Bookmarked Zero Value Added by Cory Doctorow

Elsevier: “It’s illegal to Sci-Hub.” Also Elsevier: “We link to Sci-Hub all the time.”

Cory Doctorow

A full decade ago I heard a very interesting talk by an Elsevier employee who had thought long and hard about ways in which a scientific publisher can be relevant again, since their original function of multiplication and distribution has become completely obsolete. It was a very good talk diving into what a scientist needs from the start till the end of her career, and what type of services Elsevier could offer.

A year later that person didn’t work there anymore and in subsequent years in meetings with e.g. the European Commission all I heard from them was delaying tactics to please let them go on a bit longer without changing, before making open access publishing completely mandatory as well as free availability of any and all publicly funded research.

Since then the Elseviers of this world, and even ‘innovations’ like JSTOR, have betrayed their original purpose of multiplication and distribution exchanging it for an extortionist business model, that not only is a huge financial drag on many universities that have tax money to spend but also completely exclude all scientists around the world that cannot afford the rent-seeking practices of these publishers. They add zero value. They need to go.