[HN Gopher] MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing ...
___________________________________________________________________
MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier
contract
Author : nabla9
Score : 244 points
Date : 2024-08-20 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sparcopen.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (sparcopen.org)
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Aaron Swartz would have liked some of those principles. This is a
| small, "better late than never" step for most of us, but for
| Aaron...it's more like "too little, too late."
| jashper wrote:
| My first thought as well
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Surely MIT made this move at least partially due to Aaron's
| legacy. I hope and believe he'd be happy to see this.
| seatac76 wrote:
| Question: What is Elsevier's value proposition? Could that be
| replicated by on open source offering?
| Y_Y wrote:
| The own the prestigious journal names, you can trivially do
| what they do, but you lack the prestige.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Like Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic
| Chemistry?
| azan_ wrote:
| No, like Lancet or Cell.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The bundle pricing is a problem, as is consolidation in
| the publishing market. The fact that that there are so
| few publishers nowadays really doesn't help with pricing.
| Another example why antitrust enforcement is needed.
| pdonis wrote:
| It already is: arxiv.org.
| dheera wrote:
| I wish arxiv.org would have a big "Booooo" banner for papers
| without code.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I don't think it's always necessary if the paper makes it
| really clear how things were done. And just because the
| code is available, it doesn't mean that it is actually
| reproducible or comprehensible.
| anticensor wrote:
| Different roles. I could have agreed if you said, say, PLOS.
| arXiv is a preprint repository, Elsevier publishes peer-
| reviewed journals.
| pdonis wrote:
| The preprints on arxiv are read, and responded to, by
| plenty of peers. The question was what _value_ Elsevier
| adds; I think the primary _value_ added is just making
| papers available to anyone who wants to read them. Arxiv
| does that. (What 's more, it does it for _everyone_ , not
| just academics--as a taxpayer I can go on arxiv and read
| research that my tax money paid for. I can't do that with
| Elsevier published journals.) Publication in journals at
| this point is mainly resume padding and status signaling,
| not an actual value add.
| anticensor wrote:
| PLOS is open-access, as a taxpayer you can read world-
| class peer-reviewed (more stringent than Elsevier
| journals in fact) articles in your preferred field's
| preferred issue.
| pdonis wrote:
| Are there any articles on PLOS that I can't find on
| arxiv.org?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Network effect. "Everyone" subscribed to Elsevier, so if you
| wanted your papers to get visibility and citations, you tried
| to get it published in their journals.
|
| They are a relic of a bygone era. They made sense when journals
| were physical publications in the library. Elsevier was the
| one-stop-shop for all of the major academic journals. But with
| the internet, they make less sense and kept their position
| through inertia and rent seeking behavior.
| adelmotsjr wrote:
| I think the issue is more than that though, because if the
| physical aspect were only the barrier, they should have
| disappeared by the time the Internet came along.
|
| I think (and this is only my honest, outsider perspective)
| that the issue is, and always was, about trust. As in: who is
| this dude publishing this paper about high-energy particle
| physics? I don't know him, so I don't trust him. But I do
| know about Science, and Nature, and other Journals, so I'm
| gonna use them. That's why Elsevier and Springer and other
| publishers continued to exist.
|
| Problem is, science isn't about trust. It's about knowledge,
| and more importantly, _truth_. But how do get the truth?
| Well, there 's witnesses, and evidence, and
| Reproducibility(tm) of statements to produce facts. Y'know,
| science itself. If we could somehow resolve the
| reproducibility crisis of science, I think we would be one
| step closer to ending the parasitic mono-duo-oligo-
| whateverpoly of these publishers. Because then it would not
| be about who I trust to move forward the science enterprise.
| Instead it would be about facts themselves, and about
| confirming, via evidence and reproducibility of these facts,
| that would promote a piece of statement into knowledge. And
| that is how science should always have been, since the very
| beginning.
|
| But the reproduction of experiments is a problem in itself,
| that might be the cause of the 'relying-on-trust' issue.
| Since not all experiments are a simple ./build-and-run.sh
| script, and some involve a lot of money (think anything in
| medicine, physics, geology, oceanography, and the list goes
| on to [?]), it ends up being about someone that is reputable
| and reliable that had money and did the experiment and
| published in some journal that I know.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Editing, typesetting and curating are expensive. Yes, authors
| can do this and they contribute quite a bit, but it's not
| enough to support the high quality documents produced by
| Elsevier.
