
Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier - stargazer-3
https://www.mpdl.mpg.de/en/505
======
Protohedgehog
Just a note that we have asked the European Commission to investigate Elsevier
for abuse of a dominant market position:
[https://zenodo.org/record/1472045](https://zenodo.org/record/1472045), and
also now Education International (32 million members, 400 member
organisations) are taking the fight to them through academic unions.
[https://bit.ly/2PPjwRK](https://bit.ly/2PPjwRK)

~~~
MrGunn
I wish people would work on the systemic issues of access, rather than acting
like Elsevier is somehow uniquely responsible. If Elsevier disappeared
overnight, there would still be the other 84% of the market.

Efforts like the above just lead to the open access movement getting co-opted
by anti-capitalists, which hurts progress.

~~~
dmitriz
Overview of distribution of costs by 5 main publishers -- Elsevier share is
larger than all other 4 large publishers combined:

[https://oa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/B14-12-Lidiia-
Bor...](https://oa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/B14-12-Lidiia-Borell-
Damian.pdf)

------
Vinnl
I'd encourage all active researchers who support the move to open access to
sign the following petition:
[http://michaeleisen.org/petition/](http://michaeleisen.org/petition/)

It basically tells funders that you support them to negotiate better open
access deals, even if that risks limiting the number of venues you can publish
in.

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wetpaws
Every nail in Elsevier coffin is a great news, paywaled scientific
publications is an archaic, dystopian and shameful legacy that should never
exist in a first place.

~~~
sleavey
I agree with the sentiment but I do think the service journals provide was
once worthwhile, before the web, as disseminaters of academic knowledge.
Universities paid a subscription fee for physical copies of journals, allowing
their employees to keep up to date with what was happening in the world of
science. Once the web took off the proposition was no longer good value, as
scientists could bypass publishers. It just took two decades for academia to
change the habit of a century.

~~~
MrGunn
This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to
resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized
how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online.
The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the
behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their
field to know what's worth sending out for review in the first place, manage
the review process so that you don't have nasty, unhelpful reviews or personal
vendettas getting exercised, manage ethical concerns, deal with authorship
disputes, etc, and that's just the review piece of things. There's a whole
information infrastructure behind the scenes making sure that once something
is published that it can be found, indexed, searched for, aggregated by
author, connected to the data and code and protocols and other entities that
it mentions... I mean, I've been at this for 8 years and there's still so much
I don't know.

All that just to make the point that the value proposition is still very much
there, though I'll agree publishers could do more to make this apparent.

~~~
sleavey
That's true, but I'm not so sure all of that is still really necessary with
the way science dissemination is chaging. In computing science for example the
de-facto standard is to self-publish papers on arXiv where there is no peer
review prior to publication (beyond arXiv's moderators who check papers are
properly categorised, formatted, etc.). The "peer review" comes in the form of
the community reading and citing or not citing papers in later publications.

You could argue that publishers only ever needed reviewers - and all the
administration baggage that you mention that comes with it - because they had
to choose what to compile into each paper issue that would be mailed to
subscribers. If we remove the concept of "issues" and just have everyone self-
publish on arXiv, a lot of the value you mention regarding journals is no
longer needed.

Of course, everyone publishing on arXiv has downsides. It's no longer easy to
just read Nature/Science/Physical Review Letters/etc. to find the best
research in the field - some other mechanism will be needed to show scientists
the best papers without them spending huge portions of their time reading -
but I am sure we will find solutions to these problems in time. In fact, with
some of my astronomer colleagues it is also pretty normal for them to spend an
hour each morning skimming through 10 or so new papers posted to the arXiv.

~~~
dmitriz
> but I am sure we will find solutions to these problems in time.

Solutions have been found -- overlay journals:

[https://gitlab.com/publishing-
reform/discussion/issues/94](https://gitlab.com/publishing-
reform/discussion/issues/94)

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executesorder66
Glad to see interest in Elsevier is declining.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=elsevier...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=elsevier,sci-
hub,libgen)

~~~
EForEndeavour
Interesting to see the long-term decline, but to be fair, I don't think many
people who are looking for a particular paper would start by Googling the word
"elsevier." They _would_ , however, Google "scihub" to find out their latest
hosting domain.

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apo
_The Max Planck Digital Library has already set in place mechanisms to address
the content needs of its researchers when Elsevier shuts off access at the
beginning of January._

What is it? Sci-Hub?

~~~
Vinnl
Most other DEAL subscribers rely primarily on inter-library loan, I think.

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dmitriz
How to make journal bundles ("big deals") fair and promote quality?
[https://gitlab.com/publishing-
reform/discussion/issues/100](https://gitlab.com/publishing-
reform/discussion/issues/100)

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emasser
Isn't Elsevier just borrowing credibility from scientists and institutions, I
mean, they could all self publish, because it is still their names that lend
credibility to these reports, data and papers, not this aggregator/publisher?

------
dmitriz
Good time to change publisher...

[https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/journals-declaring-
indep...](https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/journals-declaring-independence-
from-corporate-publishers-past-and-future/)

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162)

[https://declaring-independence.org/](https://declaring-independence.org/)

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buboard
They ll still keep publishing in elsevier journals though

~~~
dmitriz
Certainly less in the country where Elsevier has such fantastic reputation :)

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IshKebab
> Researchers at the 200 institutions supporting the DEAL negotiations have
> consequently foregone access to the Elsevier platform and are broadly making
> use of alternative routes for their research needs.

I wonder what "alternative routes" those are... /s

~~~
sleavey
In many cases the library service of these institutions can still obtain
copies of journal articles via inter-library lending or individual purchases.
Yes, researchers will probably bypass this and use Sci-Hub simply because it's
quicker, but Elsevier can't argue that universities _expect_ researchers to
obtain Elsevier journal articles illegally.

