Is it any good?Even if it is, it&#x27;s nowhere near as good as scihub.

True, but nobody wants to wait a few days for an article in 2018.

Or they can use the interlibrary lending service: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lib.berkeley.edu&#x2F;using-the-libraries&#x2F;interlibrary-loan" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lib.berkeley.edu&#x2F;using-the-libraries&#x2F;interlibrary...</a>

&gt; And it is much less likely now that Sci-Hub will be a problem for anyone, because the world&#x27;s best researchers are all going to be using itI wouldn&#x27;t count on that, could lead to the reverse, Elsevier coming to terms with the threat and getting serious. If the worlds best (and wealthiest biggest-spending) research institutions are willing to go this route, Elsevier is gonna be thinking, uh oh we&#x27;re in trouble, better bring out the big guns.The tricky thing is that it&#x27;s often _authors themselves_ who willingly share their stuff on &quot;pirate&quot; sites, and Elsevier wants to avoid at all costs the academic authors realizing they have different interests and goals than Elsevier.Elsevier is in a tough spot in the long-term, despite their crazy profit-margins today -- and we all want it to keep getting tougher and tougher. But if they think they&#x27;re going down, they&#x27;re going to start lashing out...

Sci-Hub has a better interface than my library.

my understanding is that a big impetus was being sick of both paying for UC researchers to publish in Elsevier journals and then also paying to access those same articles

While they&#x27;re not gonna say it in the press release, you gotta figure the decision-makers know that many professors and students are using sci-hub _already_, and find it _easier to use_ than the official licensed channels, and that this was part of what gave them the ability to cancel the Elsevier license.

It&#x27;s mostly a problem in more specialized fields where there are only really one or two journals servicing it. If Elsevier owns the only journal(s) in your field then you&#x27;re gonna be in a tough spot. Organizing and launching a new journal is challenging, which is one of the reasons Elsevier has been so hard to overthrow despite almost everyone being unhappy with them.What is also needed is for more journals to be founded or defect. Elsevier&#x27;s big subscribers can exert some leverage, but Elsevier&#x27;s strategy has been to lock down their control of publishing in entire fields, meaning that you may not have much alternative.

Note this announcement doesn&#x27;t say anything about submitting to journals, doesn&#x27;t say that even UC researchers will no longer submit to Elsevier journals (or no longer be on Elsevier journal editorial boards).They can and presumably will keep submitting to Elsevier journals. UC just won&#x27;t pay for licenses to access those journals.If UC tried to tell faculty which journals they were or were not allowed to submit to, that would be a LOT more controversial to them. I mean, this _could_ have been controversial too, but that would be even more so. If this actual decision wasn&#x27;t controversial among faculty, my guess is it&#x27;s because they&#x27;re all using sci-hub anyway.

But, Sci-hub (which I use every day and am in full support of!) is a band-aid solution to the open-access problem.I wonder if the entire UC system going offline from Elsevier access is enough to stop other researchers from submitting to their journals. Probably not initially, but I know that many of my colleagues avoid submitting to journals that they know their peers don&#x27;t read.

Given enough storage space you can even make one yourself, the papers are distributed via a set of torrents.

This is huge. Not only does it pressure publishers like Elsevier, it also legitimizes Sci-Hub in a way: if UC, one of the biggest and most reputable Universities in the world including Berkeley and UCLA, says thry won&#x27;t pay for Elsevier, researchers will just use Sci-Hub to access paywalled articles. And it is much less likely now that Sci-Hub will be a problem for anyone, because the world&#x27;s best researchers are all going to be using it.

The whole article is criticisms and controversies, I love it.

&gt; Elsevier&#x27;s also by far the shittiest publisher in their practicesYeah. Interesting: the longest part of the Wikipedia article used to be Criticism &amp; Controversies, but it has been restructured quite a bit. Still lists many despicable acts.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Elsevier" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Elsevier</a>Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.

This is great news. The UC system has a ton of academic clout and this will push smaller universities to close their contracts and bump up the impact factor of open access journals.Elsevier&#x27;s also by far the shittiest publisher in their practices [1]. 40% profit margins on publicly-funded research that the public doesn&#x27;t get to access is disgusting. I can&#x27;t wait for them to go out of business.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dgmacarthur&#x2F;status&#x2F;1028489457803161600?s=09" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;dgmacarthur&#x2F;status&#x2F;1028489457803161600?s...</a>

Write your advisor a brief note of thanks, would ya?Sticking one&#x27;s neck out for a thing like that, even with a bunch of other necks, could be a harrowing thing to do. I appreciate their courage in sticking up for this.

According to the linked statement from the UC Office of Scholarly Communications [1], &quot;No matter what happens moving forward, UC scholars will still be able to use ScienceDirect to access most articles published prior to January 1, 2019 because UC has permanent access rights to them.&quot;[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;publisher-negotiations&#x2F;uc-and-elsevier&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;pub...</a>Edit: dannykwells beat me to it, and in more detail.

