MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier
I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.
Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:
https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/
Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed
Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig
That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):
https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy
Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).
Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.
The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1
The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals
Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/
Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online
And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.
If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.
Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.
Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:
https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/
Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:
https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra
Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979
The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:
https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/
This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are full of citations to Sci-Hub:
https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/
Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier:
http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research
And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/
But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7
Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:
https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open
Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight
It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:
https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/
How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.
This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!
https://unsub.org/
The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.
Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/
Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance
Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.
Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier
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Made an updated version of this with a bit more info on things and a few tweaks, so go check out that version here!
I've made a few posts talking about things in the nonhuman and alterhuman communities recently, mostly just brief looks into them, so I thought I would share this one.
The info may not be all that much, and could easily be expanded upon, but I did my best for a simple bit of info for certain things.
All pictures have ALT text included, but I shall post the text also here, under a cut, cause it's a bit long, lol
Nonhuman as an identity: To identify as not human either fully or partially. (hate/trolls will be reported and deleted)
Reminder: These are all personal identities and why someone identifies as nonhuman and what term someone decides to use for themself is exclusively their business. In the end it is what makes the most sense to the individual and not up to others. Now, onto some of the communities that are included under the nonhuman identity:
Otherkin: from the term "otherkind" - an identity which typically encompasses being wholly or partially a nonhuman entity. Usually understood to cover those who identify as mythical creatures and other fantastical things. Also covers those that fall outside of beings and creatures.
Examples of non-being or creature based identities:
Conceptkin: an identity where one identifies as a concept such as the concept of night or fire.
Objectkin: and identity where one identifies as an object.
Songkin: an identity where one identifies as a song.
Examples of being and creature based identities:
Therianthropy: usually shortened to therian - where one identifies AS a nonhuman animal. Some will say that this term refers to only earthen animals, living or extinct, but it has never only encompassed earthly animals. The community's language came from those who identify as werecreatures.
Theriomythic: an alternate identity term for one who identifies in some intrinsic was as a mythical creature.
Paleotherian: an identity term for one who identifies as a now extinct earthly animal, like a dinosaur or mammoth.
Cladotherian or Cladokin: an identity term for one who does not identify as a distinct species, but a broader identity encompassing an entire genus or larger grouping.
Cladomythic: an identity term for one who identifies as a group (clade) of animalistic mythical creatures.
Fictionkin: an identity term that covers all things fictional. For those who identify as something fictional like characters, animals, species, objects, etc. These can be from books, shows, video games, etc, but not always! Original fictional characters and such are also possible.
There are many other identities that fall under the nonhuman umbrella which is why it's important to do your own research to figure out if a certain term works for you. All these identities share the trait of being involuntary. You cannot choose to be therian, otherkin, or the other mentioned identities.
While the already mentioned identities are involuntary, there are some identities that fall under being voluntary.
Otherlink: an identity where one voluntarily identifies as nonhuman.
Copinglink: an identity where one voluntarily identifies as nonhuman to copes with things such as trauma, stress, etc.
A lot of people may also say that it is impossible to become a therian, otherkin, etc. While the identity is involuntary, things like trauma and neurodivergence can cause an individual to take on a nonhuman identity when they had not had one previously.
Most will usually see people explain that these identities are spiritual or psychological, but these are only some of the ways that individuals may experience them. Some other experiences of nonhumanity:
Symbolic
Metaphorical
Ancestral
Physical
(Yes this is an actual reason for some and they are just as much a part of the community as anyone else. Physical and Ancestral nonhumans are part of the community's history and some of its founders.)
For those looking for more information, and community places, here are some places to check out!
Werelist
Nonhuman National Park
Alterhuman Archive
The Chimera's Library.
The above are forums and archives of information on the community. Most archived information is thanks to who-is-page, liongoatsnake and frameacloud on tumblr.
While this is a brief look into the nonhuman identity that I could share, I do hope it has been helpful in some way.
Remember to be true to yourself, and don't let anyone tell you how to feel.
Ignore, report, delete and block the haters!
Yeen out~
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Static image version of a previously posted video. All images are ALT text, but I shall also paste the text here:
COMMUNITY PSA: A reminder that those who identify physically as nonhuman are welcome and have always, and will always, be a part of the therian, alterhuman, nonhuman, otherkin, and similar communities, and can use ANY of these labels.
Whether their reason for identifying this way is spiritual, due to delusions, trauma, mental health, conditions such as lycanthropy or zoanthropy or is similar to the notion of "this is my body, and I am nonhuman, therefore my body is nonhuman" is their business and theirs alone.
People outside of the communities will always find a way to dislike us, and trying to cater to them by putting down other members of these groups will never make them fully accept us. Playing into the "Us vs Them" mindset only pushes the community apart.
All I hear when I see videos and comments from fellow therians, nonhumans, otherkin and alterhumans talking about these identities being ONLY non-physical is, "well, we OBVIOUSLY don't identify physically as animals/etc. We're not like those CRAZY people!"
Which is not only ableist but paints those who do identify physically in a bad light, whatever their reason may be. Delusions and mental illnesses that may cause them does not mean the identity of that individual is fake or wrong. So treat others nicely, even if you may not understand.
Not only that but delusions and the mental illnesses that cause them do not always equate to distressing or bad. Unlearn the idea that such things are an indicator of something being wrong and so has to be fixed because that mindset hurts many who live unbothered lives with them.
All of my accounts will always be safe spaces for those who have physical nonhuman and alterhuman identities. Just as they will be a safe space for those whose identity is non-physical. The only one who can decide what and who you are is yourself.
Stay true to yourself! Ignore, report and block the haters! Your happiness is more important than their ideas of you!
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