
Thousands of scientists run up against Elsevier’s paywall - pseudolus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00492-4
======
raphlinus
All this is an excellent ad for sci-hub, which avoids most of the serious
drawbacks of publishers like Elsevier. It was interesting how that was
relegated to a veiled comment at the end, "or finding access in other
channels". But basically if the mainstream publishers can't meet the need, we
do need other channels, and right now sci-hub is the only one that actually
works at scale.

~~~
z2
Sci-Hub's user flow is so ridiculously friendly, that I'd often use it even
when I have credentials to some obscure authorization network. This is true
even for the free SSRN which started requiring logging in around the time
Elsevier bought them.

Gabe Newell of Valve asserted something very similar:

> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is
> almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a
> pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the
> convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the
> product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US
> release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the
> pirate's service is more valuable."

~~~
amelius
> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is
> almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said.

I don't know. Paying $25 or $50 for an article, just to see if it contains
something useful is a lot ... And with the realization that the research was
funded by tax dollars, that price becomes absurd.

~~~
norswap
Yeah, in the Steam age the demos have been mostly killed. I guess "Let's
Plays" have replaced them? Personally, I still value getting my hands on the
beast myself.

~~~
joshvm
Steam will at least automatically refund a purchase within 14 days if the play
time is less than 2 hours.

As far as I know you can't get a refund if you don't like an article, but I
may be mistaken. If you had that option, paying for a journal article might be
slightly more palatable.

The quickest legal way to get a copy of a paper that isn't already accessible
as a pre-print is to email the author(s). Usually they don't mind. Hint: email
the student, not the prof and you're more likely to get a reply. You can also
do this via ResearchGate.

------
slr555
Stunningly in NYC there is not a single medical library that offers journal
access open to the general public. The only publicly accessible medical
library has been described to me as primarily a "historical" library without
journal access.

Columbia and NYU's medical libraries are only open to medical school students
and faculty. No undergraduates. No alumni. The New York Public Library has
surprisingly good online access but is missing a number of important journals
and current issues are often delayed by agreement for several months.

If in this nation's largest city, current healthcare knowledge is bulkheaded
from public access there is a serious problem. Whatever the publisher's rights
these knowledge and information asymmetries must not be allowed to continue.

~~~
asdff
I guarantee anyone enrolled or alumni with credentials at Columbia and NYU can
log into just about any journal on the school network on campus or with the
school proxy anywhere in the world.

Laymen aren't going to be reading from these journals, they are really too
technical to be informative. It's like having people without CS knowledge read
through your source code and saying "Boom. Open source." By the time you
explain someone the necessary conceptual ideas to understand these dense
papers, you will be basically giving them a B.S. in biology.

The real crime with these journals is that it can cost thousands to have the
privilege of your paper published. That's thousands that could have been spent
on more reagents, equipment, or salaries to do even more science. Instead, you
pay the toll troll, and you lost another x% of your grant earmarked by the
government to do science.

~~~
Vinnl
You're stretching the definition of laymen here - often people with plenty of
expertise, such as GP's, don't have access to the latest research, or have to
make do with the access of interns. For examples, see
[https://whoneedsaccess.org](https://whoneedsaccess.org)

------
phlakaton
While Nature publishes articles that poke at Elsevier, they might themselves
want to explain to us why they are the largest requestor of waivers to UC's
Open Access policy, by almost a factor of 8:

[https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-
uc/ope...](https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/open-access-at-uc/open-
access-policy/publisher-communications/)

It would seem to me that they're not exactly an unbiased spectator on the
matter of publishers and access.

------
a3_nm
Keep in mind that this article is published by Nature Publishing Group, which
is a closed-access publisher just like Elsevier. Hence, they have an incentive
to give readers the impression that it's a big deal for a university to cancel
their subscription to closed-access articles.

They do so by failing to mention the two obvious ways that people can use to
get access to scientific papers without a subscription: (1.) preprints on open
repositories and/or author websites, and (2.) Sci-Hub.

~~~
fabian2k
Preprints are not an option in every field, they're very common in some fields
but almost nonexistent in others.

Sci-Hub is not a legal alternative, that is an issue. There are legal ways to
get papers without subscription for a reasonable price (inter-library loans),
but they take more time and effort.

