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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

#141

Post by euyyn »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #129
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…

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 ty…

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.

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

#142

Post by lisper »

dagw wrote: post #132
lisper wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When was the last time you read a paper printed on actual paper? I know it's not what you meant, but I almost always print out papers before reading them.

Yes, I should have said: when was the last time you read a paper in a bound journal printed by a publisher?

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

#143

Post by inimino »

tdb7893 wrote: post #134
lultimouomo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because they are entrenched, they publish all the "prestigious" journals, and academics haven't collectively walked away yet.

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

#144

Post by inimino »

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.

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.

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

#146

Post by inimino »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #104

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…

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.

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

#147

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

euyyn wrote: post #141
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ty…

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 position…

Yes, that's a very good point.

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.

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

#148

Post by grigjd3 »

a3_nm wrote: post #58
grigjd3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

"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.

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