Very happy to see my advisor&#x27;s signature on the academic senate&#x27;s support letter. We have been waiting for months to see the outcome of this. I can still get to stuff on sciencedirect but i assume that will be changing in the near future :)

Finally! I&#x27;ve been hearing librarians gripe about the prohibitive cost of academic subscriptions for over a decade. It&#x27;s no surprised that the first administrative body to take a $tand is from a state school system. It&#x27;s surprising that their budgets didn&#x27;t bring them there sooner, though. Lets hope that UC faculty will stop publishing with Elesevier in the future, so the journals rankings begin to drop.

Worthwhile to mention Sci-hub&#x27;s telegram bot [1]. Forward any link as a message to the bot and it&#x27;s instantly send you a paper.Also worthwhile to mention Zotero&#x27;s sci-hub integration. There&#x27;s a guide on how to get it running here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@gagarine&#x2F;use-sci-hub-with-zotero-as-a-fall-back-pdf-resolver-cf139eb2cea7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@gagarine&#x2F;use-sci-hub-with-zotero-as-a-fa...</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sci_hub&#x2F;status&#x2F;731467465973174273" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sci_hub&#x2F;status&#x2F;731467465973174273</a>

this userscript will automatically detect and link DOIs to scihub: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;36188-sci-hub-automatic-link&#x2F;code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;36188-sci-hub-automatic-li...</a>

In addition to Sci-Hub, another good and legal alternative tool for academics is Unpaywall.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unpaywall.org&#x2F;products&#x2F;extension" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unpaywall.org&#x2F;products&#x2F;extension</a>Although nothing beats the speed of a Sci-Hub bookmarlet.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nfahlgren&#x2F;scihub_bookmark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nfahlgren&#x2F;scihub_bookmark</a>

Does anybody who actually works at Elsevier ever read these HN threads?

They have a &gt;40% profit margin, so it would take a lot to bankrupt those bastards.

&gt; I looked up Goldman&#x27;s recruiting video, and it was a careerist ego show.These sterile inclusive environments of growth-opportunity-passion smilling heads created by corporate America are beyond creepy.

But how else can they pay for their beautiful open floor plan offices? Standing bicycle desks! Developers, QA professionals, even DBAs! Informal discussions! Beer-o-clock and hack days!From the promotional video anyway:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vSPUc70z_Cc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vSPUc70z_Cc</a>Edit: it could be worse. For kicks, I looked up Goldman&#x27;s recruiting video, and it was a careerist ego show. At least Elsevier allows commenting and voting on their recruiting videos. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bzNowvBmR3g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bzNowvBmR3g</a>

And it&#x27;s starting, can&#x27;t wait until Elsevier is bankrupt. Parasites.

Unreasonable choice by Elsevier. I never understood why the authors of a University&#x2F;Institute have to pay for open access on top of the huge subscription bill.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.library.ucdavis.edu&#x2F;uc-elsevier&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.library.ucdavis.edu&#x2F;uc-elsevier&#x2F;</a>

This was not evident to me after reading the article, but perhaps I did not read carefully. Can you kindly direct me towards some textual evidence, or a citation?

This only applies to publications post-2018.The UC system, i.e., its students (tuition) and state taxpayers, is still paying Elsevier for all pre-2019 publications, including papers published by UC authors.

Great news.  Now there are enough dissenters that Elsevier will be forced to come to the table upon more favorable terms.

Perhaps, and budget cuts can justify more risk taking. No one wants to be accused of taking political stances that go against student interests, but budget cuts are budget cuts.In my field, where being Free Software based is a selling argument, I like to joke that recessions are good for our field, and economic booms are good for our field (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pgUA1tluVmE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pgUA1tluVmE</a>). I just adjust my pitch depending on the circumstances (save money or invest in a more powerful platform).

My understanding is they are demand inelastic so their costs naturally go up, and there&#x27;s been an arms race in the past 20 years to build very nice new buildings, housing, etc to compete on look, prestige and features for students. Reputation of the school is one of the biggest differentiators, so now that they&#x27;re being run as a business rather than the state costs have no incentive whatsoever to decrease. Now of course, even if the states wanted to be more equitable to their citizens by going back to a more state-funded model, the cost to maintain all of those new features is massively increased. Its like an asset bubble more or less.

There&#x27;s plenty.The college board has good data on the cost side:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.collegeboard.org&#x2F;college-pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.collegeboard.org&#x2F;college-pricing</a>And the department of education has good data on the expenditures side:Private: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d17&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt17_334.30.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d17&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt17_334.30.a...</a>Public: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d17&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt17_334.10.asp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nces.ed.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;digest&#x2F;d17&#x2F;tables&#x2F;dt17_334.10.a...</a>

For one they don&#x27;t get remotely close to $150,000 from each student.  The average public 4-year university gets $6,100 per student per school year.  That&#x27;s tuition and fees minus financial aid coming from the school.  It covers about half of the cost of educating students, with the other half coming from state funding and federal financial aid.

Universities in the UC system are definitely not getting $150k from each student. Tuition doesn&#x27;t even cover the cost of educating each student.You can see UCLA&#x27;s financials here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucla.app.box.com&#x2F;v&#x2F;acct-pdf-AFR-16-17" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ucla.app.box.com&#x2F;v&#x2F;acct-pdf-AFR-16-17</a>Tuition and fees netted $833MM in 2017. The cost of the undergraduate schools alone was well over a billion dollars.

