[hcrean]

Imagine working this hard to track down people sharing ideas, that you didn't work to produce or fund in the first place, in order to punish them for not giving you a financial cut... Companies like this are just holding humanity back.

[dandanua]

It's not actually hard, but I agree with the point. BTW, they also charge authors ridiculous amount of money for additional services, e.g. printing colored images.

In a far (and optimistic) future such companies will be studied as examples of social parasites in schools and universities.

[LastTrain]

It already is studied and there is even a term for it: rent seeking.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[geysersam]

Printing colored images! What does a single issue of their printed editions cost? Hundreds of dollars? The color printing cost is a rounding error.

[qup]

I think the universities themselves will be studied as social parasites, too.

[vsuperpower2020]

I think they'll be studied as universal basic income. There's so many college graduates with no skills who basically unemployable, but are still collecting a decent salary to teach things that no one wants to pay for in the first place. Our economy can evidently support a lot of people who aren't working.

[giancarlostoro]

Starting with Oracle I am sure.

[grishka]

The companies themselves aren't the problem, they are a symptom. The real problem is governments, especially the US government, that happily use their monopoly on the use of force to help such companies enforce such business models.

[ngcazz]

So is your point that companies are put in a position where they _have_ to take advantage of government's use of force?

Elsevier could well come up with a business model that isn't purely based on extraction, rent-seeking and legal intimidation, but the problem is that governments possess legal resources that have good-faith use cases?

[grishka]

Yes, the problem is that governments allow such business models. These legal resources are used overwhelmingly with bad faith and to the detriment of the society, so maybe they need to be reformed.

[mint2]

Okay so you’re advocating for increased government regulation to combat this?

[grishka]

More like a full redo of the copyright system so it couldn't be abused like this.

[ngcazz]

To be clear, I 100% agree regulation and more commonsensical legislation is fundamental to stop and punish bad players like Elsevier. I just find it gross that consolidated players invariably go their way.

[amomchilov]

Taken a step further, why does the US government help enforce such business models?

[grishka]

Because the it's the most powerful government in the world and is the only one among the most powerful ones that legally allows bribes.

[amomchilov]

And who do those bribes come from?

Companies. They come from companies, which are how greedy business models manifest in the real world.

[hiddencost]

Ludicrous

[xhkkffbf]

Huh?

Imagine working this hard to write a book. Some authors work for years. Many work for at least a year. Some academics work several years on one article.

Elsevier is very much a partner to producing and funding this work. The people who work there edit, format and distribute the work. The authors are very much partners in this endeavor and they're often paid royalties by Elsevier.

And then scummy people rationalize their piracy with lots of different stilted rationales.

If you see a poor author, you can be sure the piracy is cutting into the ability to support themselves by selling their writing. But, yeah, imagine that it's Elsevier that's holding humanity back, not pirate scum.

[RBerenguel]

Edit and format? I don't remember getting any formatting or editing help from any research journal ever, aside from getting some LaTeX style file.

[xhkkffbf]

Believe me, the publisher still hasn't to reconcile the work and tweak it when it comes in. Have you ever tried to edit a book from N authors? Even if they're using the exact same style file, there are always issues.

But again, go start your own free journal. People have been trying it since the Internet began and the best we get are some glorfied FTP server. Yes, this is all that some branches of science need, but there's a reason why Elsevier is still in business.

[paulmd]

elsevier isn’t paying authors a dime lmao, the authors are the ones paying here.

A publisher would never deign to pay an academic. They get “paid in exposure”, and again, actually they have to pay for that exposure in the first place. Elsevier sits in the middle and skims the authors when they publish and the readers when they read. Peer reviewers, of course, work for free. Nice work if you can get it - billions of dollars a year for running a static website and providing a latex template. You could run the whole thing off a single server and cloudflare with some http basic auth lol.

(and if you’re asking “why don’t you start your own journal then”… that’s why arxiv and others are taking off like crazy over the past 15 years.)

[xhkkffbf]

Elsevier pays many authors. They may not pay the authors of some of the journal articles, but they also publish many books which generate royalties that are shared with the authors.

But why does pay have anything to do with this? Why does it justify the piracy? No one is holding a gun to the head of the journal article authors. They're making their own choice to submit it. And why? Probably because they want the fame and hope that it will generate big grants in the future. The editors, typesetters etc at Elsevier have ZERO chance of getting one of those grants.

And you mentioned the other academics who review papers. Again, they're doing it of their own free will. And why? Because they want to stay on the cutting edge. They want a chance to read the papers before they're published. Why? I would think that getting their own big grants is a motivator for many of them. Maybe all of them.

I'm glad that Arxiv is taking off. But riddle me this: why does Elsevier still exist? Why are enough scientists submitting their papers? Because they're making a rational decision about the benefits. They don't want to spend weeks fussing with LaTeX. They don't want to maintain archives. Everyone in this chain is a free person making a free decision.

If you don't like it, don't read the papers. Or complain to the authors who chose Elsevier.

But don't pirate someone's hard work.

[goosedragons]

No, they're doing it because their career is tied to it. No published papers, reviews, editorships, means you're not going to land that academic job, you're not going to move up the ladder to full professor and you're not going to have grants (which some places tie salary to!).

