
Germany's Leading Technical University Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions - fpp
http://www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier
======
TomAnthony
Background and perspective:

Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals. Its archives
contain seven million publications. Total yearly downloads amount to 240
million.

The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its
business model, which includes "paywalls" and (in their opinion) excessively
high subscription charges.

Some very large journals (those with more than 5000 articles) charge
subscription prices as high as $14,000.

Source: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier>

~~~
hack_edu
> The company is currently being boycotted by academics who object to its
> business model

The only way to win the war is through convincing the librarians and
administrators who cut the checks for an institution's subscription. They're
who drive prices.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
But they are only going to cut checks for journals that the departments are
asking for. The more demand for a particular journal, the harder it is for the
library to not cut that check.

~~~
hack_edu
True, but its very rare that an institution subscribes on a journal-by-journal
basis. The pricing structure makes this approach ridiculously expensive and
impractical. The price of a dozen or two a la carte journals will usually cost
as much as a package of all the journals in that subject area (including the
ones you want specifically). Some journals, like the journal Nature, are
_only_ available when you buy a massively expensive package. Individual
journal subscriptions also often come in packages grouped by years; you have
to buy a different set if you want a set of volumes from 1890-1940, 1940-1990
or a package that sunsets all volumes over 10 years prior.

This isn't as much a problem when you back subscription packages. The downside
of purchasing this way is that when your subscription lapses, you lose all the
access you had (since you don't 'own' it). Were you to go the a la carte
method, you 'own' them but have to pay a $100+ 'hosting fee', per journal on a
yearly basis.

The ridiculous prices to subscribe to a la carte journals is one of the
primary problems, and the biggest gun that he publishers have to our head.

~~~
meej
I think it's also worthwhile to recognize that librarians have been trying to
sound the alarm on this problem for at least a decade. In 2001, Kenneth
Frazier, Director of Libraries at UW-Madison, wrote an article in D-Lib
Magazine where he named such journal packages the "Big Deal" and urged library
administrators not to buy them.

<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html>

------
hack_edu
Its worth pointing out that Elsevier also controls the whole line of Lexis
Nexis products. Academic publishing, especially journal subscriptions and
research databases, is one of those most entrenched industries there can be.
It might not be as fashionable as hating on Elsevier but Gale, ProQuest, ACS,
CSA and company make a hell of a lot of money through exclusive contracts with
smaller publishers. Any new entrances to the industry are locked out from all
valuable content or choked before they can even get going.

This is all at the expense of libraries and universities, and by proxy, your
tax dollars and tuition. The industry is in need of massive disruption, has
been for a decade now, but wrestling their IP seems an impossible feat.

~~~
darksaga
Great point. I had a friend who worked as a salesmen at Thomson West when they
still owned Thomson Learning which published all their academic materials. To
say the industry is entrenched is an understatement. My friend told me once a
publisher was in with a university, there was virtually no way other
publishers could get in there. Even the professors had little or no say who
they could buy their books from.

It's a few steps removed from organized crime.

~~~
mturmon
That's weird to hear. Lots of professors use their own textbooks in their
undergrad and (especially) graduate classes (e.g., Yaser Abu-Mostafa uses his
own textbook for <http://www.work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html>).

Also, there are certain canonical texts that are used almost universally
across all universities during a certain time frame (say, the CLR algorithms
book, or the Cover and Thomas information theory book).

------
bborud
Good. Very good.

Something needs to be done about scientific publishing and the excessively
high tolls on knowledge. The publishing industry may claim that it performs
some vital role, but I find it extremely unlikely that this is the optimal way
of reviewing and disseminating knowledge.

I think we are morally obliged to do a lot better.

To me the paywalls around scientific publishing is a lot more than a question
of principles -- it may end up impacting my life. Five months ago I was
diagnosed with kidney failure. If left untreated, this will kill me. What I do
the next months may have a big impact on my quality of life.

When your doctor tells you that you have a condition that will kill you, I
would assume that most of you would try to educate yourselves on the topic.
This includes reading recent papers.

Well, good luck with that. For absolutely every aspect that I have looked into
I keep bumping my head into paywalls. Some articles are only available if I
pay a lot of money -- and I have no way of knowing up front if the article
will be worth it. Kidney disease is a narrow enough subject for publications
to be very expensive.

I am continually asked what the hell I need access to these articles for since
I am not a doctor. Imagine that: people acquiring knowledge because they need
it and not because the publishing industry needs the money...

I think it is time academia started taking knowledge seriously.

~~~
imeikas
You may try to contact the authors in the papers directly. In addition to
getting the paper you might even get to discuss the issues directly with the
authors.

~~~
bborud
At this stage I am mostly trying to get an overview and trying to find out
what I need to know. This means reading a few books to give me the background
knowledge I know and it means surveying what is being published to identify
topics I need to explore. This usually means _skimming_ a lot of material to
determine if it is worth my time right now. If I need to contact the author,
that slows the process down a lot.

------
user24
> Low Bandwith Version of this site due to large amount of requests:

> Aufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen hat das Direktorium des
> Zentrums Mathematik beschlossen, alle abonnierten Elsevier-Zeitschriften ab
> 2013 abzubestellen.

> Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of
> directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its
> subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013.

> @<http://news.ycombinator.com/> visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server
> ;-)

~~~
stfu
Somewhat odd that "Germany's leading Technical University" isn't able to
handle _a few_ Hackernews visitors showing up _

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I remember Reading HN now had a million accounts (btw can anyone confirm?)

if that's true then top story at the beginning of the US day could generate a
_lot_ of requests, and if the university has a plain cms that is updated once
a week by the departmental secretary then it's pretty unlikely they have seen
much traffic, ever.