Is there any in-deep analysis about university finances? It seems that getting around $150.000 from each new student they should have more than enough to sustain and profit.

&gt; Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years &quot;Yeah our researchers don&#x27;t mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over.Not only do universities not openly admit to SciHub usage, but there are even university administrations that still warn their students and staff against using SciHub.I recently read through a fairly prominent European university’s freshly-revised course for undergraduates on how basic use of the library and research methods (I saw this as part of my job, so naturally I won’t name the institution). Among the course content on how to find journal articles in JSTOR and Web of Science, how to properly cite your sources, etc. were admonitions not to use SciHub because it “is illegal”, and warnings that use of SciHub can lead to failing a course or having one’s student status revoked.

Actually, TFA quotes UC President Janet Napolitano basically saying that:&gt; &quot;I fully support our faculty, staff and students in breaking down paywalls that hinder the sharing of groundbreaking research&quot; ...

I wonder if UC gives any money to the Scihub admins. I found their current donation link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sci-hub.tw&#x2F;donate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sci-hub.tw&#x2F;donate</a>

The other reason is of course Scihub. You pretty much can&#x27;t do research without access to Elsevier&#x27;s journal, so before Scihub, university libraries just didn&#x27;t have a choice. Now they do.Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years &quot;Yeah our researchers don&#x27;t mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over.&quot;, but it doesn&#x27;t take much reading between the lines.

You&#x27;re also missing the distinction between an endowment and a revenue stream. Harvard has almost $40B in assets but they are going to be making much smaller annual returns on that — probably 10% at best — and the reason why people donate those funds is to support academic work, not boost profit margins for large companies. Harvard&#x27;s academics are providing an enormous amount of unpaid work for journals so it&#x27;s dubious that they are jumping to cut a big check for that rather than, say, scholarships, equipment, etc.

&gt; when Harvard University said it can&#x27;t afford journal publishers&#x27; priceHarvard&#x27;s endowment is, according to Wikipedia, $39.2 billion as of FY 2018. My first reflex was to say that &quot;can&#x27;t afford&quot; must be a relative term...A closer look at the article says: &quot;A memo from Harvard Library ... warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.&quot; So I could believe that the Harvard Library is given a certain budget by the main Harvard organization, and that this budget is insufficient to support that bill plus other unavoidable recurring expenses.

Yeah, budgets are, in part, motivating the push for open access journals. But I don&#x27;t think university-wide budgets are the most relevant ones to consider.If you look more closely at university _library_ budgets, you&#x27;ll usually see that journal&#x2F;e-journal&#x2F;database subscriptions have been eating up bigger and bigger chunks of the pie. The ever-increasing price of a subscription to ScienceDirect.com is directly taking away money from buying monographs (books), maintaining archives and special collections, and keeping university libraries open late at night for students to study.

&quot;Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription&quot;So it&#x27;s a move against both traditional paywalled publishing and Gold OA.The argument that some universities refuse to pay because they are &quot;scholarly poor&quot; [1] is only propaganda.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chorasimilarity.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;google-translate-helps-the-scholarly-poor&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chorasimilarity.wordpress.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;28&#x2F;google-tran...</a>

Well... the other reason might be that the German Universities got together to negotiate with the big publishers. While agreements are in reach or have been reached with most of them, Elsevier continued to try to throw it&#x27;s weight around leading to most German academic institutions letting the subscription to Elsevier journals lapse (or cancelled) at the end of 2017, with the remaining important ones following suite at the end of 2018.Currently almost no academic institution in Germany is subscribed to Elsevier. Here is the full list of German Universities and Labs currently not subscribed to Elsevier:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projekt-deal.de&#x2F;vertragskundigungen-elsevier-2018&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projekt-deal.de&#x2F;vertragskundigungen-elsevier-201...</a>Elsevier did not actually shut down access to its journals for German institutions.Wiley on the other hand has just signed a contract with DEAL, and negotiations with Springer Nature are going well enough so interim contracts are in place until they are concluded.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projekt-deal.de&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.projekt-deal.de&#x2F;</a>

Just for reference, and this does not diminish the parent&#x27;s point significantly, inflation accounts for approximately 24% of that increase. That&#x27;s still a 36% real increase in operating budget assuming student size held constant.

Actually, the overall budgets of universities have increased substantially— they&#x27;ve more than made up for the lost state funding by raising tuition and other fundraising.U.C. Berkeley, for instance, has increased its overall operating budget by from $1.6B in 2006 to $2.7B in 2018. That&#x27;s a 68% increase over just the last 12 years! [1]Universities are spending, and taking in, more than ever.Even with all this cash, Elsevier&#x27;s subscriptions are not cheap. The estimated cost for U.C. Berkeley is $1.15M per year. [2][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;controller.berkeley.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;uc-berkeley-financial-reports" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;controller.berkeley.edu&#x2F;home&#x2F;uc-berkeley-financial-r...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-the-cost-for-a-university-subscription-to-the-entire-Elsevier-database-with-unlimited-views-and-downloads-for-an-academic-year" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-the-cost-for-a-university-subs...</a>

Maybe, and just maybe, if money was not an issue, research would also be more open.

