What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem?
Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?
Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
11–20 of 148 posts
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#12For the rest of us, what is the TLDR of what Elsevier is?
They're a large publisher of scientific journals, who have repeatedly been caught behaving unethically.
Note that don't own the most prestigious journals, like Science, Nature, or New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#13Elsevier 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].
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-el...
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#14Without reading the article, I presume his reason is that they are as close to pure evil as a scientific publishing company can get.
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 adjustm…
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.
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#15Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#16What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem? Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?
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.
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#17For the rest of us, what is the TLDR of what Elsevier is?
They're a large publisher of scientific journals, who have repeatedly been caught behaving unethically. Note that don't own the most prestigious journals, like Science, Nature, or New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
They publish Cell, which has a high impact factor. And a lot of their other ones have high IFs:
https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-j...
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#18What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem? Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?
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.
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#19What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem? Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?
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).
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/editors-of-the-journal-lingua-...
Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
#20While 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.