Elsevier exists because of inertia. There's so much inertia left over from when paper journals kind of mattered that it's hard to change at an individual level.

Publishing with Elsevier doesn't avoid LaTeX either. Some journals mandate you use their template and you still have to proof after acceptance and correct all the mistakes the typesetting staff makes.

[xhkkffbf]

So in the scientists' case it's a "career", but in Elsevier's case it's money and greed? Are those scientists being paid? If so, I would submit that it's just as much about money and greed for them too.

BTW many of the scientists are better paid than the editors and proofreaders in academic publishing. But, hey, this thread is all about hating on Elsevier so what am I saying?

[goosedragons]

Should carriage builders still be common?

[fallingknife]

Funny how when Elsevier tries to enforce its copyright, HN acts like they're the devil, but when the AI training data is the subject turns into the strictest IP rights warriors I have ever seen.

[__rito__]

They get papers for free, that were funded by the public, or other entities. Then they charge people obscene amount of money to let them download the PDF.

This is dictionary definition of "parasite".

Nobody funds most artists. Buying artwork isn't funding. They produce art from their own funding. Then a company leeches them off and trains models without compensating them.

I am okay at training models on arXiv papers. The authors consented to spread the knowledge publicly.

With such dumb-logic comments, you make it hard to take your point-of-view seriously.

Edit: The copyright of the paper _authors_ isn't being protected. They are being blood-sucked. And, before the Hub, if you emailed an author for a free PDF, if you couldn't afford it, most, if not all emailed you a free PDF.

Harvard famously said that they couldn't afford Elsevier anymore. [0]

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...

[bayindirh]

They are completely different things.

I send my research to Elsevier for free, and surrender all my publishing rights & copyright to Elsevier to be able to publish it.

When/if it's published, I have a paltry "author's copy" in return, which I have to be very diligent while giving copies of it away, otherwise Elsevier might punish me.

At the end, it's a paper which bears my name, but I have none of the rights attached to it, and Elsevier gets literally millions of dollars from each country which licenses its publications.

Their expenses are a mere rounding error for what they charge, and they are doing this to protect their income, not my research.

Copyright infringement / ethical issues in AI is something else:

Crawlers reap & providers sell my data without my consent, and I get nothing in return, except the ability to poorly imitate my writing/art style, making my work, blood, sweat and tears I shed over these years to create that style worthless.

Both parties earn exorbitant amount of money with my work, for free, and suck me dry in the process. One at least gives me a paltry PDF file and maybe some recognition, and the other one threatens my livelihood while raising hype and applauding degeneration of human achievement and reducing it to a mere set of numbers.

Both are cutting the tree they're living on, though.

[takinola]

I am not familiar with the academic publishing world but it seems this should be disruptable. Why isn't there some other outfit running a WordPress site taking submissions and publishing them on much less onerous terms?

[Staple_Diet]

Ha.

It's kind of like saying; 'Shit, why are people paying 6 figures for college degrees in US when they could just learn most of that for free'.

Because no one gives a shit if you don't have the expensive piece of parchment.

Academic publishing is similar. The impact factor and 'prestige' of the journal matters to your University, your peers, your grants panel, and yourself. However this results in 2 scenarios, when you publish in a top tier journal, a) the journal charges you a small fee and also pay-walls your work so your reach is lessened, then actively polices you sharing YOUR work without permission b) the journal charges an exorbitant fee (Nature wants $11,000 USD) for open-access publishing that allows wider distribution (but still has stipulations in some cases).

HOWEVER, some editorial boards of big for-profit journals have flipped the table and started their own not-for-profit journals with blackjack and hookers. The big one in my field was NeuroImage board creating Imaging Neuroscience - with a public letter to the owners (Elsevier if I'm not mistaken) calling out the bullshit publishing fees.

[casey2]

There is a reason no one gives a shit. And it has nothing to do with publishers. If a paper actually contributed meaningfully to a field it everyone would know about it.

Ironically, institutions like Elsevier justify the existence of the numerous hack academics (not scientists) that exist nowadays. Most of whom have no leg to stand on complaining about Elsevier's rent seeking when they themselves would be infinitely more useful flipping burgers.

[__rito__]

> this should be disruptable

This is already disrupted in AI at the highest stages. arXiv paper are the first class citizens there; people regularly cite blog posts, and even tweets in their papers. Rather than journals, people take conferences more seriously.

Now, some companies like DeepMind like to publish in Nature for prestige's sake. That's a different thing.

[bayindirh]

The disruption started even before the AI hype. ArXiV is not an AI focused service anyway (it started with pysics IIRC). It's FAIR and Open science and push from countries like Germany which forced Elsevier to sign open access submission and publication agreements in the first place.

This happened ~5 years before AI hype became something, and ArXiV was a force even before that.

[xhkkffbf]

Uh-- no one is forcing you to send anything to Elsevier. Or any other publisher.

If you don't like the terms, self-publish. The Internet makes it easier than ever.

The reason so many people use Elsevier is because they realize it's a better deal than self-publishing.