Maybe, but subscriptions costs have also been rising for years, while at the same time academia has also started paying, higher and higher, publishing fees.

&gt; Ultimately, this is starting to put major university systems in line with individual usersSo the side effect of budget cuts is actually a good thing?

One of the reasons you are probably seeing this happen are budget cuts. Major university systems have seen their funding be cut by state governments. Elsevier charges an obscene amount of money to access information that is often publicly funded.If money were no object, you&#x27;d probably see less university systems rejecting Elsevier. But money is becoming a bigger issue.Ultimately, this is starting to put major university systems in line with individual users, and we should see an explosion of open-access information in the next decade.Remember when Harvard University said it can&#x27;t afford journal publishers&#x27; price: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2012&#x2F;apr&#x2F;24&#x2F;harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;2012&#x2F;apr&#x2F;24&#x2F;harvard-univ...</a>

Universities have working paper series, generally.However, Arvix and co. are a centralized platform, and there are lot of scale benefits (for everyone) in using such as platform - which is why everyone publishes there.In that sense, decentralized working paper series are not a solution.
However, the system can be &quot;decentralized&quot; in terms of control, and run much more efficient with greater consumer benefit.

inertia.yes, a website could solve the issue today, but not 30 years ago.Elsevier predates internet by more than a century (it is 139 years old)

I agree. Right now the only way for universities or funders to know whether other researchers have thoroughly looked at and approved of the work of someone they&#x27;re considering for tenure or a grant, is to look at whether their work has the stamp of approval of being published in a &quot;reputable&quot; journal. We need an alternative to that.(Full disclosure: I&#x27;m working on such an alternative. It just launched, but if any of you come across research you think it&#x27;s good, do consider publicly endorsing it using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaudit.pub&#x2F;extension&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaudit.pub&#x2F;extension&#x2F;</a>. It&#x27;s all open data, and non-profit.)

I don&#x27;t know. All the real power is in the hand of the academics. For example, Don Knuth managed to persuade the editorial board of the Elsevier Journal of Algorithms to resign, and they started the ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher instead, and (if I understand correctly) take along the prestige. The Journal of Algorithms folded a few years later.Why oh why don&#x27;t more editorial boards do this????

The problem is that they used to be needed, in the pre-Internet era, so the entire academic community has evolved around the publishing ecosystem. Or rather, the incentive system has evolved that way. Journals like Science&#x2F;Nature&#x2F;Cell are essentially the gatekeepers to tenure-track jobs at top universities, at least in the biomedical sciences. If you&#x27;re a typical postdoc trying to move to the next stage of your career, &quot;just post it on Biorxiv&quot; isn&#x27;t very helpful advice.I would love nothing more than to see the entire publishing system revamped and parasites like Elsevier and NPG disappear, but until you solve the basic problem of academic hiring and promotion, it&#x27;s an uphill battle.

If you&#x27;ve ever had an article typeset&#x2F;proofread&#x2F;copyedited by Elsevier then you know how little they contribute in this area.

Journals already impose formatting and submission rules on scientists. Asking them to send them a BibTeX file would be no major issue, given that all reference managers can import and export BibTeX.I know that a lot of smart scientists struggle with computers and they cling on MS word because they have invested a lot of time and effort into learning how to use it. But I think, we should try to convince them that there are better, simpler and more reliable ways to author papers.

Typesetting, proofreading, copy editing, indexing, graphics editing etc. come in mind.Just look at random &quot;not so well formed&quot; Word file like for example:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1902.07133.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;1902.07133.pdf</a>Not commenting the bad typography of text, math, tables, etc., just try to estimate the effort for converting the references in well-formed and validated BibTeX entries.

At UC we have eScholarship <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;escholarship.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;escholarship.org</a>eScholarship has a repository for UC, and also publishes open access journals.(disclaimer: I&#x27;m the tech lead of the group that runs this site)

Why can&#x27;t you upload a copy in Institutional Repository and publish it in a journal? Do journals set any rules?

this exists.look up &quot;Green OA&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openscience.com&#x2F;green-oa-vs-gold-oa-which-one-to-choose&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openscience.com&#x2F;green-oa-vs-gold-oa-which-one-to-cho...</a>) or &quot;Institutional Repositories&quot;.the reasons these sites haven&#x27;t taken over academic publishing are many and varied:<pre><code> - they are woefully underfunded (library services are low-status, gendered work, that never receive the funding they deserve).
 - publishing in established journals is singularly the most important thing in academic careers.
 - scholarly societies (IEEE is referenced elsewhere in this thread), publishers, and other entrenched interests have significant influence on policy.
 - etc...
</code></pre>
in short, this isn&#x27;t a technical problem. if it were, it would have been solved over a decade ago.

I don&#x27;t understand why companies like Elsevier are needed. Why can&#x27;t every university have their own Arxiv kind of website, upload their work? These websites are anyways indexed by Google.

