#elsevier

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

[silelda]

I really, truly hope this case results in some positive changes. These publishers have had a stranglehold on academic publishing and budgets for far too long.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Maya Yang at The Guardian:

A controversial study that promoted hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, as a treatment for Covid-19 has officially been withdrawn. On Tuesday, Elsevier, a Dutch academic publishing company which owns the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, issued the retraction of the March 2020 study, saying “concerns have been raised regarding this article, the substance of which relate to the articles’ adherence to Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants”. Elsevier added that concerns had also been raised by “three of the authors themselves regarding the article’s methodology and conclusions”. An investigation by Elsevier’s research integrity and publishing ethics team, as well as the journal’s co-owner, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, found multiple issues within the study, according to a lengthy retraction notice. Among those include the journal being unable to confirm whether any of the patients involved in the study were acquired before ethical approval had been obtained. The journal has also not been able to establish whether there was equipoise between the study patients and the control patients. According to the Association of Healthcare Journalists, equipoise is the “genuine uncertainty within the expert medical community – not necessarily on the part of the individual investigator – about the preferred treatment.” The retraction notice also said that the journal has not been able to establish whether the subjects in this study should have provided informed consent to receive azithromycin as part of the study. According to the original study, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid would increase if used with azithromycin, an antibiotic. It went on to add that there is “reasonable cause to conclude that azithromycin was not considered standard care at the time of the study”. Since the study’s publication, three of its authors, Johan Courjon, Valérie Giordanengo and Stéphane Honoré, have contacted the journal to express their concerns “regarding the presentation and interpretation of results” and stated that they “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article”. Meanwhile, several other authors disagree with the retraction and dispute the grounds for it, the retraction notice said.

According to Nature, the study is the highest-cited paper on Covid-19 to be retracted, as well as the second-most-cited retracted paper overall.

The International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents retracts a March 2020 study that promoted hydroxychloroquine as a dubious COVID “cure”.

[konstruktivenachrichten]

Das MIT hat keinen Vertrag mit Elsevier mehr, spart dadurch jedes Jahr eine Menge Geld und hat keinerlei Nachteile was den Zugriff auf die Veröffentlichungen angeht.

[commiepinkofag]

In summary, I'm very sorry, as I am an AI language model

"In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model."

[mlleshopping]

Decoding Schizophrenia: Brain Connectivity’s Role

Decoding Schizophrenia: Brain Connectivity’s Role

[arathyputhillam]

it’s very weird being a swiftie who LOVES Taylor’s re-recording projects while also being a PhD student publishing papers because it’s like why am I signing away my intellectual brainchild to a damn publisher for nothing except a line on my CV 😭

[haroldjaffe]

Image description:

A post by Eiko Fried @EikoFried

Text:

Two days ago, a lawfirm filed a federal antitrust suit against 6 commercial publishers (including Elsevier & Wiley) in the federal district court in New York.

They allege a 3-part scheme on part of publishers. 🧵

Source:

[rcvandenboogaard]

Christendom en cultuurverval: Huizinga's omstreden kritiek op de geest der eeuw

Reformatorische christenen spelen niet langer een grote rol in het Nederlandse culturele en intellectuele leven. Dat is wat merkwaardig, als je goed nagaat. Ons land, en daarmee onze Nederlandse cultuur zijn immers in niet onbelangrijke mate gegrondvest op een mede door de Reformatie geïnspireerde Opstand tegen Spanje aan het einde van de zestiende eeuw. Of die Opstand nu voornamelijk religieus…

[dr-afsaeed]

Navigating the Elsevier Maze: Your Guide to Getting Published and Finding the Perfect Journal

Navigating the Elsevier Maze: Your Guide to Getting Published and Finding the Perfect Journal So, you’ve got a fantastic research paper burning a hole in your hard drive, and you’re eyeing Elsevier as a potential home. That’s great! Elsevier is a major player in scientific publishing, with a vast portfolio of journals. But navigating their system can feel a bit daunting. Fear not, aspiring…

[ailurinae]

Fuck Elsevier

Also not the first, I didn't know about this:

[shinelikethunder]

fuck it, pasting in my own commentary from a screenshot compilation of the notes on this post:

heartwarming!:

turns out dunking on Elsevier is one of those rare ways to bring tunglr dot hell together in unity, harmony, and incandescent seething hatred

#pirating from elsevier and the other big academic publishers is ALWAYS not just ethically permissible but a moral good #because they've perverted copyright to the point where it's not actually possible to 'steal' from the authors or peer reviewers #anyone who contributed useful creative or scientific work has been extorted into doing it free or even paying for 'partial open access' #and their institutions have to pay through the nose to rent it back - in bundled plans a cable company would blush at

#if you stomp into one of the core domains of fair use and put everyone in a chokehold that eliminates every legitimate purpose of copyright #and are no longer even pretending that a single contributor to 'the progress of science & the useful arts' gets any compensation from it #then yeah it's a moral good to circumvent your illegitimate vandalism of the societal good that authors' rights are in tension with: #public access to - and unfettered dissemination of - knowledge and culture #copyright was the peace treaty and you twisted it into a legalistic shit-pretzel that serves neither and inflicts the opposite on both #so truly it's an honor and a privilege to jailbreak any of the hoarded scholarship you fucks have misappropriated

#this has been your kohlberg stage 5 moral defense of pirating academic PDFs have a great day & once again thanks for coming to my tag talk

hey you wanna see something beautiful? this is Elsevier's wikipedia page. the actual contents are even more brutal.

make enough sworn enemies out of academics, open access advocates, and freedom of information activists, and one natural consequence is: your wikipedia page will never again be a place of cozy low-profile positivity where you can drop "about us" copy directly from marketing and expect no one to care enough to challenge it

[thisisazman]

Elsevier's Network and Computer Apps. Vol. 166, 3 June 2020, DOI: 10.1016/j.jnca.2020.102731

A review paper discussing 50 articles based on existing blockchain-based IDMS. Future research includes some identity-related challenges and cost implications.

[libraryben]

Produced in collaboration with Becky Yoose of LDH Consulting Services, Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards. The report raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary.

By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of “risk” products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies. 

As much of the research lifecycle shifts to online platforms owned by a small number of companies, the report highlights why users and institutions should actively evaluate and address the potential privacy risks as this transition occurs rather than after it is complete.

While the report raises serious causes for concern, libraries still have the power to shift the marketplace to once again reflect librarianship’s commitment to patron privacy. Concerted action now during this period of transition can greatly impact the future, so the report closes with suggested actions that libraries can take over both the short and long term to address vendor privacy risks. 

This page will be updated as additional analysis and resources are available.