I always wonder why some disciplines are more open than others [0]. As someone in biology: the state of publication is very sad. We have to pay thousands to _submit_ a manuscript, and then:
- get rejected right away, or
- the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or
- we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets rejected, or
- The editor does some proof-reading and publish the paper behide a paywall. I lose all the rights and I may need to ask the journal for permission to use part of it in my thesis, otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing.
Sometimes when I read preprints in computer science/physics/bioinformatics etc. I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family, and we biologists are locked in a prisoner's dilemma because we can't communicate. Then we fight each other and the publication companies are selling tickets for others to watch.
Seriously. Every time you review for a journal and don't ask for a reasonable (say, $150/h) fee, you are enabling their predatory practices. Stop doing it.
Come to think about it, why not copy their pricing scheme? Sure, I'll review for this particular journal for $3000/h---or I agree to review for any of your journals, for a flat rate of $3000/week, even if there is nothing interesting to review...
But really, at the very least, stop doing it for free.
> otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing.
No, you don't, because that's impossible. You might risk infringing the journal's copyright---but the journal only has a copyright on the final article, not on the words you submitted. Maybe that's what differentiates Biology from Physics: you guys thinks self-plagiarization (sp?) is a thing.
As an academic (who hates Elsevier as much as OP, and who has also signed the boycott), I can't agree. If we accept payment from publishers then we tie ourselves into their ecosystem even more.
I personally think of academic mathematics like a giant, collaborative, open source project. Research wants to be free, and there is no reason it shouldn't be. Fortunately (for now at least; researchers are being replaced by adjuncts in too many places) the open source model is sustainable. Universities hire us (at somewhat modest salaries) to teach classes and to write TPS reports from time to time, and to actively maintain a presence in the research community. And grant-making agencies such as the NSF are delighted to have the results of their funding disseminated as widely and as openly as possible.
It's not perfect, but to a large extent (at least outside the laboratory sciences) we have the luxury of simply contributing to knowledge without worrying too much about where our next paycheck will come from. That is one of the reasons why we're willing to work for half the salary that we might get in industry.
For a good model I recommend Discrete Analysis [1], a mathematics journal started by Tim Gowers. It is an arXiv overlay journal, meaning they do not publish articles (even electronically). They have a top-notch editorial board that handles peer review and lends their imprimatur to papers which are hosted elsewhere (on the arXiv, a free preprint server). It's everything that academics could want from a journal, with none of the cruft. If I ever do any research in the area of the journal then I am definitely submitting here. And I will dream of it getting accepted.
As far as practicality goes, demanding payment will invariably amount to refusing the review assignment. I don't have any problem with that, but I don't believe that any publishers will be willing to meet such a demand.
I'm sure no commercial publisher will agree. But there is still a difference between "I will not review because I don't feel like it" and "I will not review unless I get paid for it". They send different messages to both the publisher and the scientific community.
By the way, feel free to provide your reviewing services for non-profit or open-access journal. Just please, pretty please, don't collaborate with publishers who demand to be paid for a service they don't even provide. And point out that is the publisher who is freeloading, not the researcher who merely refuses to work for free.
Can you explain to me why academics will spend their time reviewing journals without the expectation of getting paid? I would never accept work where they weren't planning on paying me
Academics do get paid, and reviews are usually considered part of their work duties.
Publishers have simply managed to externalize the cost of reviews (and authorship) to universities, i.e. to students in the case of private university, and to students and states in the case of public ones.
Coming from working in business it seems kinda weird that they have outsourced not only creating the content but also reviewing the content for free. I wonder why the journals are so expensive when they seem to get a large part of the work for free.
It interferes with a goal of replacing the model entirely. Since it's already clear that academics pay dearly to do this (let alone doing it for free!) it's not clear that the journals add anything but prestige, so anything we can do to eliminate that for a model will allow everyone full access to the literature.
If the effort currently wasted here could be redirected into making research available to all, it would be good for everyone except the publishers.
Academic mathematician here. It does, sort of, but .....
Say a mathematics postdoc is applying for a job, and she works in underwater basketweaving. The two underwater basketweavers in her dream department read her application and can see that she's brilliant. She's developed a new methodology for weaving rattan under 100 feet of ocean without even getting it wet. She has letters from the most preeminent underwater basketweavers in her field. She should be a shoo-in to get the job.
One problem though. A majority of the hiring committee works in different areas of research. One thinks that underwater basketweaving is overhyped. Another thinks that great work was done in the eighties, but all the interesting questions have been solved already. And these people don't put much stock in the letter writers: they have a reputation for writing glowing letters even for mediocre candidates.
