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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

#121

Post by HelloNurse »

socmag wrote: post #50
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…

Seriously why all the down votes. I'm saying this is a prestigious publication company with very low distribution. What would you do if your revenue didn't meet your principles? Maybe a Kickstarter? I'm pretty sure these guys are doing what they can. Why don't you ask them?

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

- trolling, and not to be encouraged

- a shill writing on behalf of Elsevier

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

#122

Post by Intermernet »

kriro wrote: post #111
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…

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 an…

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.

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

#124

Post by midgetjones »

devoply wrote: post #41
nacc wrote: post #39

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 g…

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.

I'd call it a racket.

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

#125

Post by torrent-of-ions »

nacc wrote: post #39

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 g…

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.

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

#126

Post by jimmytidey »

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.

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

#127

Post by mrkgnao »

euyyn wrote: post #103
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…

> 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.

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

#128

Post by lisper »

mrkgnao wrote: post #127
euyyn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

#129

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

impendia wrote: post #82
matheusmoreira wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering why submitting papers to these journals is necessary. Does the research not stand on its own? > I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family I feel the same way. ArXiv accepts submissions from any registered researcher¹ and it seems so much easier. ¹ https://arxiv.org/help/submit

> 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…

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...

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

#130

Post by tdb7893 »

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.

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
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