I am really happy for UC&#x27;s choice! Sadly, this reminds me that recently Elsevier and CRUI (the association of Italian universities) sealed a 5-year-long deal [1], despite protests from the scientific community.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crui.it&#x2F;archivio-notizie&#x2F;i-ricercatori-italiani-potranno-beneficiare-dell%E2%80%99accesso-continuo-al-database-sciencedirect-di-elsevie.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crui.it&#x2F;archivio-notizie&#x2F;i-ricercatori-italiani-...</a>

That&#x27;s why it was extra surprising that large Chinese funders have publicly declared support for Plan S, the coalition of funders forbidding researchers they fund from publishing in journals that do not go fully open access: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-018-07659-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-018-07659-5</a>

&gt; before it finally collapses.Nope, you are forgetting about China.China is where it is happening for Western scientific publishing enterprises. To get published in a Chinese journal is one thing, to get your paper published for the global audience is true icing on the cake.Elsevier and Springer can look at this little problem with UC and think &#x27;meh!&#x27; - the travel to China and the conference scene there is much more fun anyway.

NICEElsevier is really, really bad. At this point, I think they are already seeing the end and investors are trying to squeeze every last bit out of the publishing system before it finally collapses.Case in point: The extremely consumer (paying!) hostile actions they took after buying Mendeley.

IIRC they download the paper as you enter the doi if it is not already in their catalogue; so does moscow library just not have subscriptions to the journals you&#x27;re looking for or what?

Oh that&#x27;s interesting. I search for stuff over a wide variety of fields, and find like 95%+ of what I search for. Some of it is so obscure I&#x27;m amazed they have it.Try libgen scientific articles, e.g. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;libgen.io&#x2F;scimag&#x2F;index.php?s=archaeology" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;libgen.io&#x2F;scimag&#x2F;index.php?s=archaeology</a> .. ALso you can search by journal number (or click on journal name) and all issues are shown in a table.

Yep, Sci-Hub is sorely lacking when it comes to humanities. I&#x27;ve had several DOIs just come up empty after it tries all its proxies.

Sci-Hub is great, but it absolutely does not have everything published.  I try to keep up with the archaeology journals and maybe 1&#x2F;3rd of papers I look for are available.

I&#x27;ve never heard of sci-hub being blocked by any academic institution.

This is not an option for big universities (or big companies) unless they want to get sued.

Also, usual reminder that Sci-Hub exists and has all the research papers available for free from any journal.

That is called capitalism. By the way there are plenty of people that are making money off of what the government funded which of course was the arpanet and the internet.

The problem is that they&#x27;re making money off content they didn&#x27;t produce, that taxpayers paid for in many cases, and they&#x27;re actually preventing wide dissemination of research results.  It&#x27;s not like they&#x27;re particularly good at their job either - I have yet to meet a scientist who actually enjoys interacting with journal publishers.  They simply don&#x27;t have a choice if they want to stay in an academic position.

Yes they freak out because it&#x27;s not money going into their pocket but someone elses. And they don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair.You get a similar outrage for a different reason against the last mile and cable companies. Why should they control the &#x27;final mile&#x27;. Why can&#x27;t everyone have access to the lines which they dug? Why? Because they got there first and spent the money to gamble when there was no guarantee of success which is obvious now. That is capitalism and business.

&gt;&quot;I don&#x27;t know why people have this tendency to freak out when a for profit company like Elsvier tries to make money.&quot;That&#x27;s an interesting sentence, the way you&#x27;ve framed that. People objecting are objecting to capitalism...and the whole natural order. &quot;Elsevier is..just trying to do what it was created for, like a bird singing or the sun rising or a baby smiling, why is that such a problem? People are just freaking out! I don&#x27;t know why.&quot;

If a for-profit company can&#x27;t market itself effectively, it is going to die.Elsvier is the textbook example of a company that hasn&#x27;t marketed itself effectively, unless you consider &quot;WE ARE MONOPOLY! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!&quot; to be a marketing strategy.Well, the monopoly is over. Nature is taking its course.Think of it as evolution in action.

&gt; made around 40% profits year-over-year. Those margins are on the high end for luxury brands like Apple. However, when we&#x27;re publicly funding science, we&#x27;re not funding it as a luxury product - quite the opposite, in fact: we want the results to be a commodity.The number 40% is not relevant. My guess is that if the number was 25% there would be the same issue and outrage. The thing is everybody wants to decide what is fair for someone else and especially when it impacts the directly in some way.&gt; It&#x27;s just that Elsevier and its kind have been put in a position where they&#x27;ve been able to obtain something resembling a monopoly

&gt; I don&#x27;t know why people have this tendency to freak out when a for profit company like Elsvier tries to make money.That&#x27;s not the problem. Elsevier and its kind haven&#x27;t just &quot;made money&quot;, they&#x27;ve consistently (i.e. for over two decades) made around 40% profits year-over-year. Those margins are on the high end for luxury brands like Apple. However, when we&#x27;re publicly funding science, we&#x27;re not funding it as a luxury product - quite the opposite, in fact: we want the results to be a commodity.It&#x27;s just that Elsevier and its kind have been put in a position where they&#x27;ve been able to obtain something resembling a monopoly, and that just so happens to be in an area where that allows them to lay their hands on a disproportionately large share of money that&#x27;s earmarked for eye-catching things like cancer research.Sure, it might not be that justified to be angry at Elsevier for doing what&#x27;s the only logical thing to do, in their position, but it is incredibly frustrating to see a system work so badly for something so important, and that frustrations naturally gets projected onto the benefactor of that injustice.

