Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/01/public-sphere-v-elsevier.html
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Good for them.
“closed access or author-fee publication” - the second part needs mention. As a response to public outcry against paywalled research, the top journals (including Nature) have created open access journals that are free to read but cost $3000-$10000 to publish in. Nearly all of that cost is paid from federal grants. The costs are set based on what they make for traditional publishing plus an OA premium so that they actually make more off open access than paywalled articles. Currently for the biggest journals everyone’s tax dollars go straight to publishers’ pockets whether people get to read the articles or not.
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MacMillan book reps just made a big sales pitch at my school for a new textbook. The book is pretty good, but it has a lot of useful features intended to torpedo the used-book/book rental market. There’s some good to be said about that… BUT they kept going on about how they’re a family-owned business. But, like Nature, they’re a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck. The same guys who made TOR stop selling no-DRM ebooks for a while. The siblings who own Holzbrinck (the brother would be a count if Germany still recognized those titles) are billionaires, and Holtzbrinck brings in close to two billion Euro a year. And Holtzbrinck has been throwing newspapers under the bus one after another.
I got pretty riled-up during the book pitch, and it lasted over an hour. I probably need to go on heart meds now. The above was some of the rant I held back during the meeting. Is there such a thing as "angry googling’?
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