Copyright is a right that's given to YOU, the creator. If you don't want to sign it away, find your own way to distribute your work. Copyright will protect YOU from big companies stealing your hard work.

[bayindirh]

The name of the game is Peer Review, which is a fundamental pillar of science. Your blog or self-published papers are not peer reviewed.

If you found and can sustain an open access journal with a reputable peer review process, you can do a lot of business. If you're not get subverted by big houses, of course.

[__rito__]

Companies like Elsevier are a force of the old world.

They rely on prestige, connections, name, etc. to leech people off.

And, the system, due to inertia, and their efforts, make it difficult for people to get grants, name, etc. if they don't publish in big-name journals.

Elsevier also spent tens of millions of dollars in lobbying in the US [0].

I am glad that AI research in the highest levels have mostly gotten rid of the parasites like Elsevier.

Can't imagine charging thousands of dollars of a PDF hosting service.

[0]: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...

[bayindirh]

It's not the AI research which disrupts old publishing houses. It's FAIR and Open Science.

The biggest reason publishing houses still continue is not that they hold PDFs, but they provide peer reviews as a service. It's what it provides their prestige and inertia.

The bad thing is many open access journals keep the bar pretty low, allowing Elsevier, Springer, et. al to amplify their power. Moreover, if you are not aware, every big publishing house loves to allow ArXiV submissions even in intermediate revisions because they reduce the editorial load on themselves while raising the quality bar.

You can already cite blog posts, etc. in your publications. It's not something frown upon as long as what you cite is sound.

At the end of the day, FAIR & Open research, institutional federated and peer reviewed data warehouses and (high quality) open access publications will kill these big houses, and they already bent pretty hard with forced open access subscriptions and submission agreements done by countries.

Disclaimer: My institution also manages these subscriptions for universities country-wide.

[Netcob]

That HN guy, amirite? Such an inconsistent individual.

[dopp0]

it's not funny when you compare "profits over other's knowledge" to "share knowledge without profits", it doesn't make sense at all. potatoes and oranges

[codedokode]

As I understand, it is not Elsevier's fault, it is the government that allocates funding and gives promotion based on number of publications made in Elsevier journals.

[red_admiral]

Some of those governments, in Europe, are also starting to mandate open access though.

In practice, for maths papers I look on arXiv, for crypto papers on iacr and so on - academics generally want their work to be read (and cited) so they're usually happy to make it available for free. There's even tricks you can play like uploading an "author version" or "preprint" if you're forced to use a commercial publisher for a conference.

[goosedragons]

Open access is its own ridiculous racket. It usually costs the author literally thousands to publish as open access.

[red_admiral]

If you're funded by a Horizon/EU grant, you can cost the article publication charges into your grant application in most cases. It ends up being the funder, not the author, who pays.

That also means that if the whole racket is revisited at some point, then Elsevier will get to pick on someone their own size if not bigger - and will hopefully come off worse in that fight.

[goosedragons]

Is that the best use of grant funds though really? Yes, it's not the author directly out of pocket but that money could be used towards new equipment, boosting grad student/post-doc pay, etc.

[red_admiral]

It's not. But it's on the EU government, or possibly the Horizon scheme managers, to fix it.

[DoctorOetker]

One can publish on Zenodo, universities and authors can band together and split the difference: divide the cost of hosting and / or optionally paid peer review.

[Hitton]

>paid peer review

What? Elsevier doesn't pay reviewers either.

[DoctorOetker]

I know, what I'm saying is if universities band together, they can arrange for reviewers to be paid, so that authors at all universities start a discussion when they are assigned to review for Elsevier... for free.

[epolanski]

Sadly the publication metric is sick and made the overwhelming majority of published scientific papers, I am sadly a co-author of a paper that I know for a fact can't be reproduced because the underlying data has been stressed enough to show what the main writer wanted to show.

And it's not even the authors fault the system is like that. Research isn't just about saying "hey we found this works", but also about "we wasted 3 years, it doesn't work sadly". Yet, the second option does not lead to the same impact, because if something doesn't work it's not going to be reproduced and thus quoted.

[memen]

Proof that it does not work is still an interesting result! However, I think you meant to say that if you failed to show that it works, it often also means you cannot proof that it doesn't work. And then you indeed have nothing worth publishing.

[epolanski]

Say you're researching some material to have some behaviour. It doesn't have it.

You're not gonna be published on high impact journals with data that doesn't move the field, even though as you point out the information is as valuable.

[DoctorOetker]

but a preventing the field from sliding in the gutter could be rewarded in principle.

[DoctorOetker]

it could be quoted by say medical insurance companies, or by patent offices, but that would mean a wider quotation scope.

a less extreme widening of scope would be just the research funds that apply or deny grants for research: suppose a flurry of papers investigates the superconductive behavior of a piece of meteorite, and you're the one to kill the buzz with your negative result, then future grant denials could cite your boring negative result.

[sigwinch28]

A lot government funding stipulates open access publication of some form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_mandate

[carschno]

"Open Access" includes formats that shift the cost from the readers to the authors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_processing_charge

So the publisher still gets a significant amount of money, albeit often paid by the institution of the author.