SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sgleysti on Sunday February 16 2020, @04:34PM
Whenever someone would ask, "Who is your personal hero?", I never used to have an answer. Then I read about Alexandra Elbakyan (founder of sci-hub), and now I have an answer :)
It's so funny how people express the opinion that sci-hub is a stepping stone or a stopgap or a symptom of a broken publishing system, and then Alexandra publishes posts like https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/sci-hub-is-a-goal-changing-the-system-is-a-method/ [wordpress.com] explaining that she has already opened access to research, and that this should be legal.