[cdcox]

I'm actually surprised this whole suit is being pursued by a professional society. Closed publications seem to be out of line with the interest of their members. Unless the society makes substantial money from their publications, which is unlikely[0], it's hard to see what the motivation of this organization would be and why the members of the society haven't loudly complained against it. I'd really expect a suit from this to come from Elseiver or NPG.

[0] From talking to a few representives of sceintific societies it sounds like they usually produce thier journals at or around cost.

[adventured]

Cartels often like to protect their elite or scarce stature. Even if one has an elevated respect for the type of people that belong to a given society (eg scientists or researchers), they're going to likely more often than not be no better than doctors or plumbers or any other professionals when it comes to being human: ie they will act in their perceived self-interest to put up barriers that benefit their position.

I think farmers are remarkable people, broadly speaking. They feed us all. Who deserves more gratitude than people that do that, right? Well, farmers love their tariffs and protectionism. They lobby like crazy for it all around the world. Nearly everyone wants artificial protection when they can get it.

Nobody is confused when labor unions do the exact same thing. This is all about restricting a resource, restricting distribution, tightly controlling it for the supposed benefit of the members (often at the expense of non-members).

Controlling prestige via distribution, etc. is one way to control stature and prevent dilution. Scientists & common researchers often don't get paid super well, one of the things they do have is acquired prestige. Restricted publication/distribution is a way to control who gets to be prestigious or not.

[ocschwar]

> I'm actually surprised this whole suit is being pursued by a professional society. Closed publications seem to be out of line with the interest of their members.

Not exactly.

I fully recognize that Elsevier and Springer Verlag have behaved so obnoxiously that they make everything I'm about to say sound ridiculous, but nevertheless, here goes.

"If you're not the customer, you're the product."

When I get the latest issue of (say) IEEE Transactions On What I Do For a Living, I want to know that the editors did their best to solicit and round up the best new work on advancing the state of the art in my specialty, and that the manuscripts they received check out and are worthy.

That takes money, because the editors have bills to pay and can't really do this on a volunteer basis. Even though the peer reviewers are volunteers, getting them to volunteer is itself work. And the work starts by filtering the slush out so you're not asking the reviewers to look at stuff that's utter crap.

Advertiser support is not appropriate here. "This issue of IEEE Power And Energy is brought to you by Xformer Corp. (So don't even think about discussing in these pages how our transformers blow up more often than should happen in polite society.""

Author support is even less appropriate, with all due respect to the PLOS line of journals.

And yes, the professional societies try to price subscriptions and downloads so their budget is at break-even, which is why they have an interest in getting subscriptions and payments from as many people as possible, i.e. by not making the PDFs available for free. If everyone in EECS joined IEEE, membership fees would go down, and they could add Transactions access to the standard membership package.

I do still think it's counterproductive to crack down on Sci-Hub. Ultimately, what we need is a micropayments system that makes paying for downloads too seamlessly easy to be worth dodging. If Venmoing for PDFs took less time to set up and use than going to Sci-Hub, this would be moot.

[dnomad]

Yeah, everything you said is ridiculous.

Journals are very much a profit center for the publishers. Scientific journal publishing is a wildly profitable business[1][2][3] and it is not all the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal quality. They are almost certainly monopoly rents. And the idea that membership fees pay for the journals is also silly. It's well known that it's institutions who pay the outrageous subscription fees for the journal that are actually powering this racket.

The interesting point here is that Sci-Hub isn't really a threat to the publishers. Like with most piracy it's not clear that the people using Sci-Hub would purchase the papers if Sci-Hub weren't available. And no matter what the publishers can always count on those fat institutional subscription fees. And that's what this is really about. The ultimate danger of Sci-Hub is that it undermines the very idea of a journal. Individual scientific papers become the unit of trade and people will take those papers on an a la carte basis. SciHub, if it were left alone, would unbundle science publishing and you'd see a drastic fall in profits.

This is all about money and protecting a wildly profitable business model. The idea that this is about supporting editors is ridiculous.

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

[3] https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...

[ocschwar]

> Journals are very much a profit center for the publishers.

For Elsevier, Springer, WIley, yes.

For IEEE? For ACS? For AIP? Not so much.

> nd it is not all the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal quality

THey're not. I shouldn't have to pay $35 dollars for an Elsevier PDF when Elsevier didn't even have the decency to spend some of that money on copy editing to help authors who don't speak good English.