And, so far, the hiring meeting is deadlocked until the basketweavers pipe in: Our candidate has published in Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik and Inventiones Mathematicae and Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS.
And now, all of a sudden, that postdoc is getting the interview, because her competitors have only published in Mathematische Annalen and Indagationes Mathematicae. (These are all real names of math journals.)
That was a bit long winded, and please forgive me if it's a bit silly, but the point is that we need mechanisms to compare researchers working in different subdisciplines, for researchers to "prove" to the community at large that they're doing good work. I wish we could eschew these games, and I certainly wish we could ditch the commercial publishing industry, but we compete with each other for jobs, for grant funding, and for fame, and we need to establish some kind of metric for evaluating researchers which is as fair as possible.
It is not perfect; certainly it is not completely fair. But I believe it works reasonably well.
And that's in countries with relatively reasonable hiring practices, like the US.
In Spain it's even worse: for positions at universities there are so-called "objective" scales of assessment, so that a paper scores a number of points depending on the position of the journal it's published in in the ISI JCR journal ranking. Points are added and the top scoring candidate wins.
For hiring postdocs in projects, the PI typically has some more leeway to set the assessment scales, but not too much. As a PI who is hiring right now, I can use an interview or personal assessment of candidates' work to tip the scales a bit (at my place up to 15% of the grade or so, little more than a tiebreaker) but if I get a candidate with significantly more JCR-indexed papers than another, I basically have to hire them even if I think their track record is worse (which is often the case as one can get lots of "points" by submitting tons of very similar papers on an easy-to-publish area). Because doing otherwise is, you know, not "objective".
So here, basically, if you publish in a discipline where JCR-indexed journals are dominated by the likes of Elsevier, you absolutely need to publish there or not get hired, period. When people in my field from more fortunate countries say things like "let's just ditch the journals and publish everything in arXiv", I would agree with them in an ideal world, but in my world they would push my whole country out of the field...
Well, you're talking of a publicly-owned university, and the perception of "mamoneo" and "amiguismo" funded by taxpayer money is, in my opinion, already high enough that I welcome anything that tries to make the hiring system more objective.
Mind you: The hiring policy at Google is that managers don't get to interview the potential hires they will manage, nor have any say in the hiring process. For technical positions, five engineers interview the candidate independently, and submit their feedback and recommendation to a hiring committee that makes the decision. The process tries to be as objective as possible, and the manager has no leeway at all.
That doesn't mean the Spanish system is any good, just that I don't think giving the PI more say is a great solution. The points assigned to "easy-to-publish areas" can be reduced if PIs give that as feedback. A way to evaluate a candidate without the numerical scale silliness could be devised too.
What I am against is the rigid numerical scales. There are always ways to game them (even if easy-to-publish areas can be flagged, which would be politically difficult to do, there is the problem of people who manage to publish almost identical work in several journals, the problem of ghost authorship, etc.) I believe it's basically impossible to judge a researcher's work without actually reading it.
That said, indeed many PIs can't be trusted to make decisions based on meritocracy, as there is the perception you mention and it's often justified. Probably the CVs should be evaluated or at least checked by someone different from the PI (for example by experts in the field from a different country, I think in Italy they do that kind of evaluation for some projects and grants). I just expressed some frustration as PI because I may be forced to hire a suboptimal candidate due to the rigidness of the scales, but what I want is not necessarily more autonomy for hiring, but simply any solution (like external expert evaluation) that will (1) give me the best candidate, and (2) not support the oligopoly of the likes of Elsevier like the Spanish system does.
> we need mechanisms to compare researchers working in different subdisciplines, for researchers to "prove" to the community at large that they're doing good work.
But the acceptance into those journals is decided by editors, with the same thought process of the hiring committee. What makes their decision any more valuable?
Each journal focuses on a specific subfield of math/CS/$SUBJECT, so they can make more informed evaluations on the quality of the research than an expert in some other field can.
OK, but then why don't the editorial board of these journals just get together to do reviews and jettison the ridiculously high overhead of the publishers, and the concomitant games with copyrights and paywalls needed to sustain that overhead?
I mean, seriously, it's 2016. When was the last time you read a paper printed on actual paper?
> One thinks that underwater basketweaving is overhyped. Another thinks that great work was done in the eighties, but all the interesting questions have been solved already.
Then he cites three general Math journals as what the hiring committee can use to rank the candidates, not a journal specialized in underwater basket-weaving.