To be honest I would be interested if pg could publish what kind of click
through rate the various links generate - could even be a counter next to the
story.

~~~
yummyfajitas
This was at the top of HN for a day or so:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852341>

22,638 visits on Apr 17, 10,247 on Apr 18 (according to Google Analytics).

This one <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894302> got 17,740 and 6,864 on
Apr 26 and 27, respectively, from being close to the top.

~~~
kolinko
+1.

Our numbers are 5k, 10k and again around 10k, so this would confirm what
you're saying :)

------
davidacoder
The title on HN is incorrect. Only the mathematics department is canceling
their subscriptions, not the whole university.

------
andre3k1
The market for the distribution of peer-reviewed academic journals fascinates
me. It is ripe for disruption.

More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same
institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as
the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After
production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred
over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same
content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution
involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles.
Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose.

There is a burgeoning movement toward open access journals. More info on the
subject available here – <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis>

~~~
bgilroy26
Is really ripe for disruption? I would think that if it was very ripe that the
arXiv would serve a broader purpose than it currently does.

The problem is a social one -- academics want to post their work to well
respected journals, because the respect is the currency that their future
career advancement runs on.

A market is ripe for disruption when every stakeholder except the entrenched
competition wants the product to be different AND that difference is readily
available through low-cost solutions.

Typically the new, low-cost solutions that haven't already been tried, are
only recently available through new technology.

Given the maturity of the market and the social nature of the business, (even
considering how squeaky clean arXiv's brand is versus Paypal's) I think the
same people who aren't very excited about putting arXiv papers on their CV are
those who would never dream of taking their money out of a big, traditional
bank.

Even though all of their money is digital, etc.

------
random123
The link is working again now, but has been replaced with a low bandwidth
version. (The original version just contained additional images.) The amount
of request generated by this site was unfortunately a bit too much for the web
server.

(I'm one of the server admins ... and have been in fear of a real DDOS attack
during the last couple of minutes. ;) )

~~~
GoodIntentions
If it isn't asking too much, would you mind telling HN about it? what kind of
traffic you saw, what hardware/software platform you have in place?

~~~
random123
The link got about 13000 hits so far, thereof about 5000 hits with a referrer
value containing "ycombinator". But as only 3481 hits occured during the 3
days before it was posted on HN, I guess that actually about 9000 hits are due
to HN.

I think the hardware platform is not really interesting, as the DDOS was only
caused by the worker pool of Apache2 being too small. Each hit of the site
creates about 30 additional request for css,js,png and gif files. So 9000 hits
in 3h mean something like 270.000 requests in 3h. Apparently this was too much
for 50 workers.

~~~
fpp
That looks as if the majority of the hits went directly over to the google
cache links mentioned here (otherwise most likely this would be > 50k hits at
least).

When the link was hitting the HN front page your site was already blocked -
when the first person mentioned that the site was not reachable this HN post
had about 60 points - anyway guess its the req/sec that killed you (and no
cache - guess you don't have that much static content).

Have you seen many facebook referrers from people who repost HN front page
stories to Facebook?

~~~
random123
From the 23000 hits so far only about 300 came from faceboook ... not really
that much.

I'm pretty sure that the amount of req/sec caused the problems. After a
configuration change between 150 and 200 apache2 workers were constantly
occupied and neither network ,cpu or ram were even closely used to their
capacity. (Before the change we had a hard limit of 50 workers.)

------
robertwalsh0
It's great to see mathematicians taking up, Tim Gowers's rallying cry and have
the courage to step away from Elsevier. The academic publishing industry for
periodicals is going the way of the journal industry.

Apps like Scholastica (<http://scholasticahq.com/>) allow anyone to start
their own peer reviewed journal and manage its content. Very soon, they'll
even be able to publish open access
([http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-
access-p...](http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/21917547765/open-access-
publishing-is-on-the-way-with-scholastica)). Full disclosure: I'm working on
this application.

------
lamnk
This concerns only the math faculty, not the entire university.

~~~
sswezey
And for those not familiar with the German university system, each department
of a university is a lot more autonomous than departments in the US. They
sometimes have different admissions, different libraries, different policies,
etc.