But I should pay a price. Because the alternative is for someone else to pay, someone who does not have my interests at heart.

[gliboc]

Since when do you need to pay just to download a PDF ? Just remember there's peer to peer, and that the web is not a big black box where you can only deal with giant companies and their websites - there's freedom in it too.

Also: I think your attitude is quite symptomatic of a certain laziness of the research community, which has helped these counterproductive monopolies to rise and strive. Get angry, for once, because this is getting ridiculous.

[s17n]

If the value that the journal is providing is curatorial, then that's what they should charge for - give the papers away, charge for the table of contents.

[Vinnl]

> The interesting point here is that Sci-Hub isn't really a threat to the publishers.

I'm not sure if you can say that. Consortia of universities in both France and Germany have recently decided not to renew their contracts with one of the big publishers, and although it's hard to pin down to what extent motivations contribute, one could very well make the case that they have been able to do so because they have less pressure from academics to retain subscriptions - thanks to Sci-Hub.

[cup-of-tea]

How much money do you think it costs? Peer reviewers aren't paid. The typesetting is low quality and done in India. Difficult bits like figures and tables must be done by the author with no help from the journal. The printed copies are low quality and contain advertising.

[ocschwar]

Part of the cost is that the editors have to read through everything to filter what goes to the peer reviewers. If you keep sending junk to the reviewers, they drop out of reviewing.

[bradleyjg]

The most logical funders of journals are the university via their libraries. They pay lion's share of the money under the current system. And competition isn't really doing much in this particular industry. A guess free riding could be an issue, but they are all non-profits to begin with.

[andrei_says_]

What if

We could have a nonprofit with transparent accounting which would make it easy to check the cost of each issue

And a subscription model priced to pay for that cost

And a payment system allowing to pay a similar amount per issue, with up to 2x the cost of each issue after which access becomes free.

Or a similar model which covers the expenses and pays very well without attempting astronomical profits.

[spystath]

I kind of like the AIP model. Articles are free for 1 month from the date they are published. I also recall AIP having an entire month of free access a couple of years ago, however I don't know if this is a regular thing (say yearly or so).

[laretluval]

If paywalling is required to put journals together, how do fields such as computational linguistics manage with all open-access journals?

[ocschwar]

If your field is narrow, and the participants are collegial, then the peer reviewed journals are mostly there to formalize the banter your colleagues put out on mailing lists. Easy to do for cheap.

Other fields, not so much.

[Eridrus]

It seems like ACS publishes C&EN which comes free with a membership, so is probably a draw for people becoming members, which is probably(?) where most of their revenue comes from; they could reasonably see Sci-Hub as a threat to their membership revenue.

[lvs]

No. ACS is a publisher for a large number of journals. As a nonprofit, their financials are fully available online. Member dues are a tiny slice of their revenues.

https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/aboutacs/financ...

[Eridrus]

Nice find! So it looks like they have almost half a billion in "Electronic services" revenue, which I assume is their electronic publishing business.

Given it is a professional association, can its members pressure it to get out of the publishing business?

Its expenses are huge too, which seems odd; where is 384 million dollars going?

[lstamour]

It appears to be more than one company, for starters. They frankly seem more like an investment or holding company in some ways: The accompanying consolidated financial statements include the accounts of the American Chemical Society and its related entities, which consist of ACS International, Ltd., a wholly owned international marketing services subsidiary, and Hampden Data Services, Ltd., a wholly owned chemical information software company. The consolidated financial statements also include the accounts of the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, an endowment fund established to advance scientific education and research in the petroleum field, and the American Chemical Society Insurance Trust, a grantor trust established to enable members of the Society to purchase insurance coverage through group insurance policies. All significant interorganizational transactions have been eliminated. The accounts of the Society’s chapters, referred to as local sections and divisions, are not included in the Society’s consolidated financial statements because the Society does not have a financial controlling interest in its chapters.

[Fomite]

A number of societies I am a member of depend on journal revenue for a substantial portion of their activities.

[Kadin]

And yet there are whole fields that are dominated by open-access journals; presumably they also have societies, and those societies have found alternate business models.

That someone is going to be forced to change their business model does not strike me as a compelling argument for the current system.

[nugi]

Maybe that is a serious problem.

[eesmith]

"pursued by a professional society"

This is the ACS.

The ACS has fought hard against competition for decades.