University of California system libraries break off negotiations with Elsevier, will no longer order their journals

Elsevier (previously) is one of the titans of academic and scientific publishing, a wildly profitable and politically potent corporation whose market dominance has allowed it to extract ever-larger sums from the universities whose researchers provide the vast majority of the material it publishes — material it does not have to pay for, and in some cases, material it charges money to publish.

ISP that protested being ordered to block Sci-Hub by blocking Elsevier and government agencies now under threat for "Net Neutrality" violations

Bahnhof is the Swedish free-speech-oriented ISP that was finally forced to block access to Sci-Hub (a site providing principled access to paywalled scientific literature) retaliated against science publishing giant Elsevier and the Swedish Patent and Market Court by blocking access to their sites for Bahnhof customers, redirecting requests to a page explaining why the block was in place.Read the rest

Elsevier buys SSRN

Elsevier is one of the world's largest scholarly publishers and one of the most bitter enemies that open access publishing has; SSRN is one of the biggest open access scholarly publishing repositories in the world: what could possibly go wrong?

Associate editor of Elsevier's Genomics resigns, vows to devote energies to open access

Winston Hide, is an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was also — until recently — the associate editor of the prestigious (and expensive!) Elsevier journal Genomics. In a column in The Guardian, he explains why he resigned from Genomics: people are dying because scientists in poor companies can't afford proprietary journals. — Read the rest

Merck and Elsevier publish fake peer-reviewed journal

Pharmaceutical giant Merck paid science publishing juggernaut Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed scientific journal, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

What's wrong with this is so obvious it doesn't have to be argued for. What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications…."

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Google's AI search summaries use 10x more energy than just doing a normal Google search

Jay Fog / Shutterstock.com

It seems like every company in the world right now is eager to push their large-language modeling algorithms as a brilliant innovation in the realm of generative general artificial intelligence. That includes Alphabet, whose primary tool (and originally namesake) was a genuinely revolutionary search engine that became so ubiquitous that the company seemingly had no choice but to completely eviscerate everything good about it in order to keep making an even more absurd profit. — Read the rest