&gt; The prices of scientific journals now are so high that not a single university in the U.S. — not the University of California, not Harvard, no institution — can afford to subscribe to them all,” said Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, university librarian and economics professor at UC BerkeleyWhat is the definition of &#x27;afford&#x27;? Obviously Harvard (as only one example) with a huge billion dollar endowment can easily pay for the journals that are relevant. They just choose not to and think they don&#x27;t receive value for what they pay. But they do spend money on many other things that some people would find to be wasteful and plenty of people and companies make money off those institutions. I am sure their employees are very well paid.I don&#x27;t know why people have this tendency to freak out when a for profit company like Elsvier tries to make money. It&#x27;s not like the &#x27;non profit&#x27; colleges are some charity case they pay out plenty of money to various entities and people (for example I am sure they have enormous legal expenses as only one example) when they choose to do so.

UCLA at least have been encouraging researchers to not review or publish in Elsevier<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chronicle.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;In-Talks-With-Elsevier-UCLA&#x2F;245311" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chronicle.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;In-Talks-With-Elsevier-UCL...</a>

i wonder if the $5000 that the UC faculty will be paying for every articles they &#x27;ll publish in elsevier is going to make up for their lost profits.

Looks like the content at that URL has changed very recently and no longer includes all that text. Here&#x27;s an IA version that does....<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20190209202821&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;publisher-negotiations&#x2F;uc-and-elsevier&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20190209202821&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.unive...</a>

I think this will be an important link to give context to this development:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;publisher-negotiations&#x2F;uc-and-elsevier&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;pub...</a>- No matter what happens moving forward, UC scholars will still be able to use ScienceDirect to access most articles published prior to January 1, 2019 because UC has permanent access rights to them. (Please see the Alternative Access to Articles page for a list of titles to which UC does not have permanent access rights and for information on how to access items UC does not subscribe to.)- If access is disrupted at any point, the UC Libraries will still work with researchers to get them the articles they need through other means, such as interlibrary loan.- Our quick guide to alternative access provides an overview of the options available to UC researchers.________- If the negotiations are successful, UC’s proposed model will make it easier and more affordable for UC faculty to publish their work as open access in Elsevier journals.- No matter what happens, UC authors retain the right to publish in the journal of their choice.- By providing article processing charge (APC) support through the UC Libraries as well as an opt-out option, UC is working hard to ensure that authors have maximum flexibility in determining where and how they want to publish.

The ACM is similar, and I think (hope) they will eventually have to just open up all published papers by default. The main difference between the IEEE and the ACM to Elsevier is that the IEEE and ACM are professional organizations. They have a non-profit mission, whereas Elsevier is a for-profit company. I have no problem reviewing papers and serving on program committees when the organizing entity is a non-profit service organization. I think the the ACM and IEEE have a future in a fully open-access world, but Elsevier does not.

You can choose to publish open access conference papers through IEEE but you have to pay around $2000 (I forget if it was USD or AUD). I&#x27;m not sure about the exact costs for an open access Journal paper though. That said, IEEE don&#x27;t prevent you from listing your own paper on your own website (in it&#x27;s accepted form, not published form) provided you link the correct DOI and include the reference.

+1 here.For at least the past 5 years, I&#x27;ve been questioning the value of IEEE regular membership very hard. Marketing internally spams the Gmail inboxes paid for by dues; Spectrum is nothing more than a front for advertisements while members don&#x27;t even have ad-free web access to its content; Xplore is a minimum $20&#x2F;mo limited to an insulting 3 papers; standards are outrageously overpriced even with supposed &quot;member discount&quot;. The only thing that has kept me around this long is an apparent misguided belief that the IEEE is the flagship organization catering to the interests of professional EEs, and I&#x27;m an EE, therefore I should retain membership. This will be my 10th year of membership...mostly on the campaign promises of Jose Moura[1] of CMU--who I voted for back in 2017 and is now President. I&#x27;m really hoping things do indeed change.I also hold lifetime membership with the ACM. Cost ~$4,000 out of pocket, but that buys indefinite access to digital library content. Sure, I could have Sci-Hub&#x27;d their papers, but I also recognize that the organization needs to be funded somehow, and their asking price for perceived value was within my budget. IEEE doesn&#x27;t even have such an option, nor does its Computer Society.This criticism of SDOs[2] is definitely relevant to the meta of those professional organizations who merely claim to support the interests of its members.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.josemoura.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.josemoura.com</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Sdm698P2AkA?t=88" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Sdm698P2AkA?t=88</a>

I just looked at a paper on Elsevier&#x27;s site, and saw that it was $36, while a paper on IEEExplore was $33 (non-member price). I open to the idea that the IEEE is less expensive than Elsevier, yet not convinced that there is a big difference.To be clear, the IEEE does have good journals, and is the best place to publish for many. There are countless volunteer reviewers and editors and officers who do great work. My impression is that the paid IEEE bureaucracy (in New Jersey?) are designed for a pre-Internet age. While cutting-edge cryptographic techniques is published in the journals, the IEEE email alias has terrible security. I guess this is a common story, and I&#x27;m expecting too much...