Do those sorts of differences in early publishing predict later success—say, in attracting grants or top grad students, when you adjust for the benefits of being at a top school? If not, maybe it doesn't matter which is hired, as with the undergraduates so often told that a whole admitted class could be set aside, the next N taken, and the world would go on.
> Do those sorts of differences in early publishing predict later success?
Absolutely yes. They are perhaps the most reliable yardstick for past success that we have available, and past success is the best predictor of future success.
Citation? Also, it's worth pointing out that the question was not "do they predict success", but "do they predict success controlling for pedigree". Ive been thinking for a while on how you might actually measure the effect of pedigree, beyond the identity of university. I believe that the specific research group matters, but that's a lot harder to prove (smaller N, harder to get reliable data about counterfacuals).
That was a bit long winded, and please forgive me if it's a bit silly
It was neither. For somebody not working in science it was a fascinating and very illustrative summary and represents very much one of the reasons why I'm here.
I feel like one step for fixing this would be a pledge by hiring committee members. Say the university of X thinks publisher Y is a burden on the scientific community and as such will ignore everything the applicants have published there (or even weight it negatively). It's never going to happen but these issues need to be attacked from all angles that affect the careers of scientists. Employers, publishers, peers and students.
I strongly disagree. You can't penalize young scientists for playing the game; they pretty much have to.
I believe it is much more appropriate to put pressure on senior, tenured scientists to publish their work in "ethical" venues. It's more challenging to pick a fight with people in positions of power, and of course they can simply ignore you, but their careers aren't going to suffer nearly as much if they avoid some of the big-name journals.
I honestly think that it would only take one or two high class universities to boycott the large publishing corps to bring the whole house of cards down. If MIT and Stanford (for instance) made it a policy to publicly recommend and prefer arxiv etc then it would set a trend that would be emulated by the rest of the universities.
It takes some high profile researchers in each field to start the ball rolling. They are the people whose work others will track down wherever it's published.
The whole publication industry seems like a conspiracy that's hiding in plain sight for anyone to see. Yet it seems to be difficult to get rid of... and yet no one quite knows why.
It's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them.
The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor". The people who boycott the gatekeeping publishers end up with publications with a lower impact factor, so they don't get as far in academia, so they will never end up on tenure review boards, and never get to suggest better criteria for evaluating scientists than their "impact factor".
However, in some fields, people are quietly resisting the publishers by disobeying them, posting their own paywalled papers on arXiV or their personal web sites. I have never heard of a publisher suing a scientist over this. Strength in numbers.
Note that putting your paywalled papers on arXiv or on your website is very often perfectly legal, because, as a result of open access lobbying, many non-open-access publishers allow exemptions for this in their copyright transfer agreements (sometimes under some conditions). You should check with your publisher for details (or look at the specific details of the copyright agreement), and there is a database of publisher policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fI...
(For anyone wondering, the reason why publishers routinely accept this is because they derive their revenue from university subscriptions, and the availability of even a large percentage of non-official article versions online apparently does not suffice to encourage libraries to unsubscribe.)
I forget the exact wording of the quote I want, but it was something along the lines of "It is almost impossible to get someone to notice something if their continued employment depends on them not noticing it."
> if their continued employment depends on them not noticing it
A lot of these reviewers review for these journals for free, maybe because being known as a reviewer for a prestigious journal is beneficial.
But their livelihood certainly doesn't depend on it. A lot of these major journals pocket all the profits from paywalls, and don't pay the scientists who do the hard work reviewing a dime.
If there were a collective revolt, and all these scientists switched en masse to an open publishing system/platform, this scam would end then and there.
Post your galleys to http://biorxiv.org/submit-a-manuscript when you send the MS out for review. Simple as that. Oh, and respond to RFI/RFCs from NIH asking whether interim research products should count in grant reviews (yes).
You will note that there are now clinical trials on biorXiv, and I've been pushing (as a coauthor) for more of them (NEJM & Blood are the only journals worth noting that won't accept submissions that are archived as preprints).
Elsevier is at least as bad as Blood or NEJM, but seemingly lacks the editorial standards of either. They can suck their 35% profit margins out of someone else, TYVM.
Biologists love to quantify things. Even when it makes no sense. Your value as a biologist is your publication record. That is, number of papers in "high impact" journals. Nothing to do with the quality of your output at all.
A tremendous amount of lip service is given to the virtues of publishing in open access journals. Or to using modern technology (like the WWW!) instead of paper. But when it comes to it, do you think those very people advocating change will put their research out there and lose a Nature/Science paper?
It requires entire institutions or governments to step up and determine how their research will be made available. Individuals will not do it. They will not stop climate change. They will not stop old fashioned publishing.