|
| Yes, tex-savvy authors can do a pretty good job but it's just
| not the same. That's one reason authors choose to pay the page
| charges.
|
| Curating is also surprisingly important. Sure, you can often
| get some author to send you a free PDF from something written
| 10-20 years ago. But it's also not uncommon for the author to
| be very unresponsive. Maybe they left academia. Maybe they're
| lazy. Who knows? But I know that I can't count on getting a
| free PDF from any author.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Curation is not access. Curation is editorial, in terms of
| having a journal issue contain a selection of available new
| works and not every single thing posted.
| azan_ wrote:
| Do you know how expensive open access publications are? I
| guarantee that editing, typesetting and curating could easily
| be performed for fraction of that price (and it's easy to
| prove it - just check how much Elsevier makes each year!).
| Also keep in mind that most of editors - which are
| responsible for curating - are not paid at all... And if you
| mean "curating" as in providing access to pdfs, then there is
| arxiv which does just that - for free.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| For institutions, it's that Elsevier gives access to some of
| the papers their researchers need. The question is then how
| Elsevier got the papers and I think there's a bunch of parts to
| it.
|
| Firstly, it can be by providing a good service. Before the war,
| most papers were published by learned societies and such
| societies tended to not be very good publishers - they would be
| slow with long backlogs and unable to publish the volume of
| papers scientists wanted published at the time. By providing a
| faster service they could get papers.
|
| Second it can be by offering a service at all. If you have a
| Springer journal and an Elsevier journal for some field, they
| can both get papers because researchers need to publish to
| advance their careers and one journal will not be big enough
| for all the papers in that field
|
| Third can be from being a preferred choice by being
| prestigious, which can matter even without impact factor
| arithmetic - hiring committees made of peers can still know
| which journals in the field are more prestigious / harder to be
| published in, and take that into account when hiring. It's not
| totally clear to me how to become prestigious. One way is by
| inertia - if you were prestigious before you probably still
| are. Something some publishers (Pergamon Press, but maybe
| others too?) did was owning and dining prominent scientists to
| get them to sign exclusive contracts to edit new journals.
| Perhaps this association via the editorial board could improve
| the journal's prestige or otherwise get desirable papers in.
|
| It does seem true to me that scientific publishers used to
| provide a pretty valuable service, and I think if one were in a
| government looking at all the government money going to the
| journals via universities, one might be able to feel that the
| improvement to the rate of scientific exchange was worth it.
|
| It feels that today, a lot of that value comes from various
| kinds of inertia/lock-in: Elsevier has the papers and
| scientists must publish in Elsevier journals to advance their
| careers, which maintains the prestige of those journals and
| means the publisher continues to have the papers.
| arijun wrote:
| What library are the researchers getting their access through
| now? Are they saying the MIT library bought digital copies of all
| those publications?
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a
| proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users
| request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy.
|
| The article states that MIT pays $300,000 annually for
| individual request fees, far less than the prior contract
| amount.
| gruez wrote:
| >They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is
| just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual
| users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article
| Galaxy.
|
| I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet.
| IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between
| end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was
| doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyright
| infringement.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,
| _In....
| shkkmo wrote:
| Your link is broken, should be:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,
| _....
|
| You missed the final period
| skissane wrote:
| Your link is broken too - they didn't miss anything, HN
| removes the final period. Solution is to %-escape it as
| %2E for a working link:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos
| .,_...
