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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 15 2020, @05:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A quiet revolution is sweeping the $20 billion academic publishing market and its main operator Elsevier, partly driven by an unlikely group of rebels: cash-strapped librarians.

When Florida State University cancelled its “big deal” contract for all Elsevier’s 2,500 journals last March to save money, the publisher warned it would backfire and cost the library $1 million extra in pay-per-view fees.

But even to the surprise of Gale Etschmaier, dean of FSU’s library, the charges after eight months were actually less than $20,000. “Elsevier has not come back to us about ‘the big deal’,” she said, noting it had made up a quarter of her content budget before the terms were changed.

Mutinous librarians such as Ms. Etschmaier remain in a minority but are one of a host of pressures bearing down on the subscription business of Elsevier, the 140-year-old publisher that produces titles including the world’s oldest medical journal, The Lancet.

The company is facing a profound shift in the way it does business, as customers reject traditional charging structures.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday February 16 2020, @06:31PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday February 16 2020, @06:31PM (#958865) Journal

    I am also a researcher, and have gotten more than my fill of the problems with the current state of affairs. I am furious with the journals for paywalling research, both my own and the research of others that I want to read. They don't even pass along to the researchers any of the profits from their dastardly system. Nor of course do they feel in the least obliged to keep authors informed of the profit they manage to suck out of interested parties, so there's no telling how much or little that may be. Consequently, I am more than happy to give out free copies of any of my research works that anyone wants, and damn the academic publishers and their strongarming of the transfer of all rights from researchers to them in exchange for the "favor" of being paywalled. I dare them to sue me for violating the copyrights they extorted from me, when I distribute copies of my own works.

    Most of all, these academic publisher scum and fellow intellectual property extremists in the entertainment and software industries have delayed by years the great drive to digitize everything, and truly bring us to the full flowering of the Age of Information. Our public libraries should be freed of the burden of having to house so damn many bulky copies. Digital storage now takes a fraction of the space of paper, and is way, way, way more searchable, and copyable. Can now get an entire wall full of books onto one thumb drive. There are a lot of old papers I'd like to be able to access without either having to find out which library has a copy and then traveling there, or asking for an interlibrary loan and waiting weeks. Why should anyone have to travel to a library at all, why can't we just download copies of books and "papers" from the nearest, handy Internet connection?

    It's coming, slowly, but it is coming. For instance, many of the works of one of the most famous mathematicians of the 18th century, Euler, are freely available online. Of course, works that old are long out of copyright, so no problem there. However, Euler wrote his papers in ... Latin! Oof. I actually had some Latin in middle school, but even if I remembered it, it would be of little help with something that technical. But in another glorious stroke of progress, scholars specializing in the history of sciences have translated many of these papers into English and freely offered their translations.

    Another area of growth is, with so much more data storage capacity, the inclusion of complementary materials that in the past were routinely excluded from publication, things such as source code and gobs of data.

    Another thing in need of much change is peer review. The quality is very spotty, and perfectly good articles are routinely misunderstood, and summarily rejected. The worst cases are those very few groundbreaking papers that while correct, were so radical they weren't believed. Sure, there's a lot of spam and crap too, but these high flying journals are too damn picky and proud of their exclusivity, and for what? To save on that oh so valuable page limit that really isn't important any more?

    Further, much of the formatting requirements are just ridiculous. It's frivolity. Of course there's merit in keeping things neat, organized, readable, and comprehensible, but beyond that, it's just a distraction. It's like hoping the medical doctor will evaluate you as healthier because you wore a suit to your checkup. Even if you can't impress the doc with that, maybe you can wow the other patients in the waiting room.

    A final word about that author pays publication model: Yeah, that's okay for those researchers fortunate enough to be employed by a patron who will foot those bills for them. For the rest of us researchers, it's a raw deal. Not good for the small time patron either, to have to pay again for what the public has already paid.

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