"Elsevier [...] is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable."
Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use where I can just get knowledge and science that I need for projects. Elsevier simply destroys that out of pure greed and nothing else.
Elzevier isn't the only one, either. While not as egregious, there is Proquest, who locks private researchers out of many databases and digital works (mostly historical works) that are not available anywhere else. If one is not an enrolled student or faculty member of an institution that pays for an institutional subscription, there is no way to gain access to their databases.
This type of intellectual elitism disgusts me. It's particularly bad when I would pay for access to some of their databases, but I'm not even given the choice.
One thing to keep in mind is that European universities have encouraged this situation by insisting that faculty publish in "legitimate" journals, where "legitimate" means "published by one of the major academic publishing companies." It has been a problem for CS faculty who have to convince universities that conference proceedings carry more weight in CS than journal articles, which is why you see Springer publishing "official" copies of so many conference papers (while "unofficial" copies can typically be found at the authors' personal webpage).
I hope to see more open source online journals like https://distill.pub/ in the future. With hosting being so cheap (basically free for anything remotely open source), I really don't see a need for private publishing companies.
Publishing companies exist because faculty need to publish in "legitimate" journals; this is an even bigger issue in Europe than in America. Basically, if a young professor is trying to gain tenure, the university will insist that she have a solid record of published researched. The only publications they will consider for a tenure decision are those that are in journals published by the big companies, because those are what are considered "legitimate."
Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.
From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.
That's pretty much undeniable. That said, German academic libraries have also supposedly spent a lot of effort into making sure that accessing the content is still as painless as possible, e.g. through making Inter-library Loan easier.
There is a semi-successful media campaign against studies published in "less than reputable" journals in Germany right now. Elsevier always features prominently as "a good example", while Open Access often is associated with "bad practices".
Geez, I wonder who might have paid for that campaign.
It would probably be better to attend the members meetings of the professional societies that manage such conferences and voicing your objection to Elsevier.
The most powerful boycott would be not to submit papers to Elsevier journals. But given current academic hiring practices this is hardly going to happen, at least not in my field.
German Universities could no longer accept Elsevier papers for hiring purposes going forward. If they did it with 2 years lead time maybe they can tip the scales without punishing the researchers
I think this is great. Hopefully the entire academic world will switch to Open Access for all future publishing. Then by fixing copyright lengths we can just wait them out.
Readit News
Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use where I can just get knowledge and science that I need for projects. Elsevier simply destroys that out of pure greed and nothing else.
This type of intellectual elitism disgusts me. It's particularly bad when I would pay for access to some of their databases, but I'm not even given the choice.
https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/8w98c8/shameless_...
Technically journal publishing companies have been obsolete since the Internet was invented, but the problem is not technical, it is political. Even in the crypto research community, which maintains its own repository of research papers (https://eprint.iacr.org/), there is still a need to have Springer publish conference proceedings.
From about page: "Distill articles are peer reviewed and appear in Google Scholar. Distill is also registered with the Library of Congress and CrossRef.
I am so, so glad that Open Access is being fought for instead of being appeased with concessions.
The folding of other consortia modelled after DEAL during negotiations has been shameful so I am glad that DEAL are standing firm.
Geez, I wonder who might have paid for that campaign.