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

talyarkoni.org

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

#91

Post by vacri »

a3_nm wrote: post #56
vacri wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 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.

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

#92

Post by impendia »

brians wrote: post #90
impendia wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the research not stand on its own? 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 let…

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.

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

#93

Post by rrmm »

socmag wrote: post #80
Retra wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alright, Elsevier... As I see it, the reason this article is on Hacker News in the first place is that the community as a whole appreciates your publications. If the paywall is causing some kind of riot it's actually just a projection that people care. So frankly an opportunity to fix and redeem. Nobody wants Elsevier under the bus. That is for damn sure. Really hope you are reading Elsevier. You are loved.

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.

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

#94

Post by Ericson2314 »

impendia wrote: post #88
Ericson2314 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an academic, but I feel like charging for-profit journals for rwviews but not community-driven overlay ones is a practical and ethical policy.

I certainly agree that it's ethical. 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.

Sure. In practice it's just a spin on the boycott.

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

#95

Post by Ericson2314 »

Natsu wrote: post #87
Ericson2314 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an academic, but I feel like charging for-profit journals for rwviews but not community-driven overlay ones is a practical and ethical policy.

It would be in isolation, but it would also make it hard for people to replace that income if they came to depend on it.

Sure. For the near term that is not an issue. Longer term at least the company is offering more of a service

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

#96

Post by taneq »

adrienne wrote: post #85
taneq wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It's Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

That's the one, thanks!

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

#97

Post by sndean »

rspeer wrote: post #47
bumblebeard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

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.

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

#98

Post by Ar-Curunir »

vacri wrote: post #52
j-pb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#99

Post by maus42 »

remus wrote: post #51
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/

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/

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

#100

Post by Natsu »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #95
Natsu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be in isolation, but it would also make it hard for people to replace that income if they came to depend on it.

Sure. For the near term that is not an issue. Longer term at least the company is offering more of a service

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.

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