We just had a paper accepted after 11 months. There is no good reason for it taking this long. I wish biology would adopt the publishing practices of physics or machine learning.
Or can't you get a single person to endorse you for a paper in http://biorxiv.org/ ?
Seriously. It's your choice where to publish. you are literally saying "boohoo why can't we have what computer science/physics has" while you reject it.
I have as much sympathy for you as I do for men/women who will never go on a second date with anyone, regardless of how the first went, and then complain about being single. It's your choice, guys and girls.
It is YOUR CHOICE whether to have open biology research. You (personally you, OP) are choosing "no".
----
EDIT: I obviously got downvoted for my tone, but I am keeping it because I think it's "tough love" that will move OP and others to submit to open bio servers.
Elsevier was also recently awarded an "Online peer review and method" patent which earned the August, 2016 "Stupid Patent of the Month" from the EFF [0].
The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me.
What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publishing in so many scientific disciplines?
Its because most PIs could care less about the actual research, but rather only care about their 'rank' in the pissing contest that is academia. The internet should have, and in some more lucrative and distributed areas of the ivory tower it actually has like Archiv, made journals redundant and pointless. Only peer review should have remained. One would naively think this based on the idea that the academy is about knowledge. However, PIs can commonly be vain, narcissistic, and only promoted based on previous accomplishments. These are the people that got through via the random sieve that is modern schooling with nothing but A+s from kindergarten through grad school; they only know rankings and nothing else. As such, a barrier of luck under the guise of effort must then again be invented, this being the journal process. The reason is that there is not enough money for all the grad students out there to become PIS. Publish or perish is not a bug, but a feature that keeps out people from un-well connected labs and PIs. Remember, ~50% of all papers are never read (0) and ~50% of all papers have such large issues with their stats, that they can be considered noise (1). That means ~25% of papers are even relevant to the world in any meaningful way. Couple this with the average time for papers to appear from the submission to 'print' is ever increasing for 'new' authors (2), and you have what could be reasonably considered to be a concerted effort to keep out competitors.
While I agree that some of the blame falls on the PIs, it should fall on the university system as well. My PI recently read his mid-tenure review to our group, noting that there are explicit publishing metrics evaluated by the department which play a major role in his performance review. Things like ranking of journals published in (ref. Reuters InCites), # citations etc. I understand a department's desire for a quantitative evaluation metric, but at the same time as long as this mechanism is in place the system will not change.
You don't need to be an overlay journal to be an open access journal. In machine learning (that maybe is something many here are more interested in than the quite abstract math stuff of Discrete Analysis), JMLR has been around for a quite long time: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/
I don't think it's hard to figure out at all. These journals have something people want, prestige.
Scientists are free to publish in whatever journal they want, including open source. They chose not to. Yes, you could argue it's not much of a choice since their tenure is dependent on publishing in these journals.
Start convincing the people who make the important decisions to stop looking for "Science" and "Cell" in CVs and the problem will solve itself.
That seems so obvious that I have always assumed that the feedback loop is from the likes of Elsevier and back into the pockets of the top brass of the universities. How could Elsevier otherwise keep everyone hostage?
It's purely a cultural problem with life sciences . The problem is how to get way more people to publish in open access journals, so that they become prestigious. Elife is doing good progress with it.
> It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online
O_o
It's a bit more complex than "let's just share everyone's articles out of Bob's google docs account" - from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head, doing such a thing is a massive undertaking and requires buy-in from a lot of people.
The arXiv website operates on less than $1M per year (source: Wikipedia page) and takes care of everything that is needed to disseminate knowledge except for arranging reviews (don't forget that traditional publishers are not actually doing the reviews). In terms of arranging reviews, it shouldn't be hard to do better than the publisher-run reviewing platforms (which in my experience are all incredibly crappy). I don't know what is the budget of review-specific systems like Easychair (run by a company) or the French Épisciences (public project) but it's probably not that much.
Compare these costs with Elsevier's >$2G/year revenue...
arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines. You're comparing apples to oranges. EasyChair is also something to run a conference with, not a blinded review system per se. Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews
If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy and Elsevier can be so massively undercut, then go for it. You'll make a ton of money with your <$1M infra and your low-budget review system - even if you charge only 10% of what Elsevier does. Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information - after all, all the big open-source companies have legal teams, despite their info being 'free'.
If you want to bring a giant like Elsevier down, the technical part is not the difficult part, though it is in itself a difficult project to do right.
> arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines
Yes, you should probably scale the operating costs of arXiv according to the number of papers published. arXiv's reported overall cost is a few dollars for each paper hosted. Compare this with Elsevier's subscription fees or most journal's $1000-plus fees to put your article in "author pays" open access.
> Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews
Yes, an editor, which in my field is essentially always an unpaid volunteer.
> Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information
This should probably apply to arXiv to. Can you show me evidence that arXiv is having lots of legal trouble just because they are distributing PDFs? The only legal trouble I could see them getting into is essentially trolling from Elsevier et al about "their" papers getting uploaded.
> If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy
I do not think this.
I think we agree that, as you say, "the technical part is not the difficult part", but I disagree with you in that you seem to imply that large for-profit publishers are somehow necessary (see your earlier message, "from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head"). Again, Elsevier has a profit margin of 37%, which is ridiculously high, and shows that a large part of the money they take in is a net loss for research. Of its other operating costs, I suspect that lots cover things like lobbying, litigation, having useless booths to be seen at conferences, etc., that research doesn't need either.)
To borrow an argument from https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/why-sci-hub-will-win-595b5...: contrary to most fields of human activity, if large for-profit publishers were to disappear overnight, I'm confident that a self-organized, free, Internet-based way to distribute and review articles would take over very quickly and run at a fraction of the cost. This isn't just speculation: Sci-Hub already exists, works fine, and the main obstacle to its growth is copyright trolling from large publishers, not some intrinsic difficulty.
So, in my opinion, the challenge to replace Elsevier is not technical (as you say), but it's not caused either by some intrinsic need for something like Elsevier: it's just a question of inertia of researchers and of the prestige of journals. Of course academic publishing is hard to do right, but Elsevier is not doing it right, they are simply milking the prestige of the venues and smaller publishing companies that they bought.
I think this is great news. More unsubscriptions are a good thing because (1.) publishers get less money; (2.) researchers in these universities realize that subscriptions should not be taken for granted, in the frequent case where they have never thought about the issue; (3.) these researchers realize that not having subscriptions isn't such a big deal (you can find most recent papers online anyway, or ask your friends, the authors, use Sci-Hub, etc.); and (4.) researchers who don't publish open-access version of their works realize that they are losing potential readers in other universities (and citations, if they care about this).
I would argue that currently "academic publishing" is a misnomer.
If you write up some work you can easily show it to your colleagues or put it on your blog. You can place it on a pre-print server if you are doing science. In my field (design), and the wider humanities, you can also look to Medium.com, theconversation.com, Twitter, a think tank etc.
Once your work is formally published you're rights to show it people have gone. It's quite possible that it will reach a much diminished audience.
In my institution many people haves published in journals that the university has not purchased access too; on a strict interpretation of the law those people can no longer show their research to the person who sits next to them.
"Publishing" can often mean less people seeing it. "Academic validation" or similar would be a more appropriate.
The whole thing is a racket. The public sector has a vampire squid sucking the blood out of it; no single institution has sufficient incentive to sort it out.
There's a real gem tucked in here, not specific to Elsevier, but about corporate social misbehavior and its apologists in general:
> For what it’s worth, I think the “fiduciary responsibility” argument–which seemingly gets trotted out almost any time anyone calls out a publicly traded corporation for acting badly–is utterly laughable. As far as I can tell, the claim it relies on is both unverifiable and unenforceable. In practice, there is rarely any way for anyone to tell whether a particular policy will hurt or help a company’s bottom line, and virtually any action one takes can be justified post-hoc by saying that it was the decision-makers’ informed judgment that it was in the company’s best interest.
Yes, this argument as used against any and all ethical claims is a pet peeve of mine.
It suggests that money is the highest value and to think otherwise is impossible. It is corrosive to the foundation of shared values on which society depends.
Yes, essentially they systematically try to hamper open access to articles while also extracting as much money as possible from the scientific community. As a corporation all of this makes sense because they want to make money, but that is why boycotting is a good response as it will give them a profit motive to stop trying to hamper science.
You should read the article :)
It's very well written and I found it quite informative. I knew nothing about Elsevier other than that I have used some of their textbooks when I was in school. They were very expensive.
The only thing in the whole article that I feel qualified to comment on was his assertion that Trader Joe's mistreats their employees. It must be a regional thing, because the TJ's around here are excellent places to work (anecdotally and based on my long chats with employees, as a frequent shopper).
That said, Elsevier really do take some risks to publish rather good publications. I've met with them in the past and they are very keen on technical authors.
That was eight years ago, maybe things have changed but they still represent a certain quality in my mind. Them with Addison Wesley in the early 90's.