I am not sure about IEEE&#x27;s institutional prices, but their member prices for journals are quite reasonable. Most academic journals published by Elsevier are beyond the reach of individuals.

Absolutely, IEEE is also on the same boat, charging 20-40USD for a PDF to general public. Insane.It was great to access journals while at university, but there is so much knowledge out there behind paywalls that is literally holding humanity back!

IEEE and ACM have the same problem, they paywall the papers that they publish. As they are theoretically nonprofits run by the community, it is even harder to get people to care, but it is still very problematic.

I&#x27;m a member of the IEEE, which I believe also has a problem. They charge authors to publish, then charge IEEE members to access the journals. All this while the reviewers and editors are working for free. At a bare minimum, they should make the journals open to all members. One way to cut costs is to stop printing paper journals.I&#x27;d love to hear what the UC system has to say about the IEEE.

This thread has convinced me to try to switch, but one thing that I love in Mendeley is the ability to watch a folder, and have any pdf in that folder automatically imported into my account, which then gets synced across devices. That, and the document detail lookup based on a manually input doi, which fixes author names etc. are the two sticking points. When I add a doi to a pdf in Zotero, there doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to look it up and import the relevant information to the file information in Zotero. Does anyone have any way around them?

You can try using Zotero instead. Mendeley is just not that good, and Zotero is open source and excellent.

Obligatory reminder: Mendeley stores your watermarked pirated papers on Elsevier servers. Tread carefully.

See UC&#x27;s Office of Scholarly Communication&#x27;s guide to &quot;Alternative Access to Elsevier Articles.&quot;It looks like UC actually had a license which granted them perpetual licensing rights to most existing content? Or &quot;post termination access rights&quot; in the language of the post.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;publisher-negotiations&#x2F;alternative-access-to-articles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osc.universityofcalifornia.edu&#x2F;open-access-at-uc&#x2F;pub...</a>

Many (most?) German universities did this last June, here&#x27;s a recent article from Nature (which may not be un-biased) on how it&#x27;s working out.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-019-00492-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-019-00492-4</a>

Zotero has been great. I switched four years ago and never looked back. Plugin support is great- I have drag and drop support in my latex editor and fairly easy citation selection in Lyx

I&#x27;ve used Zotero regularly since 2012 or so. At the time I chose it because it integrated with Firefox, though I recall looking into Mendeley as well. If you use BibTeX or BibLaTeX I&#x27;d recommend the following extension: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;retorquere&#x2F;zotero-better-bibtex" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;retorquere&#x2F;zotero-better-bibtex</a>I&#x27;m very glad I never even tried Mendeley given the database encryption fiasco. Mendeley put a blog post out saying that preventing importing to Zotero was unintentional, but I don&#x27;t buy it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mendeley.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;the-importance-of-interoperability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.mendeley.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;the-importance-of-inter...</a>Before the database encryption fiasco, I would recommend Mendeley and Zotero if someone wanted a citation manager, but now I recommend staying away from Mendeley as much as possible.The only major problems I&#x27;ve had with Zotero were related to Firefox&#x27;s switch to WebExtensions. Now adding a copy of a webpage to a citation is more difficult than before the switch, though probably equally difficult as in Mendeley.

I&#x27;ve recently migrated from Mendeley to Zotero. I first had to downgrade Mendeley because recent releases also encrypt your local database to guarantee lock-in [1]. Quite scary.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zotero.org&#x2F;support&#x2F;kb&#x2F;mendeley_import" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zotero.org&#x2F;support&#x2F;kb&#x2F;mendeley_import</a>

I gave up on Mendeley. It’s clearly made by a team that doesn’t care about users, or science (eg the rubbish mobile app). Much better options these days which don’t require giving Elsevier any more money.

If you&#x27;re interested other Elsevier shenanigans they now encrypt your PDFs that you add to Mendeley so you don&#x27;t even have access to your OWN research.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;mendeleys-encrypted-repository-is-fundamentally-anti-science.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;mendeleys-encrypted-repos...</a>

If I go through my library site, I have a good 70% chance of this happening: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DannyBate4&#x2F;status&#x2F;1092132558937169922" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;DannyBate4&#x2F;status&#x2F;1092132558937169922</a>

They all know that anybody can just go on Sci-Hub and get most research.My local city library offers several &quot;legal&quot; free access sites to published journals - - if you have 20 minutes to wade through all the ridiculous BS on the computer trying to discover if the article is even available.Sci Hub takes me 25 seconds and 85 to 90% of what I need is right there.(Be certain to donate !)

Hold on, that&#x27;s not my follow-up question.You&#x27;ve just said that some orgs publish in Elsevier because grants and tenure.Nobody needs to use them. And yet people do use them, fully aware what it will do to the research, because it helps them personally.My follow-up question is, why are people not mad at the funders and research labs who insist on publishing there? They&#x27;re burying the research intentionally just to get a better job.

