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German research institutions boycott Elsevier

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Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#31

Post by Fomite »

BeetleB wrote: post #25
mattkrause wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature , Science , Cell , and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless…

>However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. Isn't it a requirement that all NIH funded work must be published as open access?

It is, but it's after a time. It's not actually weakly enforced - we've been told we can't take credit for publications on grant reports if they're not in PMC.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#32

Post by anton_tarasenko »

Professors don't care about high prices. Universities pay for subscriptions. The pricing is political in Europe where education is funded by the public. US universities pass high prices over to students. Students pay with debt since good universities have oversupply of applicants anyway.

Elsevier had been buying academic journals for decades. A typical scheme is like Cell's story.

A professor establishes a journal under a big university's publishing arm. Then the professor thinks how to make money. Elsevier makes an offer and the professor accepts it. The journal becomes the property of Elsevier and the editors keep reviewing papers for free because it's good for their CVs.

Looking at older HN posts[1], Elsevier becomes another Comcast. That said, boycotts have not reversed the Group's profit trend.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=elsevier&sort=byPopularity&pre...

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#33

Post by Fomite »

mattkrause wrote: post #17
hannob wrote: post #4

The thing is, scientists have a much more powerful tool to stop bad publishers: Don't give them your texts. And maybe even more important: Don't demand from your applicants that they have published in high impact journals from the very same publishers that make your life hard. That might really change things. Everyone has been complaining about Elsevier for years now. They still have publications and they still seem…

I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature , Science , Cell , and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless…

This. The biggest and most meaningful way to do this would be for people sitting on search committees and tenure/promotion committees to say publicly that candidates wouldn't be punished for deliberately publishing in OA journals.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#34

Post by carbocation »

Fomite wrote: post #28
carbocation wrote: post #18

People want to publish in high-impact journals. Aside from name recognition (Nature, Science, New England Journal, etc), impact factor and similar metrics drive where people want to publish. If you really want to strike at a particular journal or family of journals, you could work to convince academics not to cite articles in those journals. Since all these metrics are some variant of (inward citations)/(publications…

Yeah, I'm not going to back messing up using evidence in scientific papers to strike back at a journal publisher.

By restricting access to the material whose copyright is owned by a journal publisher, this is what Germany is doing, to a degree.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#35

Post by mattkrause »

BeetleB wrote: post #25
mattkrause wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature , Science , Cell , and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless…

>However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. Isn't it a requirement that all NIH funded work must be published as open access?

Not quite. You have to deposit a copy of the manuscript in PubMedCentral within a year of publication. Some journals let you deposit the final pdf (or even do it for you). Others restrict you to an unformatted "final draft" (i.e., the last thing you submitted to the journal).

However, this is still tagged with the source journal, so it doesn't really get you around the career-related issues.

Public Access guidelines: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#36

Post by mattkrause »

Fomite wrote: post #31
BeetleB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. Isn't it a requirement that all NIH funded work must be published as open access?

It is, but it's after a time. It's not actually weakly enforced - we've been told we can't take credit for publications on grant reports if they're not in PMC.

Don't you need to include the PMC ID number for each paper on the progress report/renewal? I vaguely remember doing something like this for our last one....

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#37

Post by JorgeGT »

Fomite wrote: post #33
mattkrause wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature , Science , Cell , and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless…

This. The biggest and most meaningful way to do this would be for people sitting on search committees and tenure/promotion committees to say publicly that candidates wouldn't be punished for deliberately publishing in OA journals.

Nobody punishes you for publishing in OA journals, what matters is the IF and JCR rank of the journal, not if it's OA or not.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#38

Post by mattkrause »

dv_dt wrote: post #21
mattkrause wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature , Science , Cell , and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless…

It is interesting to separate the review from the storage/access portions of scientific publishing. Bind the prestige to the review board, not the publisher. Once you have open access, there's nothing stopping academics from forming an independent review board organization which then provide some form of stamps of approval; paper A from It seems like it would be a good organizational excuse to stay in touch with peer…

Have you heard of Faculty Of 1000 (f1000.com)?

It sorta does that. The "faculty" submit 1-2 paragraph blurbs describing papers. The blurbs often point out the strengths and weaknesses of each paper and give a brief description of how it fits into the broader literature. If you can find a couple of people on there with similar research interests, it can be a great way to get up to speed on something.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mattkrause wrote: post #17
hannob wrote: post #4

The thing is, scientists have a much more powerful tool to stop bad publishers: Don't give them your texts. And maybe even more important: Don't demand from your applicants that they have published in high impact journals from the very same publishers that make your life hard. That might really change things. Everyone has been complaining about Elsevier for years now. They still have publications and they still seem…

I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature , Science , Cell , and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless…

> none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access

Is this solely a product of network effects? Or could there be some truth to the top journals' ability to organise the review process?

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#40

Post by mattkrause »

JorgeGT wrote: post #37
Fomite wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The biggest and most meaningful way to do this would be for people sitting on search committees and tenure/promotion committees to say publicly that candidates wouldn't be punished for deliberately publishing in OA journals.

Nobody punishes you for publishing in OA journals, what matters is the IF and JCR rank of the journal, not if it's OA or not.

If you find an OA journal with cachet matching Nature or Science, I would be happy to submit stuff there. As far as I know, there's nothing even particularly close.

In other words, I doubt anyone is explicitly penalized for submitting to PLoS Biology instead of Journal of Neuroscience. However, there is an implicit penalty for not submitting to Nature/Science/Cell.

[As an aside, I really hate the obsession with IF and all these other "quantitative" measures of research quality. They're all incredibly ad-hoc, someone easily game-able, and yet otherwise-smart people take them so seriously.]

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