Kiss and Makeup

March 16, 2021 9:10 AM

Elsevier & University of California (UC) reach publishing and open access "deal" after negotiations were suspended 2 years ago. UC says they won 7% savings, but a far cry from the open access arrangement that had been hoped for public and government funded science. Does this bellwether of future negotiations between institutions and publishers just promise a continuation of the status quo pay-to-publish pay-to-access publish-or-perish codependent relationship we've seen in the past?

previously

posted by rubatan (28 comments total)

Gosh I'm sorry, I sure turned esoteric boring topic that only applies to a certain isolated elite into clickbait.
posted by rubatan at 9:12 AM on March 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

I think it's extremely unfortunate -- the University of California has the size, the academic clout, and, frankly, the Nobel Laureates to throw its weight around in favor of open access and to grind Elsevier and its extortionate practices to mulch.

The University of California could have, and should have rid the world of Elsevier, and touting a 7% "savings" on multiple-times markup is whistling past the graveyard.
posted by tclark at 9:31 AM on March 16, 2021 [38 favorites]

Instead, an existing federal policy, supported by publishers, requires only that grantees place their papers in free public archives within 12 months after publication. Publishers contend that model is necessary to preserve the financial viability of paywalled journals.

So, why do we care that the paywalled journals remain financially viable? Can that federal policy be changed?
posted by surlyben at 9:34 AM on March 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

UC, and the decision makers behind this, need to have an audit right about now. When such obviously stupid deals like this happen in the open, they're always driven by other deals they'd rather you not know about.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:44 AM on March 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

I sure turned esoteric boring topic that only applies to a certain isolated elite into clickbait.

I work for a public university serving primarily 1st generation students, and our contracts w/Elsevier + others (several of which feature extortionary pricing) eat up enough of our annual budget that it forces us to limit our database offerings. We're asked on an almost weekly basis, by students or faculty, for access to resources we could never afford to buy or were forced to drop, to keep paying for, say, ScienceDirect.

Corporate publishing monopolies ripping off colleges and universities definitely has an impact beyond an isolated elite.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:53 AM on March 16, 2021 [24 favorites]

This is bad news. The current scientific publishing model, with subscription for journals, made sense before the internet. But the system right now is terrible and it takes organizations with clout to change it.

1. High quality articles are behind paywalls. If you, as an author, want as many people as possible to read your work, you have to pay thousands of dollars to get your own work released free of charge.

2. Low quality articles are free. If you, as an author, just want to get published, without rigorous review, there are plenty of journals who will make that happen for a fee. Since this is a lot like situation 1, no one really bats an eye.

Authors give their work to Elsevier for free, they get it reviewed by professional reviewers who do that service for free, and they sell it to the same universities that employ the authors and reviewers. The fact that Elsevier is making a billion dollars a year on free (to them) labor should be astonishing to anyone. I think a system where universities (or another non-profit organization) publish their own journals would lower the licensing cost to universities somewhat and allow free exchange of research. Elsevier has no incentive to change the status quo.
posted by demiurge at 10:02 AM on March 16, 2021 [28 favorites]

"codependent" is a weird way to spell "parasitic"
posted by schadenfrau at 10:19 AM on March 16, 2021 [9 favorites]

It's only something that applies to elites bc these practices are actively keeping people out. In the USA, it's largely the people who funded the research (taxpayers) who are locked out. If we let normal people read our scholarly work, it would matter to them too.

Fuck Elsevier and every other multinational academic publishing juggernaut. And I'm disappointed at UC for caving too. They would be one of the few that could actually bring their weight to bear effectively on these awful behemoths.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:31 AM on March 16, 2021 [9 favorites]

But we are forgetting the valuable service provided by Elsevier! They provide hosting for the actual PDFs so that they can be accessed. And they provide typesetting to make the PDFs look pretty.

I mean, it's not as if the US federal government has a way of hosting these articles in a freely accessible site, with nicely typeset versions of the PDFs made from the author's submitted text. Because if that were true, having anyone pay Elsevier would be completely silly.

