Just to be clear, not only do authors not get paid for journal articles, but it is not unusual that they have to pay to submit their articles (so-called "page charges"). Given that sometimes these researchers belong to organizations funded by the taxpayer, what you have is a situation where you, the taxpayer, are paying companies like Elsevier to profit from blocking access to publicly funded research.
No, you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research. None of that is free.
People are free to pony up the money to create an alternate system, and researchers are free to use it. Nothing is stopping them from doing so. People continue to pay Elsevier, JSTOR, etc, because they value the convenience of using a system that's already established and widely used.
"you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research"
Really, is that what we are paying them for? Well that's interesting, because the next paper I submit, which I am preparing now, is written in LaTeX and is submitted electronically. In the LaTeX source, I have to write keywords and codes that classify the article. The article is hosted on my website, which is hosted on the university's computer.
So remind me, what is the publisher being paid for?
> So remind me, what is the publisher being paid for?
Nothing is stopping you from, you know, just not submitting your paper to Elsevier. You could just put up a link on your blog or something. Whatever thing it is that makes you submit to them instead of just doing that is what Elsevier is being paid for.
In other words, they are paid because of the names of the journals they publish. Researchers rarely read bound copies of journals in this day and age; it is faster to download the articles they want to read. My work is published on my web page. I receive emails all the time about it, from people trying to make use of it. At the last meeting for the grant I paid on, my advisor and I were thanked by another research group for some of our work, and for helping that group get our code to run. All of that, however, amounts to nothing if the work is not published in a prestigious journal (or in my field, presented at a prestigious conference, but the conferences are run by the same companies that publish journals and the proceedings are published in the same fashion as journals).
Yes, that is how this works. A researcher with a good reputation in their field, whose website provides quick and easy access to their work, has not advanced their career at all unless their work is published in some set of venues. This is not like interviewing for a tech company and giving them a link to your github account or showing them examples of your code; your CV has to contain a list of publications in major journals/conferences if you want to get anywhere in academia. It all boils down to the names of the journals.
So the next time you want to remind someone that Elsevier is paid for something, you can tell them the truth: Elsevier is paid for the names of its journals.
Okay, so you're paying Elsevier for lending you the weight of their brands, because it's beneficial to you to do so. What's wrong with that? I paid a lot of money to my undergrad and law school so I could put their brands on my resume. Nobody forced me to do it--I did it because it was beneficial to me. I don't see the problem with it.
Everyone pays for brands--it's why Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, etc, still exist in an industry where marginal costs are approaching nothing. Hell, even tech companies pay for brands. They don't recruit at Berkeley and Stanford just to get a look at peoples' github repositories.
Signaling, filtering, vetting, vouching are intrinsic to human society. There is nothing coercive about what Elsevier is doing. They've built up brands people trust and are making money providing the signaling services people want.
TL;DR: No they didn't. Academics did, and publishers will wither away because they add no value and have relatively little power over the academics upon which they are parasites. I then break the law.
Certainly in computer science, it is not the publishers who have not built up brands people trust (except ACM and possibly IEEE). Academics forming program committees and organising the conferences have built up the trusted brands.
Now, in the past, it made sense to get a publisher to produce paper proceedings for attendees and distribute proceedings to libraries.
However, now publishers make very little contribution to conferences – attendees all pay a significant fee to attend. The programme committee and referees are not paid. The authors produce digital works (and the referees do minor proof reading, not the publisher). Paper copies are often not distributed. I've not been on a programme committee, but I'm pretty sure publishers are adding no value whatsoever.
The reason this hasn't withered away already is that all universities pay for access to all publishers so academics don't really see it as a problem; it's easier to just stick to the status quo when it's not your rights being violated.
But eventually, conference organisers will realise they can just tell Elsvier or Springer or even the IEEE and ACM to get stuffed†. They'll then put the proceedings on arxiv or some other free place (hell, just torrent them) and merrily continue doing everything else exactly the same sans publisher.
Civil disobedience time: http://robinmessage.com/wwv07.pdf is a conference paper I wrote. In order to participate in that conference, I was coerced into giving my copyright to Elsvier. Note they did nothing to make it happen; it was my work, and the work of the organising committee and referees. But I no longer own the copyright to that paper, and so probably broke the law posting it here.