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Why would Article Galaxy be shut down? It makes it easier
| for Elsevier's articles to generate revenue:
|
| https://www.researchsolutions.com/
| gruez wrote:
| As other commenters have mentioned, MIT paying for
| articles a la carte worked out cheaper than getting all-
| access subscription from Elsevier. Presumably Elsevier
| would want to stem this sales channel so institutions
| would be forced to pay more.
| outop wrote:
| Large corporations use Article Galaxy to manage their
| access to digital copies of journal articles. Such
| organizations don't have a history of large libraries
| which subscribe to every issue of a journal. Their
| employees won't pay for access themselves. They can't
| raise purchase orders which require multiple department
| signoffs for a $25 paper. The corporations don't want to
| pay hundreds of times for the same article, nor do they
| want to infringe and face legal risks. So they need the
| brokers to work the system for them.
|
| Any individual publisher which restricted access via
| these brokers would face a sudden loss of revenue and a
| knock on effect to the prestige of their journals. If
| they allowed some customers to use these services but not
| others, the predatory nature of the model would stick out
| a mile to institutes and regulators.
| pavon wrote:
| Article Galaxy contracts with publishers to allow them to
| resell papers[1], they aren't depending on a shaky
| interpretation of copyright law to resell digital goods.
| Which makes it even easier for the big publishers to cut
| them off, or raise their rates if enough universities try
| to switch to pay-per-article.
|
| [1]https://www.researchsolutions.com/about/publishers
| ReptileMan wrote:
| z library
| stackedinserter wrote:
| US universities could create enough pressure on Elsevier to make
| them seriously reconsider their practices.
| 9question1 wrote:
| Making Elsevier reconsider its practices is a self-defeating
| goal. Pay-per-access research publishing should be driven out
| of business. The majority of institutions funding the actual
| research being done are publicly funded or receive large public
| tax breaks, so the resulting research should be publicly
| accessible, and the peer review process should be managed and
| funded within a similar network of institutions, not by an
| oligarchy of rent-seeking private entities.
| treyd wrote:
| Can universities just do a buy-out of Elsevier and wind it
| down? Surely they really have the upper hand here.
| Etheryte wrote:
| > During negotiations with Elsevier in 2020, MIT presented its
| principles to the publisher's representatives as the basis for
| new contract negotiations. Once it was clear that the company
| would not agree to advancing MIT's principles outlined in the
| Framework (such as allowing all authors to retain their
| copyright), the Libraries made the decision not to renew its
| contract, effective that July.
|
| > In 2022, Elsevier approached MIT with a request to re-engage in
| contract discussions. This time, Bourg was joined by an MIT
| contracts attorney in the negotiation, and once again, the
| Libraries' asks were based on the MIT Framework for Publisher
| Contracts. MIT requested an outlining of the goods and services
| they would be paying for, some means of using the MIT contract to
| advance equity in the scholarly communications system, and a
| contract that allowed all MIT authors (including non-
| corresponding authors) to have their articles openly available in
| a repository without an embargo. However, the company returned to
| MIT with its standard read and publish contract proposal, and MIT
| once again decided to remain out of contract.
|
| This is such a glorious example of disenshittify or die [0].
| Elsevier keeps pretending it has the upper hand to force itself
| on institutions, but the less institutions play their game, the
| more obvious it becomes that nothing of value was lost.
|
| [0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-
| abou...
| tiahura wrote:
| Why not adopt the law school approach? Let the grad students
| publish the journals.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| It's already the case that many of the people involved in
| publishing an article are unpaid. Authors and peer reviewers
| are not paid (indeed authors may have to pay for open access).
| Editors are sometimes paid. There are professionals employed by
| the publisher - copy editors, typesetters(?), etc - who are
| compensated, though it is not clear they are providing that
| much value.
| j7ake wrote:
| These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise
| and ultimately tax payers dollars.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| You realize that every journal author has a choice, right? The
| authors don't need to choose the journals. But they do. It's a
| free market. And the fact that they choose the journals means
| that the journals are offering something that the authors want.
|
| But it's simpler to just demonize them.
| bigfudge wrote:
| In my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of
| power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for
| not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their
| market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid
| system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent.
| Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the
| victims.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Asymmetry of power? Copyright gives each author absolute
| power over their work. They don't need to work with any
| formal publisher. LaTeX and the Internet make it easier
| than ever. Nobody needs any of the publishers to get their
| work out.
|
| The reality is that the power asymmetry is the opposite.
|
| What are these large costs for playing what game? Again,
| this isn't formally controlled by the publishers at all.
| The snobbery you imagine comes from the promotion and
| hiring committees and Elsevier and the other publishers
| aren't on those committees.