Sorry to hear there are some issues though. Hopefully they will read the thread and make any necessary adjustments, the owners were very nice people.
Could you elaborate on the risks you think they take?
To me taking publications that academia produces, getting them reviewed for free by academia, only to host a couple kilobyte file behind a 25$ paywall seems like a pretty risk free strategy.
The only risk they take is being so outrageously greedy that people will get fed up at some point and stop working with them anymore.
Being the 'middle-man' is not something that 'just happens'. Bringing manuscripts into blinded connection with appropriate reviewers in an orderly way is definitely a value add.
It's not the risks they take (which was your question), but it's an example of some value that they add to the process which usually gets overlooked.
Does this value-added justify their scummy practices? Other middle-men seem to get on fine without doing the bad things outlined in the article.
And academia is already about networking; collaborations, at least in CS and Mathematics, are a big part of research, so finding the right set of reviewers shouldn't be too difficult for editors of a journal, given that these editors are probably well-placed people in the field.
I grew up as the son of a bookseller/publisher, who bootstrapped her own small business in the field. I just get tired of clueless people saying that publishers add nothing of value, when publishers add plenty. I'm not justifying Elsevier's scummy practices, but too many people just flatly state that they bring nothing to the table.
It's both an insult to what publishers do bring, and something of an own-goal: if you want to replace a scummy operator, you have to understand what they bring to the table so that you can replace it with something better. It's identical to the people who scream about Apple and Google taking a 30% cut of app store sale - these people are clearly clueless about business and are shouting to the world their ignorance about what that 30% gets you.
> And academia is already about networking; collaborations, at least in CS and Mathematics, are a big part of research
Academia also has a lot of political backstabbing and competition for dwindling grant money. But Elsevier's role isn't finding collaborators - it's finding reviewers, which is a distinctly different thing. You also can't find blinded reviewers yourself or via known associates, because that takes away the blind.
I'm not sure you understand what academic publishing involves. Academic journal editors are paid a pittance (few thousand pounds a year), and they are the ones who pick the reviewers. So the journal publisher is doing nothing to select the reviewers, and is not acting as a great middleman. The board of editors could do this job just fine without the journal publisher.
Reviewers themselves get paid nothing at all.
In CS, the journal publisher/ conference proceedings publisher does nothing to organize the editorial board or pick reviewers.
For conferences, there are a couple of Program Committee chairs, and they pick the PC that then review papers and solicit external reviewers for help. Once again the publishers have no role to play.
Electronic journals such as Discrete Analysis in mathematics are already doing a decent job of offering cheap open access to articles, and have a solid board of reviewers.
> Elsevier's role isn't finding collaborators - it's finding reviewers
This is also not true. It's usually journal editors who find reviewers. This is mostly unpaid work as well (publishers tend to chip in a bit for editorial board meetings, but that's about it).
Scientific publishers provide very, very little value to the scientific community. The reason why researchers want to publish in Journal X is that it has a good reputation, which is mostly a function of the editorial board's quality standards, and even more so, of Journal X's past publications (often dating back to way before Elsevier or whoever else actually acquired it).
Can be automated 99%. Predict from paper the names of reputable researchers in the same sub-field and request reviews from them. The reviewer selection process should be random / fair.
Maybe they capitalize on that, I'm not sure. Although I had the possibility of publishing with them I turned it down, only because at the time I was way too busy and already had a deal running with Charles River. But mostly because... way too busy.
I guess it depends what you want from a book deal.
Any book deals I have been approached for have never been for financial gain. More like, let's get this stuff out in a dignified way. Elsevier seemed to fit the bill.
Is like I would go to Taschen for Art stuff. Revenue would not be the driving factor.
Maybe they have the cachet of "reasonable competence", but what has cachet are the journals themselves. Books are way less relevant than papers, and their publishers are even less relevant. E.g., nobody cares who publishes Science or Nature.
That depends a lot on the field. At the more philosophical end of my discipline (politics) a good book published by a first-or-second-tier publisher (one of the major university presses, plus the best of the commercial publishers) is a major career progression requirement.
In my part (quantitative, mainly methodology) it's all done in journals and monographs are rare. It really does depend.
I get that in academia there is a standard publication path for thought and insight in the form of scientific papers.
It's a cool thing.
Scientific papers are not everyone's cup of tea though, and somewhat inaccessible (to publish for) for older people or those outside of academia.
