Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service.
I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu.
A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a PDF. Via a web interface.
Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.
And then there's the stuff the article talks about: the huge fees universities pay so that our own work can be "open-access".
I hate them. I hope they go bust. I hope their CEO becomes homeless.
I hate how soulless the journals feel. Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site. Where is the history? Where is the pride? Instead it looks just like any old rubbish journal, and any reader who stumbled upon it would think the same unless they read its history in Wikipedia.
It is hard to say this, but Russia is helping the world fight against Elsevier and all those money funneling institutions... (with scihub, for anyone not knowing that it is a russian 'service')
The papers they hold hostage have not been fully backed up [1] and made accessible for everyone. Elsevier does deserve to go bankrupt, but we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged.
I don't even want to read the article. I am on UC's side whatever happened.
Hearing someone is having a dispute against Elsevier is like hearing someone is fighting polymetis. I just know which side I want to see win.
The fact that no politician ever moved to destroy Elsevier destructive behavior that impairs research shows how little interest they have in scientific research.
Clearly Elsevier is not playing nice here. But this bit is great: "UC retains perpetual access rights to most Elsevier articles published before 2019." Whoever negotiated that bit for the UC side must be feeling very pleased with themselves.
I would be hard pressed to believe anything Elsevier says/claims at this point, without extensive and detailed evidence supporting it. Even then I would be fairly dubious, truth be told.
I despise Elsevier and am trying not to publish anything with them. However, what impressed me the most here is the tone of the letter: direct, straight to the point, and clear to read and understand, with no trace of legalese. Every time I read something coming out of some academic office, I always expect a long sequence of bureaucratic sentences.
Elsevier essentially does nothing but funnel money from researchers to rent seekers. They add just about zero to science, indeed everything they done - which includes absolutely ruining good programs like Mendeley - has directly worked against scientific progress.
I read a lot of bad things about Elsevier, so who is supporting them? Why aren't editors moving their publications en masse to some free and open platform?
You'd think a reputation transplant would be possible if you just took the key people.
Publishing in high impact journals is vital for a scientific career.
Only the very top has enough individual reputation that they can ignore Elsevier & co. And they still like their articles published in Science, Nature, or whatever the most prestigious journal is in their field.
Some top dogs are already boycotting Elsevier and the situation is very slowly changing, but the publishers hold a lot of leverage because of self-imposed academic incentives.
Their model is to leech out public funding through catering at decision maker interests. There are strong incentive to keep the system as it is and no one is paid to organize to fix that problem.
In theory that's when you would like to see politicians put an end to these practices but corruption is legal in US, so...
"The UC Libraries do not endorse the use of Sci-Hub for article access.”30 As the UC Berkeley university librarian said in a published interview, “we are unequivocal: it is our understanding (though we are not attorneys!) that Sci-Hub is in violation of U.S. copyright law. We will not advise nor help anyone to use it"
That is probably the best endorsing non-endorcement I have read. It never says they discourage SciHub and suggests only SciHub is breaking copyright law.
I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu.
A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a PDF. Via a web interface.
Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.
And then there's the stuff the article talks about: the huge fees universities pay so that our own work can be "open-access".
I hate them. I hope they go bust. I hope their CEO becomes homeless.
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