But if not everybody publishes for free, you can only get access to those articles by paying the publishers.The follow-up question is: why do people keep publishing there? The answer to that is that funders and institutions use journal brand names as proxies for evaluating candidates for grants or tenure, so publishing your work in traditional pay-walled journals is good for your career despite making your work less accessible.The follow-up question to that is: why do funders and institutions use journal brand names as proxies? The answer to that may lie in [1], summarised by: there&#x27;s not really a good alternative. (Full disclosure: I&#x27;m working on setting up such an alternative.)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laureates-when-it-comes-to-career-advice-for-scientists-80079" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...</a>

Serious question: Why do any institutions pay any publisher at all? If everyone just published for free, nobody would need a subscription. What&#x27;s the point of the publisher?

Here&#x27;s hoping this is the asteroid to Elsevier&#x27;s (and their business model&#x27;s) dinosaur.

If they are, that&#x27;s happening very slowly. Despite several prolific cancellations in the past year, they again posted nearly 40% profit margins.

Elsevier provides little value to scholars, editors, or universitiesHowever, it seems to be correcting the problem by heading resolutely toward oblivion.

This is huge. University of California, hosting Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego among others, is indisputably one of the most prestigious university systems in the world and is widely regarded as the most prestigious public school. Them terminating their subscription of a major scientific journal sounds unreal. Let&#x27;s see if this will start any change, but I&#x27;m very hopeful.

I assume they won’t expect their professors to publish in pay journals?  That open access papers are rated as highly as paid when determining promotions?

It reminds me that no lawful citizen should donate to SciHub. They even have a special link at the bottom of the main page for it!

&quot;“Knowledge should not be accessible only to those who can pay,” said Robert May, chair of UC’s faculty Academic Senate. “The quest for full open access is essential if we are to truly uphold the mission of this university.” The Academic Senate issued a statement today endorsing UC’s position.&quot;An excellent decision by UC! This decision will likely cause some pain in the short-term but in the long-term those who want or need access to knowledge will be much better off.Access to knowledge via expensive journals has long been a problem for many primarily for reasons of expense and copyright. Whilst these barriers are obvious, some are less so. In the past access to knowledge via these journals worked to a degree as academic and professional institutions and university libraries usually provided access to them but only for those associated with said organizations—that effectively left many others locked out. Whilst not completely satisfactory, the distribution system worked, albeit very inefficiently. That meant that for some knowledge was readily accessible but for others it only slowly trickled out, effectively society as a whole had access but it was both sporadic and punctuated.However, in recent years several factors changed to make that already-inefficient distribution system untenable. First, there has been an explosion of new knowledge that has pushed the old distribution to straining point, then the development of the internet changed the paradigm completely: it both pushed the problems of copyright to the fore and showed up how slow and inefficient the old system was, and finally the middlemen opportunists had a field day—publishers like Elsevier effectively became knowledge monopolies and exploited the system to the point of breaking.There is no doubt the knowledge distribution system has become completely broken, one only has to look at the phenomenal success of Alexandra Elbakyan&#x27;s pirate website Sci-Hub to come to that conclusion. In turn, staid universities and academics, etc.—those who publishers like Elsevier had already held to ransom for some considerable time—realized that Sci-Hub&#x27;s success provided the opportunity to break free of the publishers&#x27; yokes.When it comes to the distribution of knowledge, it is difficult for one to over exaggerate how truly limiting and restrictive the publishers&#x27; copyright system is. Whilst copyright has always been a limiting factor in this area, it is especially so in this digital information age. Why it is so is a huge subject that I cannot address in detail here, suffice to say it covers a vast expanse: from monopolies on information, the high cost of textbooks to restrictions on the electronic concatenation of information and research databases through to AI processing of existing knowledge. In this area the misuse of copyright is immense.There is no doubt in my mind that the distribution system needs to be opened up and that open access is the route foreword. We have to applaud the University of California&#x27;s decision to terminate subscriptions with Elsevier in its push for open access to publicly funded research. The aim for all published research ought to be for it to be fully open to everyone.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com&#x2F;guerilla-open-access-manifesto&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com&#x2F;guerilla-open-acce...</a> Aaron&#x27;s manifesto is getting more and more relevant. He would be happy to see this!

Good on ya, UC. Stick it to those dirty greedy double-dealing Dutch bstrds.

If you won&#x27;t comment civilly and substantively we&#x27;ll ban the account.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

Good on ya, UC. Hit those greedy, double-dealing, Dutch Elsevier bstrds where it hurts.Next target: Nature Pigs Group, the consortium of Anglo swne who have infested every area of research with their sitty journals.Of course, some of the blame goes to idjit academics who jump at the chance to publish in any NPG journal, even if it is named &quot;Nature Enemas and Fecal Matter&quot;

I often wish large experiments would take a stronger stance on the supply end. At CERN we&#x27;ve worked out deals with publishers mandating that _our_ content be open access, even if the journal isn&#x27;t.Personally I feel like this is buying into the system. As it stands I have to make political arguments about the value of open access research. I would rather tell my colleagues we can&#x27;t publish in journal-X because it won&#x27;t be accessible to as many people.

Using tax money to fund research and then not making the results open access is theft. Citizens should get what they pay for.

UC terminates subscriptions with Elsevier in push for open access