~~~
a3_nm
The fact that Sci-Hub is not a legal alternative is not a reason not to
mention them. The existence of Sci-Hub is very relevant to what the article
discusses.

~~~
subroutine
Thing is, there is no need for Sci-Hub if researchers (in the US) just took a
few minutes to comply with the existing NIH public access policy.

[https://publicaccess.nih.gov](https://publicaccess.nih.gov)

> To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed
> articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public
> access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal
> manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon
> acceptance for publication.

Why this duty is so often neglected escapes me, since:

(1) it's to our great benefit (in a general greater good sense, yes, but here
I'm saying it's to someone's great personal benefit) to make your research
articles as easily accessible as possible (think: h-index).

(2) It's not like PubMed / PMC is some obscure portal scientists rarely visit.
It's where the majority of us begin our lit search. If you are writing a grant
/ thesis / dissertation it's practically our homepage. Basically I'm saying
it's collectively odd behavior that we use PubMed as our primary portal to
access research articles, but not bother to ensure our own research articles
are easily accessible through this portal.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-
access/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/)

------
Causality1
It should be a legal requirement that all papers resulting from taxpayer-
funded research be open access.

~~~
fredbo22
It's a beautiful sentiment.

Who's going to pay for the layout and editing and filtering? The people at
Elsevier do something for their money.

I'm happy with going to all author-circulated preprints, but I'm afraid that
all of the archival work of the journals is a pretty good thing.

~~~
wsy
I have been publishing at Elsevier, and the editing process was a nightmare.
The "layout and editing and filtering" is not performed by skilled editors, it
is performed on an Amazon Mechanical Turk level. There was no improvement for
the reader over what my co-authors and me had submitted, just a lot of back
and forth to prevent numerous new errors to be slipped in.

I'd gladly pay a one-time fee for a good editor to bring a paper into a better
shape, to cover these costs.

------
cubaia
The value of a publisher these days is not about the cost of publishing
anymore (for obvious reasons, like text editing technology and the Internet).

Today it's almost 100% about the prestige/brand recognition of the journals
which they still control.

Journal prestige still matters because: (i) it's a way people can quickly
determine the value of a paper (i.e. without reading it); and (ii) "where" you
publish has direct impact on researchers careers, funding, etc.

The only way out is for the research community to start using other means of
ranking papers and assessing the impact of research in a way that doesn't
depend on which journal it got published.

------
azangru
And yet, they keep publishing in these journals?

Yes, yes, I know, publish or perish, prestige, impact factor, yada-yada. I’ve
just imagined for a second what it would be like if the rhetoric and activism
of left-leaning staff on campus that is talked about so much were directed at
fighting unequal access to knowledge. It sounded so good in my head; the
rhetorical techniques fit so beautifully.

~~~
fabian2k
They don't really have a choice. Your publication record is the most important
factor you're judged by, and that determines your chances to become a
professor and to continue to earn grant money to do some science.

If you have the option to publish in Nature or Science, you have to take it.
Or you will stunt or kill your career.

~~~
azangru
> If you have the option to publish in Nature or Science, you have to take it.

That’s because it is currently your own decision as an individual. But if the
left mobilized their forces to shame those who publish in these journals like
they shamed, oh, I don't know, Niall Ferguson for having an "all-male history
conference” — oh how the arithmetic will change :-)

------
jostmey
As a academic researcher, here is my takeaway: European scientist will be much
likely to see my publications under Elsevier and therefore much less likely to
cite it. Going forward, I will avoid publishing under Elsevier (even in those
journals with a high impact factor) out of fear that the work will not be
cited in the future

~~~
ur-whale
Sounds like what matters to you most is how many citations you get.

Color me naive, I thought research was about doing cool science, no?

~~~
jostmey
Yes, I am in research to do cool science. I write the papers because I want to
do cool science. But then I have to decide where to submit those papers. At
this point, the choice has nothing to do with science, so I am careful to pick
journals where my papers get the most visibility in the hope that this will
increase my chances of remaining funded

~~~
natechols
Elaborating on the above, _everyone_ gets into research to do cool science.
But once you get there, you need to worry about funding, promotion, and other
messy details of career maintenance. I've watched many excellent scientists,
genuinely brilliant and thoughtful people, spend an inordinate amount of time
on this, because they all know if they don't, they won't be able to continue
doing science indefinitely.

------
_emacsomancer_
To address some comments (some of them dead) suggesting that typesetting etc.
costs money: most publishers actually force the author to do this themselves.

