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Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

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Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#51

Post by remus »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #24

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 publi…

It's getting there, though admittedly some fields are more advanced than others.

Maths and physics are pretty good examples. You have https://arxiv.org/ for open access to pre-prints and overlay journals are starting to gain a little traction, for example http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#52

Post by vacri »

j-pb wrote: post #14
socmag wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#53

Post by remus »

eva1984 wrote: post #48

What value does Elsevier provide comparing to something like arxiv.org? Just curious.

Basically, reputation.

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.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#54

Post by Balgair »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #24

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 publi…

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.

(0) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studi...

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4533968/

http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematics-of-science-s-brok... (good overview of the issues)

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#55

Post by a3_nm »

rspeer wrote: post #46
devoply wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.)

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#56

Post by a3_nm »

vacri wrote: post #49
dkarapetyan wrote: post #24

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 publi…

> 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…

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...

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#57

Post by a3_nm »

remus wrote: post #53
eva1984 wrote: post #48

What value does Elsevier provide comparing to something like arxiv.org? Just curious.

Basically, reputation. 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.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#58

Post by a3_nm »

grigjd3 wrote: post #18
lordnacho wrote: post #11

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?

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.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#59

Post by bcook »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #32
godzillabrennus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would assume universities exist to perform logical value in society.

Universities do exist to add value to society through education and dissemination of information. Seems like a pretty clear charter if you ask me.

Don't some universities exist to make money?

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#60

Post by a3_nm »

jack1243star wrote: post #43

My alma mater will drop subscription to Elsevier in 2017, stating that they have been increasing the fee 4% each year.

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).
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