Surely there is a middle ground between "JavaScript for Dummies", "Studies in Global Illumination" and "Computation on the modular hypersphere"
Actually, I'll be frank. Academic papers are designed to be inaccessible. Not all, but the majority. I've read plenty in Comp.Sci, and all I can say is that going out of their way to be obtuse seems like more than a fascination. I think it is called "Job Security"
Heck for the longest time, academic papers were behind paywalls that were WAY more inaccessible than Elsevier.
It's a problem. The incentives are for getting published, not getting read. We are somewhat rewarded for producing accessible content in the form of teaching, but anything popular in writing (even if scholarly and read by millions) just isn't quite recognised.
And that deliberate obscurity is a thing, though not a universal one. And that is evil.
In academic book publishing, I tend to agree. These are low profit enterprises. Few copies get sold in all honesty. However, they are major leeches when it comes to journals.
> I have never had a problem spending money on educational material that was way beyond what you can find in public libraries (Internet these days).
Cool story, rich bro. Taschen and Elsevier are actually very good publishers to compare, not because they are "esoteric," but because both many scientists and many artists benefit from public grants. Taschen does not actively work to keep work it publishes from public libraries. If Taschen acted like Elsevier, for example they would be suing photographers for having exhibitions featuring reprinted photographs in public museums.
This is all of course besides the fact that limiting access to scientific knowledge for the purposes of rent-seeking is morally wrong and IMO should be criminal.
The difference between Elsevier and Taschen is that people like us don't appreciate computer science as much as art.
We expect to get everything for free online, not something I can hold in my hand.
Meanwhile I'd love to own an original copy of an Escher and stick it on my wall.
Other people pay good money every month to play world of Warcraft. I'm guessing amortized over time, more than Elsevier charges.
What do you want? Free everything, fine. It's available. Original content that someone worked really hard for and has a stupendously limited audience, but is presented with style and panache. There is that too.
At this point I don't know what I'm really suggesting. I can't say I like $25 paywalls. That isn't me, and I don't have the pocket change for it either.
That said, I do appreciate "known good reliable sources". and am willing to pay a premium.
I think "criminal" is probably a bit much. I'd like to understand the economics first. Nobody buys newspapers any more either. $.25c was criminal too, and look where the news is now.
You are being downvoted because you appear to trust and support a very evil corporation.
In the harsh, cynical world of Hacker news, such aberrant opinions mean you are either
- too naive and/or out of contact with reality to be worth listening
Instead of charging for access, they could be charging for promotion. You could be paying them to review & analyze your work and essentially supplement it with materials that aid in understanding and sharing (and thus expand your work's ability to help and influence people.) They should be help, not adversaries. They could offer publication tools by subscription and knowledgeable advisers.
I can think of a great many buses I'd like to see Elsevier under. Perhaps Google can do some sort of self-driving bus to automatically do it.
Elsevier is a leech on academia and actively work against open access to papers. They run scam journals and try to strong arm university libraries into buying tons of journals they don't want to get the important ones they do.
This is why you are getting downvoted. Elsevier is hated, not loved. People see that Elsevier is locking away knowledge created by others, and aggressively working to restrict the flow of scientific knowledge.
If the Internet and the free exchange of scientific information is good and helps mankind to progress, then Elsevier represents the forces of evil working against this, retarding human progress only to maintain their ability to squeeze money out of the academic system.
Nobody is expecting Elsevier to change, but to be replaced and fade into richly deserved irrelevance.
Arxiv isn't peer reviewed and thus you get a lot of crap on there (just have a look for proofs of goldbach's conjecture). Because the barrier to entry is low you dont get any kudos for publishing there, and the performance of academics in many institutions is essentially based on the kudos they get for publishing in big journals.
Fortunately, many fields also have fully open-access journals and conferences which provide the prestige without making your papers hard to access. (In my field, e.g.: the ICDT conference, IJCAI, ICALP, LICS; the LMCS and JAIR journals.)
The reason why these haven't completely taken over is because prestige has a lot of inertia, and publisher-run titles retain their prestige (and still attract quality submissions and reviewing). But it's not true that you have to publish with closed-access publishers to get reviews and prestige.
Thanks for clarifying. I guess ML community is different though, even conference cannot keep up the pace of development, journal would be way too slow. But that might not be case for other domains.
While I very much abhor the practices of Elsevier, one has to be really careful how one acts to push back. Even without getting into the result that not interacting with Elsevier has on careers in the biomedical sciences, it's easy to fall into traps with other publishing firms. For instance, PlosOne is a pay-to-publish "alternative". However, the motivations here are backwards. PlosOne makes money for each accepted publication and thus limits their motivation to do serious peer review. I'm not saying that means PlosOne articles are necessarily bad, the very nature of their publishing model suggests something could be wrong - and it's pretty hard to get recognition for publications through them. I personally prefer when the professional organizations, like APS, handle their own mainstream of publishing. The Phys Rev journals have a strong motivation to promote the best research, because it speaks well of the industry overall, but because they are beholden to their membership, they are less likely to promote the kind of unethical practices used by Elsevier.
