

Elsevier's recent update to its letter to the mathematical community - vgnet
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/elseviers-recent-update-to-its-letter-to-the-mathematical-community/

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noelwelsh
I agree with the authors complaints (I'm not in the same field, but the
general complaint holds across disciplines). However the solution really is
trivial. The machine learning community solved this problem a decade ago when
the editorial board (40 of them) resigned en-mass from the Machine Learning
Journal: <http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/statement.html> JMLR (<http://jmlr.org>)
is now the premier venue for machine learning publications, and you can visit
their home page to see the (non-)restrictions they place on access. They are
also very cheap to subscribe to if you prefer dead trees. Any other discipline
that really cared about open access could do the same in a heart-beat. The
research produced by a discipline is largely consumed by that discipline. If
they want to know who is keeping the academic publishing racket alive they
just need to look at themselves.

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ChristianMarks
The machine learning community (along with the combinatorics, category theory
and many other communities) created an open access journal. While this is
laudable it did not solve the non-trivial problem that commercial publishers
have a lock on 60 years of scientific publications.

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MBlume
This really is a hard problem. I'm not _sure_ this is right, but I think
there's probably a case to be made that congress should seize the IP under
eminent domain, write the publishers a check and tell them to go home.

~~~
nickpinkston
I really wish this would happen too... For "national security" reasons!

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Havoc
>Urs countered that “according to Florian Breuer’s computations the University
of Stellenbosch, South-Africa pays roughly the same than the University of
Muenster, Germany.

wow. Given that Stellenbosch is substantially smaller and in a 3rd world
country one would expect that they'd pay less.

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lshepstone
The choice of Stellenbosch in South Africa as an example is perhaps not ideal.
While SA may be a third world country in parts, it is very "first-world" in
others and has a GDP greater than Denmark, Finland, Singapore and Ireland.
Stellenbosch is also one of the countries premier Universities. I am not sure
we'd be as surprised if Universities from those countries were chosen as an
example.

I'm sure it's more of a case of Elsevier charging whatever it could to each
university.

~~~
Havoc
> has a GDP greater than Denmark, Finland, Singapore and Ireland.

That says absolutely nothing. You'd need to look at it on a GDP per person
basis. There all those countries you listed are far ahead of South Africa, in
some cases by a factor of 10x.

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thespin
That story about the MFN clause (if there is even a clause) is amusing.

The academic publishing industry seems a bit like the film and recording
industries. They do not want to face the fact that distribution and production
are becoming less expensive. And they are going to fight to the end.

But their high fee structures will eventually be unsustainable.

UCal tried to take at least one of these publishers on some years ago, forcing
them to renegotiate licensing terms. What ever became of that?

