[zaarn]

"Elsevier [...] is still not willing to offer a deal in the form of a nationwide agreement in Germany that responds to the needs of the academic community in line with the principles of open access and that is financially sustainable."

Elsevier can truly go burn in a fire and I hope that the universities here pull this through to the end. arxiv, distill and other places are a joy to use where I can just get knowledge and science that I need for projects. Elsevier simply destroys that out of pure greed and nothing else.

[teilo]

Elzevier isn't the only one, either. While not as egregious, there is Proquest, who locks private researchers out of many databases and digital works (mostly historical works) that are not available anywhere else. If one is not an enrolled student or faculty member of an institution that pays for an institutional subscription, there is no way to gain access to their databases.

This type of intellectual elitism disgusts me. It's particularly bad when I would pay for access to some of their databases, but I'm not even given the choice.

[betterunix2]

One thing to keep in mind is that European universities have encouraged this situation by insisting that faculty publish in "legitimate" journals, where "legitimate" means "published by one of the major academic publishing companies." It has been a problem for CS faculty who have to convince universities that conference proceedings carry more weight in CS than journal articles, which is why you see Springer publishing "official" copies of so many conference papers (while "unofficial" copies can typically be found at the authors' personal webpage).