† Interestingly, apparently all publicly funded UK research will soon be required to be published somewhere open access, in direct violation of the requirements of most publishers. So academics have a fun question to answer: don't publish anywhere good, or break the law?
You're dancing around the point. Nobody is forcing you to publish with Elsevier, nobody is forcing universities to subscribe, nobody is forcing you to go to conferences associated with them, etc. It all operates on the academic industry voluntarily doing business with Elsevier. Presumably, if they wanted to do business with someone else they would do so.
So what's the civil disobedience against? Where is the beef here, because I don't see it.
I'm not sure exactly what your disagreement is here, so sorry if what follows just muddies the waters further.
Background: an academic must publish. It is their purpose. And they have relatively little control over the venue they publish in - whatever happened some time ago controls where they can have impact and gain kudos (and reach).
I think the practices of publishers are immoral. A large system, including laws, the state, and various independent and dependent entities makes what they do legal, and disobeying their rules illegal. I was not forced to publish with Elsevier, but as mentioned above, neither did I have any realistic other options. Vested interests are real, however much we would like to wish them away.
To use an analogy: if bus companies were privately owned, and practiced segregation (and sitting in the wrong place could be construed as criminal), would it be civil disobedience to sit in the wrong place? After all, nobody is forcing you to ride a particular bus. You could get together with other like-minded people and form a new bus company. However, that is a serious undertaking; we could just make segregation illegal instead.
In the same way, we could form lots of new journals and conferences which would struggle to prominence; or we could make copyright assignment of academic work illegal, at least for publicly funded research. Don't forget that copyright is at the gift of the state; it is not a natural right but a constructed one; and without the state enforcing it would be significantly weaker.
Summary: Some acts are so immoral that the state makes them illegal, even between consenting entities. In my opinion, what one might call copyright theft, as practised by publishers upon academics, is one of those acts; yet currently the law says I am the one in the wrong. Hence, civil disobedience: active and professed refusal to follow a particular law because, like a bus, I have very little choice about which one to get on (to publish in), but I'll sit (put my paper) where I like once I'm on it.
Force and coercion can come from places outside of law or government decision. They can come from private actors, or, as in this particular case, from historically grown social structures.
As an academic, you are de facto forced to publish in certain journals that are considered to be important and of high quality. It is the collective status quo that does the forcing, as Robin_Message has already explained quite well.
(Coincidentally, most of my disagreement with most libertarians seems to come from the fact that they fail to understand or accept this relatively simple concept. If you implicitly assume that force and coercion can only ever come from the state, you're going to have a somewhat warped outlook on life.)
It's called "publish or perish," in other words your career as a researcher depends on you publishing papers in certain journals. Again, the fact that I have started to gain a reputation within my field makes no difference to my career as a researcher; only the papers I publish matter, and only if I publish those papers in certain venues.
"Presumably, if they wanted to do business with someone else they would do so."
So you are trying to apply a market-based solution to this situation, despite the fact that academic publishers remain in business because of a special government-granted monopoly? That's some interesting logic you have there.
"So what's the civil disobedience against? Where is the beef here, because I don't see it."
The civil disobedience is against a system that prevents the general public from accessing published research despite the widespread availability of a technology that can cheaply copy and transmit published research. I do not know if you noticed, but there is a global computer network available that is better at copying and distributing scientific articles than any publishing company has ever been, yet the majority of that system's users would have to pay more than their month's salary just to read the articles I cited in my last paper (or else more than a year's salary for subscription access). This situation exists solely because of copyright; there is no economic reason for it and it benefits nobody (other than academic publishing companies' investors).
Since you need it spelled out for you, here it is: the "beef" is with the fact that poor people are less able to access scientific publications than rich people. Traveling to the nearest university is expensive and time consuming, and even if you can do that there is no guarantee that the library will actually have a subscription to all journals (they almost certainly do not, and they may not care if someone who lacks affiliation requests a particular article or journal). We can correct that inequity, which works for the benefit of our supposedly democratic system and our supposedly capitalist economic system, by utilizing the most advanced and effective global communication system ever developed, and so the "beef" is really with our utter failure to do so for the sake of protecting businesses that were built around the communication technology of six centuries ago.