------
Vinnl
I wonder whether this also has the reverse effect: that publishing your work
behind a paywall in an Elsevier journal will hurt your impact, because fewer
researchers will read it.

In my opinion, it's these incentives that are the problem. The main reason
researchers keep going for the same paywalled (or high publishing fee-)
journals is because they need to list the stamp of approval of its brand name
on their CV. Fewer readers makes that brand name less valuable.

That said, I don't think that will be enough. The world needs to transition to
another way of evaluating research that does not depend on where they publish.

(Disclosure: I'm working on such a system [1]. You can help by installing the
extension [2]!)

[1] [https://plaudit.pub/](https://plaudit.pub/)

[2] [https://plaudit.pub/extension/](https://plaudit.pub/extension/)

~~~
a3_nm
It is known that paywalled articles are less read, and less cited, than open-
access articles. See e.g. [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/home/open-
access-papers...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/home/open-access-
papers-gain-more-traffic-and-citations/2014850.article)

Sadly, this is much less important to researchers than the name of the journal
that they publish in.

~~~
asdff
This is because most researchers don't see the paywall with their proxies, it
is the institution or company that they work under that deals with these fees.

------
OskarS
I understand that the situation is frustrating for scientists and academics,
but I really hope that they understand that breaking the Elsevier's chokehold
is good for science (and the world) in the long run.

~~~
czzr
Elsevier publishes about 17-18% of the world’s research. It’s a lot, but they
hardly have a chokehold.

~~~
asdff
That percent changes by field.

------
OliverJones
Hmm. Given all the author requirements for print-ready copy, page charges, and
the like, one wonders why these big publishers get so much material to publish
when less costly alternatives exist.

Maybe it's their stellar peer-review processes? Maybe not.

Maybe the brand value of their flagship journals? That could be the
explanation.

Here on HN, people are on the lookout for businesses vulnerable to disruption
because they rest on their laurels rather than their innovation. Elsevier
looks like that kind of business. Opportunity for sci-hub and other
innovators!

------
roywiggins
"most of these article requests are fulfilled within a working day by one of
the ten German institutions that do still have a subscription to Elsevier"

... this doesn't seem sustainable

~~~
Vinnl
I think it mostly gives the cover of plausible deniability - I don't think
many people doubt that many researchers simply fetch the research they need
from Sci-Hub, or elect not to read it at all, before contacting their
librarian.

------
_underfl0w_
This may be an incredibly ignorant question so go easy on me, but does
publishing in a given journal give some form or Intellectual Property rights
to the publisher? Is there some mandatory exclusivity rule?

That is, what's to stop someone from publishing in a "top" journal to bolster
their career, then re-publishing the same thing in an open access journal?

~~~
gpuhacker
These publishers require that you transfer copyright to them. You're allowed
to use your own work as part of your work, such as teaching, and sharing it
with fellow researchers. But you're not allowed to upload the published
version of the work elsewhere. Preprints are often allowed, such as on arxiv,
are usually allowed.

------
saganus
"which publishes more than 400,000 papers each year."

Wow, I had no idea so many research papers were published by Elsevier alone.

Does that mean that most research goes unread? How does that affect researches
and science in general?

------
Havoc
I don't quite get why the German gov doesn't just roll it's own solution?

Presumably the community would like that. Throw some money at it & start a
government backed free one.

~~~
vaylian
The hosting is not the hard part. Arxiv.org and SciHub do that on a shoestring
budget. The hard part is changing the mindset of the scientists. Reputation is
a very strong motivation factor for scientists to publish in prestigious
journals. And journals (prestigious or not) like to charge a lot of money just
because they can.

Fortunately things are changing. Most people in the machine learning community
posts their papers directly on arxiv.org.

------
scoot_718
Bad news for Elsevier. Do Academics really want to publish papers to journals
where nobody can cite you?

------
VvR-Ox
Organizations like Elsevier as well as all those other rights management
companies are one of the worst thorns of capitalism and destroy one of the
greatest ideas what the internet should/could be one day.

What about free education and knowledge?

What about culture?

Those things shouldn't be exclusive to people with enough money. We talk about
common goods here and especially education and knowledge have to be free as
they potentially facilitate a positive development of mankind.

It's unbearable that still parasites like these are gaining wealth without
adding real value to their customers as well as humanity itself.

------
jrochkind1
Uh oh, calling Elsevier's bluff.