(As a side note, Elsevier is also a "Method D" publisher. Which means that while Elsevier publications are made available through PubMed Central after an embargo period, it is 100% up to the author to take all the steps necessary to submit the manuscript to the NIH submission system in order for this to happen. It's utterly ridiculous. For all the money they make off of authors and reviewers, they won't even lift a finger to auto-deposit their published manuscripts, because it might knock a fraction of a cent off of their income.)

Full disclosure: I'm a research scientist who publishes in journals. My spouse is an employee of an academic library who primarily spends her days negotiating licensing and access issues for said journals. It's fun.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:37 AM on March 16, 2021 [8 favorites]

Research that is publicly funded should be publicly available.

This problem can be solved at the federal level, country by country. As proposed in the second article, we can place a condition on research funding that results may only be published in open-access journals, as a requirement for receiving a grant.

This may require government funding for selected open-access journals. Making scholarship available to those who would benefit from it and are paying for it is surely worth the cost.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:18 AM on March 16, 2021 [16 favorites]

Dirty deal. What's UC as an institution or individuals at UC getting under the table? This is a very bad precedent and reeks of a smarmy, secret, dirty deal. Disgusting.
posted by chance at 11:26 AM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

(sobs in open access publishing infrastructure librarian)
posted by avocet at 11:31 AM on March 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

1. High quality articles are behind paywalls. If you, as an author, want as many people as possible to read your work, you have to pay thousands of dollars to get your own work released free of charge.

Weeeeeeell, that’s not quite right. Scholarly writers don’t really “want as many people as possible to read your work.” You want to a) be published in journals with a high impact factor (which is a different ridiculous issue) and b) be read by as many people who will cite your work, preferably also in high impact factor journals. The rest of the audience is nice but essentially irrelevant.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:31 AM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sure, these journals are expensive, but a lot of the stuff being published today could be free to everyone in a hundred years or so.
posted by snofoam at 11:46 AM on March 16, 2021

What an embarrassing lack of spine on the part of the UC committee.

As someone in a field where preprints are universal and 90% of the people who will ever read anything I write will have done so before it's officially been published. . . this all seems truly absurd. Open access is a solved problem, technologically and legally. It has been for decades.

Peer review is a good thing. (Well, mostly.) Editors who consider editing part of their real job are a good thing. (Well, mostly.) For profit journals are as close to maximally inefficient at providing those services as you can get while still actually publishing something.

UC will subsidize its authors by providing the first $1000 toward those fees.

So. . . moving 20% of the annual extortion payments from explicit budget items to overhead? Great. That's possibly helpful for people who are short on funding and don't publish much. Which isn't a bad thing, but is so much less than one might have demanded.
posted by eotvos at 11:55 AM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Is this where we post links to sci-hub.se?
(I know, it's not actually a solution, but for those of use who don't have university affiliation, or USD30 per article kinda money, it's a godsend; if I had the internet connection for it I'd seriously consider pulling down the whole database.)
posted by memetoclast at 12:24 PM on March 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

Am I correct in understanding that this is discussing the broad concept of science and not the specific publication Science? If so, can the text please be corrected to make the "s" lowercase in the final word of the second sentence so this distinction is clear? (It's even more confusing that the link in that sentence goes to an article published in Science.)
posted by ElKevbo at 12:55 PM on March 16, 2021

Lisa Hinchliffe sums up at the Scholarly Kitchen.
posted by doctornemo at 1:55 PM on March 16, 2021

Scholarly writers don’t really “want as many people as possible to read your work.” You want to a) be published in journals with a high impact factor (which is a different ridiculous issue) and b) be read by as many people who will cite your work, preferably also in high impact factor journals. The rest of the audience is nice but essentially irrelevant.

The 'impact factor' is really just a (bad) proxy for how many people in your field are reading your work. It's true that incentives for people outside your field reading your work are low. My point was really that if you asked academic authors: "Do you want people to have to pay to read your work? The money isn't going to you or anything you care about." I think the answer would almost always be no.
posted by demiurge at 2:41 PM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Is this where we post links to sci-hub.se?