|
| And you might ask why do the promotion and tenure
| committees act with such imagined snobbery? They're all
| experienced academics. It's not like the schools are
| putting some randos on these committees. It's easily
| possible for some of these committees to have 300
| collective years of experience in the field. And so if
| they're valuing some Elsevier journals more than a rando
| PDF FTP site, well, I think we've got to respect their
| opinion. Or are you saying they're just puppets and fools
| of Elsevier?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Most real problems in the world are coordination
| problems, where one motivated/coordinated entity sits on
| an essential "toll bridge", and the whole world can
| theoretically just coordinate to route around them. But
| because "everyone else in the world" is a huge number of
| people with their own mixed up set of incentives, and the
| solution doesn't work unless a critical mass coordinates
| to do the same thing, this turns out to be really hard.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _They don 't need to work with any formal publisher.
| LaTeX and the Internet make it easier than ever. Nobody
| needs any of the publishers to get their work out._
|
| That's not how academia works, though. It would be great
| if it did, but it doesn't.
| outop wrote:
| Citation needed that it's a free market. It looks a lot like
| a market where entrenched players have excessive power.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Citation? The constitution guarantees that the author
| retains completely control over their work. That's what
| copyright is all about.
|
| And they don't need to work with any formal publisher at
| all. Open source technology and the Internet makes it very
| easy for anyone to distribute their own work for free. And
| many do.
|
| But for some reason people still want to pay the page fees.
| I think this is a signal that most academics are getting
| something for their money.
| ta988 wrote:
| Authors have to sign away all their rights when they want
| to publish with those publishers.
| donatzsky wrote:
| According to the article, Elsevier demands that the
| author signs over the copyright. So no, they don't retain
| complete control.
| calf wrote:
| You are so confidently wrong it's embarrassing.
|
| Any grad student--who does the grunt work in academia--
| will tell you they would not be allowed to put up their
| research online without their lab's permission. And grad
| students sign a form that anything they say and write is
| owned as IP by university anyways.
|
| Please look into how the academic sausage is made before
| spouting more misinformation as well as specious takes on
| spherical-cow free market theories. Your comments are all
| over this thread and I can't mentally unread them.
| ahoka wrote:
| Of course it's not free market.
| fabian2k wrote:
| No, they don't. Not unless you want to sabotage your own
| career.
|
| There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of
| science, and you need to publish in the most reputable
| journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in
| most cases.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| So you're confirming that somehow the best publishers
| somehow manage to provide something of value. The people
| judging your career are the ones you're complaining about
| and somehow they're choosing to respect a few publishers.
|
| Instead of just imagining that Elsevier is somehow bad, you
| might ask yourself why these committees respect their
| journals so much. What are they doing that's right?
| fabian2k wrote:
| It's solely about prestige, and self-reinforcing.
| azan_ wrote:
| Most authors are rated based on the journals they publish in,
| and the most prestigious journals are typically from
| predatory publishers (Elsevier, Nature etc., yes I know that
| predatory journal is typically used in other context).
| nabla9 wrote:
| > It's a free market.
|
| Free market is not magic.
|
| Do you want to learn how network effects combine with
| coordination problem?
| ta988 wrote:
| This is simply not true. Funding agencies, revieweds and
| universities incentivize the researchers to publish in "high-
| impact" journals.
|
| If researchers weren't pushed by institutions to publish more
| and more and in highly ranked journals things would be much
| better.
|
| The problem is nobody wants to do the move (researchers,
| institutions, funding agencies), so publishers (Elsevier
| isn't alone, ACS, Springer, Wiley, they all do that) increase
| the prices as much as they can because nothing happened when
| they did. And even now, as was shown by a comment above only
| a tiny percentage of their clients take action...
| zem wrote:
| https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-
| th... talks about that
| ilayn wrote:
| You misspelled oligopoly. My guess from your comment is that
| you don't have a handle on how academia works, which is
| perfectly fine. You don't have to. But then don't hold such
| strong opinions because what you wrote is not even wrong.
| kelnos wrote:
| They choose the journals because if they don't, their career
| doesn't advance.
|
| It's a classic collective-action problem: you need a large
| portion of researchers to more or less simultaneously stop
| doing it. Good luck with that.