"you're paying Elsevier for lending you the weight of their brands, because it's beneficial to you to do so. What's wrong with that?"
1. Academic publishers do nothing to contribute to the strength of these "brands;" the reviewers and editors voluntarily do so. Nobody says, "Springer publishes that journal, so it must be a good one!"
2. Publish-or-perish is extreme destructive to research. Researchers frequently avoid difficult problems because such problems make it hard to publish at the expected rate. The existence of the academic publishing system, combined with the focus on journal names rather than research quality, creates and encourages the publish-or-perish system. The overall effect is detrimental to everyone, including researchers who are forced to shy away from the problems they set out to address in order to meet the demand to publish papers.
"Hell, even tech companies pay for brands. They don't recruit at Berkeley and Stanford just to get a look at peoples' github repositories."
Unlike academic publishers, Berkeley and Stanford actively maintain a level of quality that companies who recruit there expect. At the very least, those schools pay the faculty who make their curricula valuable to students; there is an expectation that by completing the requirements for a degree at such schools, students have proved their merit.
Academic publishers do nothing to maintain the quality of scientific journals; they contribute only their name, and are able to do so only because their businesses receive special, privileged protection by the government (copyrights and trademarks). The "value" of these "brands" is artificial, created by a system of laws that is grossly outdated and which no longer serves its purpose (at least as far as scientific research is concerned). We once needed academic publishers to facilitate the communication of scientific results; times have changed, we now have a better way for scientists to communicate, and all that remains is to incentivize its use (much like we incentivized the academic publishing business with copyright law).
"Signaling, filtering, vetting, vouching are intrinsic to human society"
I fail to see how this is relevant to a discussion about academic publishers, as academic publishers do not do any of the above. Again, review is generally done by volunteers, and editing is frequently voluntary.
"There is nothing coercive about what Elsevier is doing"
Academic publishers coerce researchers into assigning copyrights, and then use those assignments to extract money from those researchers later if they try to reproduce their articles elsewhere. It is coercive because researchers are expected to publish papers in the journals that academic publishers control, and so the researchers must choose between their careers and the demand for a copyright assignment. Not all coercion involves threats of death or imprisonment; threatening a person's livelihood is coercive.
> No, you're paying Elsevier to digitize, index, catalogue, and host publicly funded research. None of that is free.
So why aren't those services let out for competitive bid?
The agreements that were made in the past have severe negative externalities in the present environment. They must be renegotiated. We should not live in a feudal society where mere tradition grants a divine right of monopoly to publicly funded goods.
As far as I can tell, it's not tradition that gives Elsevier its monopoly, it's simple network effect. It's the same reason you use Facebook or Google Chat instead of something else--by publishing on an Elsevier-affiliated journal, your academic work reaches the most eyeballs.
"by publishing on an Elsevier-affiliated journal, your academic work reaches the most eyeballs."
No, by publishing freely on the Internet, without any paywall between readers and your article, your academic work reaches the most eyeballs. Publishing in a journal that is locked behind paywalls is one of the least efficient ways to communicate one's work to others. The only issue is that doing so does not help anyone's career, and failing to publish in major journals is fatal to such careers.
Elsevier definitely provides a service, and should be remunerated for it. However, arguably most of their income is due to a "coordination game" rather than any value added - see The Parable of the Anarchists Annual Meeting[1].
It's not particularly different (though the low switching costs are somewhat unusual). Regardless, there's a network externality that allows Elsevier to capture excess rents. It's not that Elsevier doesn't provide any value, but at the same time, its profits outpace that value by a large margin. Nonetheless, coordination problems can easily prevent a competitor who pledges not to take those rents from disrupting Elsevier's position, so it's not as easy as saying "there's nothing stopping you from starting a new competitor".
Nothing is stopping Google from setting up such a service, though I would personally rather just pay an upfront fee than sell Google more of my privacy.