------
zerostar07
Another point worth noting is that many (should be all) papers are readily
available (legally) as preprint PDFs (which is usually almost the same as the
final version), if the creator bothers to place a preprint online, and most
academics would be happy to email you a copy of their work should you ask
anyway. So it's not like publishers are forcing someone in a walled garden,
it's just that academics still prefer to be in there. So, these attacks on
Elsevier are shooting the messenger, but it seems it's the only way to get to
the sender here.

~~~
Tobu
I've seen the occasional clueless student tell me they didn't think it was
legal for them to upload their own papers (they might have signed some
contracts with illegal clauses to that effect for all I know). Counting on the
authors to unbreak academic publishing works if you already know what you want
and can deal with a bit of hassle searching and e-mailing, but it doesn't work
at all for skimming or looking at complete proceedings.

I suspect the publishers are fighting a bit harder against competing archives.
For example, because they are sometimes involved in organising conferences,
they can entrench themselves by offering an archive to the participants
(giving a small sponsorship in exchange for the understanding the organisers
won't offer the same archive), locking out the rest.

------
amolsarva
These things are super expensive. The value they provide is a network effect
--> prestige from history + high quality peers reviewing the work that's
published

The elite universities can "make this" themselves -- they did something like
this in philosophy (led out of Michigan) when I was in grad school:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers%27_Imprint>

The reality is these days that most/all papers are shared online in these PDF
exchanges long before 'real' publication. And as a result the journal articles
hardly matter as much.

I would guess this is most true for stuff with less lab work and more "pencil"
work like math or logic or philosophy.

------
coolowencool
Related article published about a month ago in the Guardian about frustrations
with journal publishing models:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-
blo...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-
boycott-scientific-journals)

------
GoodIntentions
atm, we seem to be crushing their webserver. If you're feeling kind, don't
click.

The page copy is just two sentences, one in German, one in English -
essentially:

"due to unsustainable pricing, the math department has canceled Elsevier subs"

~~~
diggan
Also:

>@<http://news.ycombinator.com/> visitors: You just DDOS-ed our web server ;-)

~~~
fpp
sorry for that - hopefully such an unusual event also provides positive
feedback to your directors for their decision.

------
cjbprime
Just the mathematics department, no?

------
vga256
Fucking A. Twas about time. Also read Scott Aaronson's thoughts on this issue
in general.

<http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=912>

Also

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Spring>

------
debacle
I think this is a great step. Publications are an outdated business model and
they can't and shouldn't survive at their current (in my opinion egregious)
costs.

------
auggierose
I got my Ph.D. from this university. I am proud of you, TUM!

------
aheilbut
I wonder what happens to access to archives of electronic journals when
subscriptions are cancelled -- with paper journals, at least they're still in
the library.

------
brazzy
Go, TUM!

The first time I've actually felt proud of my alma mater :)

------
keithvan
The HN link is giving a 403 -- anyone have an alternative link?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
See <http://coralcdn.org/> \- they provided a caching mechanism that I've been
using for what seems like a decade or so - you add .nyud.net to the domain
part of the URL and you get their cached copy. Hence, this provides a short
term mirror of the OP's link:

<http://www.ma.tum.de.nyud.net/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier>

------
eleitl
Just the Mathematics department, not the whole university.

------
thespin
Mathematics Departments are going to be the heros in lowering the costs to
access scholarly journals, in all disciplines.

It has to start somewhere.

Low cost, online education, which is a popular topic here on HN, is a neat
idea. But to really make it worthwhile, the student needs _full access_ to
_all_ academic journals.

For that to happen, the paywalls have to come down.

~~~
zerostar07
I agree, besides maths and physics have arxiv. The difficult part is forcing
the life sciences people out of their antiquated ways of thinking.

------
planetguy
So what's the endgame here? Drive Elsevier out of business? Watch as its
hundreds of journals (some great, some not so great) vanish? What happens to
the zillions of papers in existence in those journals, currently available
from their website with a few clicks? (What _does_ happen to the copyright
holdings of an entity that goes out of business?)

~~~
zerostar07
The authors of the papers are also copyright holders.I believe this is worth
pointing out: Elsevier is not offering some irreplaceable service by having a
web server. Their value mostly lies in setting up the journal review teams and
process, and making sure they live up to their standards.

~~~
xamuel
Negative. To publish in an Elsevier journal you must sign away your copyright.
The authors do NOT hold copyright. And that's part of why the situation is so
ridiculous and urgently needs to be fixed.

~~~
zerostar07
I stand corrected then. But they can still distribute a preprint according to
their terms: <http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights>

_the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet
websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely
such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes_ (with some
exceptions such as The Lancet and Cell Press. See also our information on
electronic preprints for a more detailed discussion on these points)*

Unfortunately, that excludes some of their best publications.

------
its_so_on
I'd be interested to know how much money they're saving. On its face, it seems
like ONE university in every rich country should pay for 'all there is'
(within reason). Or, at least the leading journals in each field, and some of
the other resources posters have mentioned above.

Like it or not, America spends a huge amount on research as published in
journals, and if a country has no subscriptions to it at all they're simply
cut off from that. I don't have a horse in this race: I would be very happy if
academic publishing were completely different. However, realistically, these
things should be 'somewhere' in a country the size (and wealth) of Germany,
available for consumption by its interested scholars.

------
ktizo
Might only be the maths department, but Elsevier is sitting on a whole lot of
loose snow right now and this is yet another snowball picking up speed
somewhere further up the mountain.