|
| The journal system/cartel is an effective oligopoly.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| they're effectively cartels
| PopePompus wrote:
| Academia's Ticketmaster
| hhs wrote:
| Indeed, "data cartels"; if interested, there is a book that
| talks about this in detail:
| https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205
| mlhpdx wrote:
| > MIT presented its principles to the publisher's representatives
| as the basis for new contract negotiations.
|
| This is an incredibly important and powerful strategy, as a
| customer or a vendor. When everything is negotiable, trouble
| follows. The instant gratification of a "win" doesn't help move
| an organization forward. Having and sticking to principles does,
| with practical benefits. Trust grows and culture improves.
| Consistency (in contracts, features, information, behavior)
| builds.
| mmooss wrote:
| The effect on experienced negotiators is different:
|
| Portraying it as a principle, a policy ('our policy is ...'),
| an emotional issue, etc. are all just window dressings for what
| they want, and everyone tries to portray their wants to be as
| non-negotiable as possible in order to drive up the price they
| can demand. One basic tactic is to act angry about your want;
| some politicians love to do this one - it's a new outrage every
| day.
|
| Well I also can act angry and say something or anything is non-
| negotiable, but the only question is, how much am I willing to
| give up in order to get that result. Acting angry, saying 'it's
| our policy' - I don't care about your internal policies; they
| aren't laws and you can change them at any time; they are your
| choices just like any other in a negotiation.
| seb1204 wrote:
| What the document is called in the end is secondary. The
| important point in my opinion is that MIT sat together and
| discussed and also wrote down what they want, how they want
| it and likely (as an outcome of their discussion) also have
| an understanding where there are areas to
| negotiate/compromise on are. Or in other words, they prepared
| themselves for the negotiations so they know when to be firm
| or angry.
| hyeonwho4 wrote:
| The article mentioned that MIT saved 80%, and that they are
| paying $300,000 to purchase on a per article basis. So their
| previous contract with Elsevier was $1.5M annually. Elsevier's
| net income is PS2.02 billion (2022)(Wikipedia). So the loss to
| Elsevier from MIT is about 0.04% of net income. Which makes
| sense: MIT is one of around 2000 universities worldwide. I hope
| this catches on elsewhere, too.
| DevX101 wrote:
| They'll lose more. Many universities will follow. If it's good
| enough for MIT...
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Thr article says: This move saves MIT
| approximately $2 million each year
| dataflow wrote:
| Aren't the articles just going to get more expensive to make up
| for this?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or perhaps lower quality.
| salt4034 wrote:
| Why lower quality? The money doesn't go to authors, editors
| or peer-reviewers.
| PopePompus wrote:
| You're certainly right about authors and peer-reviewers,
| but are you sure that editors don't get paid with some of
| that money?
| Etheryte wrote:
| How do these numbers work out though? MIT probably isn't the
| richest university there is, but I would expect it to be pretty
| far up there. Even if all 2000 unis spent as much as MIT did,
| it would only add up to roughly 80% of the profit -- and I
| would expect most universities to have far less budget than
| MIT. So is there a set of big whale universities who are paying
| way more?
| Symbiote wrote:
| Private companies doing any kind of scientific research also
| have subscriptions. (A drug company for example.)
| vidarh wrote:
| MIT is "tiny" by international standards. According their own
| site they have less than 12,000 students.
|
| The largest universities are distance learning organisations
| and large groups of affilianted colleges or university
| systems.
|
| E.g. Indira Gandhi National Open University has an enrollment
| of 7.1 _million_ students (distance learning) and National
| University of Bangladesh about 2 million (affiliate
| colleges). Iran 's Islamic Azad university system has ~1m.
|
| The US also has a long list of much bigger
| universities/university systems. E.g. SUNY, Cal State,
| University of Phoenix, UC, UNC all have more than 200k
| students each.
|
| So I'd imagine MIT makes up far less than 1/2000th of the
| student and staff population.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Daydream: MIT instructs its Tenure Committees to ignore any
| articles published (by candidates for tenure) in Elsevier
| journals.
| dhosek wrote:
| There is a move in academia towards omitting the names of
| journals from CVs and a suggestion that perhaps hiring and
| tenure committees should be given copies of a candidates five
| best papers (without publication information) to use in
| evaluating rather than just using a list of publications in
| making decisions. It seems like a much more rational approach
| to me.
