I've
temporarily added my email address to my hacker news profile, so anyone can
contact me. Thank you!

~~~
masklinn
> Would anyone be willing to help me add improvements to the page?

Reversing the list (last-on-top) and putting the "More names belong here" text
above the fold might be a good idea.

And if you know somebody who can draw icons, getting an icon for each
"refrainment" _might_ look nice (might also look worse, but good icons in the
CC style could spread in the community and be used e.g. on researcher's
blogs).

Otherwise, I like it. It's clear, simple and to the point.

Also, I think you should default the subject to empty and mandate it, you seem
to have _a lot_ of mathematicians (though it could be because it spread there
first).

And you should check your form's encoding, there's mojibake at the end of the
list, "UniversitÃ©" instead of "Université".

~~~
vijayr
Also consider grouping by university, subject etc, and adding a search box
(search by university, person's name)

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YetAnotherAlias
You have a great domain name that can be used to highlight this issue in
general. Elsevier is only one part of the problem and it might be better to
expand the list to beyond Elsevier. To have a wider impact, consider
publicizing this issue on other forums as well. Here are some random
suggestions:

Add some identity verification; Maybe facebook/twitter signup etc.

I suspect many in the HN community are associated with the IEEE and ACM. You
might want to consider adding these two orgs to the list. (Disclosure: I am an
IEEE member and a past ACM member). Both these orgs have great digital
libraries and I have no idea why they are so expensive to access. Can someone
with some experience serving on IEEE/ACM committees share some info on the
financials?

Consider posting and starting a discussion on Chronicle.com. You might get
support from a lot of people in the Arts & Humanities as well.

Why should the general public care about this issue? They pay for this
indirectly through college tuition fees. Try to share this information with
some parent bodies and ask them to pressure universities.

Get some alumni bodies to sign up. They have a lot of clout in Universities.

~~~
kd0amg
_I suspect many in the HN community are associated with the IEEE and ACM. You
might want to consider adding these two orgs to the list. (Disclosure: I am an
IEEE member and a past ACM member). Both these orgs have great digital
libraries and I have no idea why they are so expensive to access. Can someone
with some experience serving on IEEE/ACM committees share some info on the
financials?_

What do you consider expensive? ACM offers unlimited online access for
$200/year. I haven't had trouble pulling that much money together on a grad
student income (though I only pay about half that for my membership as a
student). Given the salary numbers I see people talking about here, I'm not
convinced ACM is prohibitively expensive.

~~~
YetAnotherAlias
My perspective is that we should be sharing this knowledge with people who
cannot afford even that kind of money. $200/year is a lot for many people in
many parts of the world.

I do understand that there is some cost involved in maintaing such vast
libraries and I am not saying that it should be ignored. As I mentioned above,
I would like to know more about how they arrive at these values.

The people who write these papers don't do it for the money. The people who
review them don't do it for the money. So why can't we come up with something
that makes these works more affordable and accessible to everyone on the
planet? This debate is an opportunity to start exploring other such
possibilities.

~~~
scott_s
_So why can't we come up with something that makes these works more affordable
and accessible to everyone on the planet? This debate is an opportunity to
start exploring other such possibilities._

I agree, but that's also why I don't want to lump the ACM and IEEE in with
Elsevier. That is, the ACM and IEEE are professional organizations. Their main
purpose is to represent the interests of the community of professionals in
computing. If they stop charging for articles, they can still exist as an
organization. Their members just need to elevate the issue to the point that
the larger organization changes its policy.

Elsevier, on the other hand, _will_ cease to exist if they stop charging.
Their main purpose - their business model - is to charge for access to their
journals. This business model is no longer necessary, and these companies will
eventually die.

