And I am only half-kidding.
The publishers are very comfortable with the high prices they are able to charge the quite expensive American universities.
Every one I've seen requires login, and usually university membership for the good stuff.
Why? Just use Genesis
His addressees were members of the editorial board. Surely the editorial board should be accustomed to reading lengthy prose?
Now, writing a 14-page letter, of a quality that matches published articles, is what's wild to me.
Just a different media ;)
You really cannot understand why Donald Knuth would expect the editorial board of The Journal of Algorithms to read his letter?
[1] And nobody will read it, and everybody agree even the publisher. The publisher want to increase the price anyway, and everyone else want a cheaper journal.
Bottom line up. Ususally what you need the other side to grok can be summarized in two sentences. Start with that. Give details after. If you have multiple topics seperate them into sections or make a list.
Any message is something the receiver needs to decode into actionable information. Often the receivers don't have any idea where your mind is, so you first need to being them there. The worst kind of message is one where you need to read all the way to the end to even figure out what the heck it is about and then read it again just to get what they want.
Given the topic and my love for Knuth, I went into this paper ready to agree with him. But Knuth does a great job at stating his case.
This sentence caught my eye: "Elsevier, however, ignored my letter and did not reply" - who in their right mind would ignore a letter from Knuth?!
This isn't a defense of Elsevier by the way. The scholarly system is abysmal for publications and it's seemingly incapable of any meaningful change over non-geological timeframes.
But if you keep paying people to do something then they're going to keep doing it. If they stop, someone else will appear if that's the kind of thing you're funding.
What's insane to me is the biggest complaints come from three main groups - scientists, libraries/the universities that fund them, and funders. The content producers keep giving Elsevier content, the libraries keep buying it and the funders keep paying the content producers to give their content to Elsevier. Universities keep demanding academics give their content and their time for free to these journals else they don't get the progression they want.
Elsevier is a nasty symptom but a symptom non-the-less of this dysfunction. Those groups can absolutely change how things are done but the field moves glacially.
Because the broken rest of the system (i.e. financials tied to "how many papers did you get published") incentivizes everyone to keep the status quo.
The entire academia publishing clusterfuck needs massive government intervention to dismantle.
Like a (legendary) middle manager which is in the company since the start and built it up but does not agree with the current business goals of the company. We know what happens with these managers.
[1] https://home.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/s.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms> In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...
How much does the existence of open access journals affect the affordability overall ?
A price of a book is a price of the "data" inside (copyright) + price of paper, printing, binding, packing material and distribution
A price of an ebook is a price od the "data" inside (copyright) and the price of cheaper digital distributon.
So, you save on paper, boxes, trucks, you often also save on retailers (if you sell directly), and you want more money for that? No paper for me, and you also take resale options away.. and for more money?
Just the resaleability is a scam... if you bought it, you own it. If buying isn't owning (including reselling, reading on any device, etc.), then piracy isn't stealing.
I'm sure government regulation could solve both problems, but they're more interested in screwing the "normal people" instead.
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it
for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published
over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked
up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the
most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to
publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but
instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow
anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only
apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been
lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work
of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at
Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's
outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights,
they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly
legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can,
something that's already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you
have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while
the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you
cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with
the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download
requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have
been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information
locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called
stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral
equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't
immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they
operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the
exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light
and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to
this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to
the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to
download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need
to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message
opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past.
Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
:/
EDIT: as others have pointed out the letter is now hosted publicly by Knuth himself.
so, of course I had free access to virtually everything.
It’s not really cost effective to subscribe to an individual journal and the topics across an entire journal are not as focused as you might think.
there’s a lot of irrelevant stuff published compared to your specific research (the purpose of these papers is to publish very specific articles and you read them to help you with your own very specific research.)
Alls to say it’s an odd question because an individual wouldn’t really subscribe to a specific journal, like you would with a magazine or periodical.
Unfortunately, Knuth books are not the most expensive, by far. Sure, TAOCP is about $300, which is expensive, but it is not a single book, and it totals to about 3000 pages, which is 10 cents per page. It is actually below average for textbooks.
In his letter, he complains about articles selling at 50 cents per page, so 5 times more than his "most expensive" books. So for me, it is true that Knuth is "part of the system", and also that buying TAOCP is probably a waste of your money (because there is >90% chance you will never read it...), but here, he has a point. So much that today, many don't even bother paying for articles at all, if it is not open access and it is not on sci-hub, it gets ignored.
American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you.
Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions.
Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this.
To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!)
However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality.
Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it.
Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on.
Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians.
[0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/
[1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset
[2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-...
[3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...
Back then, I had the resources of Indiana University for support. Today, lacking institutional affiliation, I couldn't do research at all - the typical price per paper is $35 from publishers, which is on average something like $2 per page. And why not? They don't have competitors for any given paper, and papers are not fungible.
I'm not independently (or even dependently) wealthy, so I can only do this research using the shadow archives. And the irony of the situation is that the access I get through shadow archives is far, far better than what I had at Indiana University in 1995, where I had to physically go to the library and hope nobody had checked out their copy of a given book, and where I paid 10 cents a page for Xerox copies. (I recently went through my files and found every single article there in PDF online - and burned all the 10-cent pages I'd copied in the 90's. It was ... weird.)
Knuth's right (well, of course; he's Don Knuth, what did I expect?) - the commercial academic publishing industry is holding us all back.