| ConradKilroy wrote:
| Wonderful.
|
| "Look at data about use, costs, and find allies across your
| campus who care about issues of equity and openness," Bourg said.
| "This is both the right thing to do in terms of our values with
| public engagement and the right thing to do from an economic
| point of view." - Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries at MIT.
| mncharity wrote:
| Some random bits of context.
|
| This conflict goes back a long time. In the early 1990's, with
| online journals just getting started, MIT was able to insist on
| principles like "anyone physically in the library has full
| access, even if they are not otherwise affiliated with MIT". A
| couple of years later, power shifted, and Elsevier could "our
| terms, take it or leave it". Then three decades, a human
| generation, of Elsevier rent-seeking, and so many people working
| towards Open Access, unbundling, google scholar, arXiv, sci-hub,
| and so on. Societal change can be so very slow, nonmonotonic, and
| profoundly discouraging. And yet here we are, making progress.
|
| For anyone unfamiliar with "author [...] required to relinquish
| copyright [...] generous reuse rights", journals would require
| authors to completely sign over copyright, so authors' subsequent
| other-than-fair-use usage of fragments would be a copyright
| violation. Rarely enforced, but legally you'd have to obtain
| permission. While some institutions sign contracts easily, and
| struggle with the fallout later, MIT legal culture has been pain-
| up-front careful with contracts. Which is sometimes painful. But
| IIRC, we're today using X Windows instead of CMU's Andrew,
| because MIT could say "sure!" while CMU was "sure, err,... we'll
| get back to you... some mess to clean up first".
| dhosek wrote:
| Interesting recent history from Wikipedia:
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELX)
|
| 2019 UC system negotiations
|
| On 28 February 2019, following long negotiations, the University
| of California announced it would be terminating all subscriptions
| with Elsevier. On 16 March 2021, following further negotiations
| and significant changes including (i) universal open access to
| University of California research and (ii) containing the
| "excessively high costs" being charged by publishers, the
| university renewed its subscription.
| antoine-levitt wrote:
| I'm willing to bet the actual reason the transition went so
| smoothly and the library doesn't pay that much in per-article
| fees is because everybody just used sci-hub.
| PopePompus wrote:
| But sci-hub stopped adding new articles years ago. It's
| significantly less useful than it used to be.
| calf wrote:
| They did? Is there any alternative nowadays?
| j_maffe wrote:
| Annas-Archive, Nexus/Z-lib
| mullingitover wrote:
| I wonder how far California could go on its own in destroying the
| journal cartels. They really are a parasitic racket, and I don't
| think the average voter understand how bad it really is.
|
| I feel like one basic ballot measure to the effect of "All state
| funded research shall be released to the public domain, and all
| prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby void" might be
| enough to knock over the first domino, hopefully culminating in
| it being made a federal regulation.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| would that be unconstitutional violation of ex post facto? I'm
| not lawyer, so that question is one i don't know how to even
| approach.
| xbar wrote:
| There are laws that make contract clauses
| illegal/unenforceable. Think right to work.
| levocardia wrote:
| > "All state funded research shall be released to the public
| domain, and all prior contract terms to the contrary are hereby
| void"
|
| That's already a requirement for a huge amount of research.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> I don't think the average voter understand how bad it really
| is.
|
| Unless you're in academia, you'd have no idea. I spent a few
| years in academia while pursuing my Masters. Dropped out for
| various reasons and never had any idea this was such a huge
| thing - mainly because as a university student, you just always
| had access.
|
| I got a small glimpse when I got a job a few years later
| working for a rather large legal publisher and how locked down
| they kept all of their online materials for anybody outside of
| academics. Its when I really understood there was a massive war
| raging about access to this stuff and the publishers trying to
| eek out every penny from granting access to materials and
| research that _should have been_ just in the public domain. I
| didn 't stay there long and had almost forgotten about all that
| stuff until 2011 when it broke into the news cycle again.
|
| You're 100% right, this should really be a much larger issue
| and covered more regularly, it has massive implications on
| research and copyrights. Remember how long the issues of
| Napster and piracy have been in the media for so long (there
| was just another HN topic this week), but this? Not much is
| ever really talked about it - it just seems to linger in the
| shadows, which is depressing.
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