I love asking my Elsevier and Wiley contacts about SciHub. It's like asking Ahab what he thinks about that one albino whale.
posted by doctornemo at 3:37 PM on March 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

Research that is publicly funded should be publicly available.
::hands raised emoji::

At $13 million dollars, the UC agreement will pay about 80% of the RELX (Elsevier) CEO's salary, so I guess they need the money.

It's such a frustrating "We got ours" outcome that sets a bad precedent for others who have broken the Big Deal like UNC – what's going to happen to the other institutions that stood up against 37% profit margins and $10 billion profits on publicly funded research now? Like, this could have been transformative but it's just more of the same. ::sigh::
posted by burningyrboats at 4:54 PM on March 16, 2021

Joe Esposito, co-author of a fine scholarly publishing newsletter: Elsevier won.
posted by doctornemo at 5:16 PM on March 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

7% savings is really rubbing UC's face in it, isn't it?
posted by ryanrs at 8:02 PM on March 16, 2021

As proposed in the second article, we can place a condition on research funding that results may only be published in open-access journals, as a requirement for receiving a grant.

Not all open access is equivalent. There are any number of fly-by-night open access “journals” that exist long enough to siphon off your money but have zero reputability and will happily publish unreviewed garbage if you are willing to fork over the fee. God only knows how long any of the content will remain available.

To work, open access needs to be certain to still be accessible in the future - hence PubMed Central. Funded by the government, and placing copies of all published work here is a requirement of accepting NIH or VA grants (probably PHS and DOD too, for that matter, but I can’t confirm). Where it falls apart is that publishers like Elsevier (a) get an exclusive embargo period where they can solely provide the article, and (b) are not forced to deposit published works on behalf of the authors.

Another thing - to work, open access needs to be discoverable. Any manuscript that goes into PMC is indexed in PubMed - even if the parent journal is not. Journals don’t get indexed in PubMed until they’ve been around for long enough to meet the requirements for indexing. Which means the spammy PUBLISH HERE! emails from that “new” journal with a weird ass name like European Journal of Fish Hatchery and Cancer Science (published in some backwater not even remotely close to Europe) might be advertising “open access”, but paying to put your paper there is about as useful as paying to post it on your neighborhood community center bulletin board. It will never be indexed and no one will ever find it when searching.

So “it has to be open access” should be replaced with “it has to be a reputable, centrally-funded open access” for me to agree.

PubMed Central actually has a bunch of their own journals. The single most cited publication I had for a long, long time was in a PMC journal - because it was both highly discoverable and freely accessible. (I mean I also think it’s a quality set of work, but I’m obviously a bit biased there.)
posted by caution live frogs at 8:03 PM on March 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

For a more nuanced look at the deal, here is Publishers Weekly's coverage.
posted by PhineasGage at 9:14 AM on March 17, 2021

37% profit margins and $10 billion profits on publicly funded research now?

That's a really useful link. Thanks!

But, it's also worth noting that it's 37% after paying people a lot of money to do work that doesn't need to be done in the first place and producing physical volumes that nobody will ever read. The people who do real work to review the content all work for free. The editors are often working for free. The people who worry about whether the use of semicolons near the word "however" satisfy the publication guidelines get a paycheck, for their service wasting everyone's time on nonsense. The remaining 55% that doesn't go toward server fees and paying the people who wrote a web interface thirty years ago is all a boondoggle.
posted by eotvos at 10:21 AM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

@eotvos Totally! For what it's worth, the head of Comms at Elsevier responded to me this week on Twitter with this gem:

"No publisher forces researchers to pay to publish their work. Authors can publish for free under the subscription model, or pay to publish open access. It's their choice"

The logic is so skewed! It's bonkers!
posted by burningyrboats at 10:25 AM on March 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Last grant I wrote, close to 30% of the budget was for open access publication fees. Like, the grant will pay publishers more than it'll pay me.
posted by basalganglia at 6:18 PM on March 17, 2021