On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 11:59 PM, Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF) <[email protected]>
wrote:
One of the dangers in this type of discussion is to confuse people with
organizations. Alicia is an employee of Elsevier and her role in "Universal
Access" - whatever than means - is ultimately to promote the profitability of
the company.
Which is what she is doing on this list. I won't impute her motives and I can
only guess at the corporate policy instructions she may or may not have to
adhere to. I also have no idea whether she has any power to change anything - I
suspect not. She has written about me:
Â
Peter M-R â You are frustrated by, and distrust, publishers.Â
I trust publishers about as much as I trust other organizations in parallel
markets. So I compare Elsevier to Microsoft and - yes - I trust Elsevier as much
as I trust Microsoft. They are out to dominate the market (nothing immoral or
illegal about that) and they use whatever business tools are legal (and
occasionally overstep - but most companies jut about obey the law).
So yes, I generally trust Elsevier to obey the law and to maximize profits.
I've had 3 intense years with helpful employees of Elsevier - like Elsevier -
and I trust them to keep the discussion going, keep things complicated,
introduce delaying tactics, appeal to our better natures, etc. The last in
particular. We academics actually like to look for the good in others and we
don't like to cause problems. We're not actually very good at business - in fact
we are lousy. Which is why we have meaningless contracts with publishers, and
why we don't lobby in an an aggressive way.
Despite this it may still be more practical to work with us to
evolve the current system into one more to your liking than to
create a completely new one.
15 years of more under Elsevier hegemony doesn't excite me for another 15.
Â
 Either way we agree absolutely that content mining is essential to
advance science, but perhaps will need to agree to disagree (at
least for the time being) about the best tactics to enable this to
happen more broadly.
Yes - I want it to happen know and you - quite rightly for your shareholders -
want to delay and obfuscate and trivialise and Balkanise. That's what any good
company would do in your position. The main trouble is that up to now it's been
possible to do this behind the scenes with confidential contracts with
librarians. I'm not keen on that and I intend - in so far as individuals can do
it - to make sure that this is as public an issue a possible.Â
I'll be writing about some of this on my blog over the new few days.
Â
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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