http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/the-end-of-tv-and-the-death-of-the-cable-bundle/259753/

The major library you mention, for instance, seems to have struck a significantly more expensive deal than Harvard’s, who pay approx. £2.3m annually for all five major bundlers combined, if I interpret their press release right.

And, being the most well-endowed university in the world, even for them, this is too much.

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/96809/changes-in-arxiv-management

suggests that it may be premature to drop official journals and use a system that is underfunded and partially run by bots? This would seem to indicate that one does need some staff and money and centralized structure is needed to deal with issues that arise. Of course these kinds of problems coud also arise with usual journals (less the bots).

The law isn’t an ass on contract secrecy – I can’t see any reading of EU competition law that supports David Clark’s line about opacity of contracts. Lack of transparency aka information asymmetry is Market Failure 101.

Every authority on competition policy and market failure I’ve come across suggests that the potential collusive effects of price disclosure to the market (because other producers can coordinate their prices with yours) are outweighed by the competitive benefits of consumers knowing what other consumers are paying.

The fact that a company advances different flawed rationales for an anti-competitive practice doesn’t convince me that they are telling the real story.

And thanks for your campaign from the non-academic sphere. It’s very difficult to implement evidence-based public policy making without access to the scientific evidence, and many government departments don’t have big library budgets. If I didn’t have access through my studies, I wouldn’t see many of the articles I actually draw on.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and for the opportunity to comment on your blog. In it you quote a trusted sourced who seriously misrepresents Elsevier’s lobbying objectives in Europe. We are lobbying to ensure that whatever policy is adopted can be implemented successfully, not in any way to remove reference to open access from the Horizon 2020 documents. Elsevier is committed to providing broad access to information, and we deploy a full range of business models. We look forward to working closely with the Horizon 2020 team, as we already work with a range of funders, to successfully implement their open access policies.

Our growing portfolio of open access options is summarized online at: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/open_access

Our agreements with funding bodies here: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/fundingbodyagreements

With kind wishes,

Alicia
Director of Universal Access
Elsevier
@wisealic

If that happens, the back issues would be available to all through Portico, which is “a digital preservation service provided by ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.” Portico works with dozens of publishers, including Elsevier, to ensure the preservation of digital journals should the publisher go out of business or cancel the journal.

http://www.portico.org/

Presumably they paid someone to digitize all those back issues, as I doubt they could interest even grad students in volunteering for that work. Maybe the free access model is backward, and they should only charge for back issues. I worry about similar problems for open access journals, in that they have to have some way to keep the lights on. Let’s hope it’s not advertising.

I’m on the edge of my seat!

Journal of the American College of Cardiology…..After 12 months….1983

that 1983 is when the archive is open back to. Call me stupid, but Elsevier couldn’t have been publishing electronically back then, because _the web didn’t exist then_. Why is this journal available so far back and not others? And from the looks of it, it was or is owned by a society.

Well, let’s have a look at the society’s page for the journal:

http://content.onlinejacc.org/archive/

and we see that the full text, in HTML and pdf formats, is available for all issues from the current one (that’s right) back to 1998 anyway! Why would Elsevier have a moving wall for a journal you can get current issues for free online?

Then here is another one:

Biophysical Journal…..After 12 months…..1960

1960? That’s astounding. It’s owned by the Biophysical Society, who chose Cell Press to publish the journal jsut over three years ago. Let me try to find this journal outside of the Elsevier system…

…why, it’s all on PubMedCentral:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/journals/231/

completely free from 1960 up to December 2011 (four months ago). So why the moving wall, Elsevier? Why trumpet all this ‘extra free access’ when it is already available?

There’s one more, and this is even more surprising:

Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry…..After 12 months…..1990

I go to the society’s page:

http://www.asms.org/Publications/Journals/SpringerJASMS/tabid/413/Default.aspx

and I see that in 1996 the journal started having a one-year moving wall with free content back to the start of the journal in 1990. So far so good. This is consistent with what Elsevier have said. But wait! Elsevier doesn’t publish the journal anymore:

“Publisher
Springer is the publisher of JASMS effective January 1, 2011.” (from the asms link above)

And clearly May 2012 is more than a year since then, so this journal, as far as it is published with Elsevier, is entirely free with no moving wall. And this wasn’t Elsevier’s decision at all. Ironically, Springer has not gone with the one-year moving wall option, with January 2011 papers not freely available. It is then false to say JASMS is free with a moving wall, and entirely outside Elsevier’s control.

So the argument that society-owned journals, or journals that were once owned by societies, cannot be made open before 1995 is completely ridiculous.

In the other direction, included in the list is

Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré (C) Analyse Non Linéaire (back to 1995)

but not

Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincare (B) Probability and Statistics,

which Elsevier stopped publishing in 2008. I wonder why the IHP only moved one journal, and what stops it moving the other one.

One other comment: the Journal of Biomedical Informatics is shown to be open back to 2011, with a one-year moving wall. That didn’t seem right to me, so I checked the journal itself (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/15320464/34), and it is open back to 2001. At some point the journal changed names, but I think the ’2011′ is a typo. Bit disappointing, really.