> Even without getting into the result that not interacting with Elsevier has on careers in the biomedical sciences...
The author of the article addresses this concern in the "What you can do" section. He says he's noticed no ill effects from avoiding Elsevier journals and that most people are likely to have the same experience.
As for PLOS ONE's business model, it's possible that it sets up some perverse incentives, but fortunately there are choices other than PLOS ONE if this model bothers you.
If it really is impossible for you to avoid publishing in an Elsevier journal, that's fine, but anybody who can avoid it should for the reasons presented in this article.
What are the other choices? PLOS ONE is the only open-access journal I know of that has a good reputation, isn't limited to a narrow field, and isn't just a trash-heap of unpublishable nonsense.
This reputation, at least, is an incentive for them to do good peer review.
Scientific Reports (http://www.nature.com/srep/) is pretty broad and is open-access. Some really good articles have been published there over the past few years.
Broad is part of the problem. It's very difficult to get qualified reviewers when you haven't narrowed the scope. One of the primary problems with PLOS ONE is that it exasperates problems already seen in other journals that cover too much. Why would you expect a specialist in awake single neuron experiments to be able to review and MRI study? Sure, there are some really good people out there, but for the most part, such reviews are going to be arbitrary.
Again, journals run by professional groups are a terrific way to avoid both the bad behaviour of Elsevier and the apparent pay to play that shows up with PLOS ONE.
This essentially happend in the linguistics field. The Elsevier journal "Lingua" has been abandoned in favour of Glossa. However it took the Lingua editorial board resigning en masse to really make this happen.
Even after this, Lingua is still going fairly strong. Completely dropping a journal requires some researchers to go against their own interest (publishing in a worse journal or not at all).
Universities should just collaborate by banning their researchers from publishing to unserious journals and conferences. Problem solved and researchers no longer face a difficult dilemma.
If universities (and on a higher level, governments funding universities) demanded that all research be publicly accessible, that would surely also hurt Elsevier et.al.
It's a collective action problem. Some of most prolific publishers are early career academics who need to make tenure, and tenure committees are looking for easy metrics (like "impact factor"). Choosing to publish in a less prestigious journal because it is better behaved can have real negative consequences if you are in a minority.
Yes, and one that, while I agree it's not easily solvable by academia, should be easily solvable by governments, who fund practically all of the research that gets published in Elsevier's journals (and those of all the other major publishers). So my real question is not why academia hasn't solved this problem (some fields, such as math and physics, basically have, with arxiv.org), but why governments haven't.
Effectively, this is a safe move for tenured professors, but not a safe move for anyone else, which represents the vast majority of active publications these days.
Yeah, but sadly, many tenured academics are not making any such moves either... There is definitely a "pyramid scheme" problem where the need to publish in unethical venues survives because of the needs of non-tenured academics, but it's not the entire story.
Add to this the fact that most reviews are probably performed by tenured academics, so if all of them refused to review for unethical venues, it would have a lot of impact. I don't think unethical venues would survive if only non-tenured researchers published there.
"Pyramid Scheme" is a fairly apt phrase for academic careers. However, it's not true that reviews are mostly done by tenured faculty. I never ranked above post-doc and I reviewed several papers.
I think the real reason for the incredible inertia in the academic world has more to do with the level of competition for jobs. When moving from one stage of your academic career to the next regularly puts you into competition with a couple hundred others for a single position, you look for every advantage. The practical effect of this is that one can easily spend a decade or two of life after college putting in 60-80 weeks as a standard. When you have to be that focused, it's hard to put energy and time into changing the system.
The point is not that Elsevier Journals are bad Journals. They aren't. However, Elsevier is a bad publisher, and publishing in these journals enables Elsevier. The author then continues to argue there is actually little personal cost in avoiding Elsevier journals.
- get rejected right away, or
- the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or
- we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets rejected, or
- The editor does some proof-reading and publish the paper behide a paywall. I lose all the rights and I may need to ask the journal for permission to use part of it in my thesis, otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing.
Sometimes when I read preprints in computer science/physics/bioinformatics etc. I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family, and we biologists are locked in a prisoner's dilemma because we can't communicate. Then we fight each other and the publication companies are selling tickets for others to watch.
[0]: http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-...