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German research institutions boycott Elsevier

sub.uni-goettingen.de

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Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#61

Post by mattkrause »

anton_tarasenko wrote: post #32

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 un…

I would be surprised if students are funding the library to any substantial degree.

Most research universities charge F&A ("facilities and administration")/indirect costs on sponsored projects. This is essentially a "tax" on grant money that is supposed to cover things like utilities, the library, and so on. While the details vary a bit from place to place (and funder to funder), this is often a pretty sizable amount. Yale, for example, charges a bit under 70%, so if you need $100,000 for a project, you'll need to get the funders to pony up $170,000.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#62

Post by cknight »

blockchain-aes wrote: post #60
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…

Funders are the key to a long overdue change of the academic merit system. Here is a proposal: Towards Open Science: The Case for a Decentralized Autonomous Academic Endorsement System http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.60054

Cheers! Gonna read this. My SO (scientist) and I were just recently discussing the idea of funders as an alternative, but not to any level as detailed as this proposal.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#63

Post by blockchain-aes »

cknight wrote: post #62
blockchain-aes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funders are the key to a long overdue change of the academic merit system. Here is a proposal: Towards Open Science: The Case for a Decentralized Autonomous Academic Endorsement System http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.60054

Cheers! Gonna read this. My SO (scientist) and I were just recently discussing the idea of funders as an alternative, but not to any level as detailed as this proposal.

Great - feedback welcome!

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#64

Post by leephillips »

jmcdiesel wrote: post #23

Forgive my absolute ignorance on the topic - I genuinely don't understand this environment even though I'm interested, so please don't take this as a stupid or inflammatory questions... Why are these publishers needed? What service do they provide these days? It seems their role is similar to publishers in other media (TV, movie, music, etc) that can and have been replaced due to the distribution ease of the internet…

In a sense, the purpose of academic journals is to not have the distribution ease of the internet. The barriers to publication are the main point.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#65

Post by ProblemFactory »

mattkrause wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Pretty much. The review process seems to be about the same across most journals. In fact, there's probably a niche for some journals that have an actual editorial process where an editor actually...edits the prose. Nature/Science/Cell are popular because everyone recognizes their "brand" and associates them with interesting, high-impact science. Thus, it's easy for anyone "Hey, we should fund/hire her because she's g…

It's not just a subjective well-known brand.

Nature/Science/Cell have a prestigious brand, so many scientists try to get their best work published there. The journals get first pick of new research to choose from, and as a result getting published there really is a good indicator that your work is impactful and high quality. It's a network effect that can be broken only if enough funding & promotion committees, or top scientists in a field take a stand together.

Something I have wondered though:

What if we separate the "measure of quality and impact" from getting published in the journals? Something like "shadow journals", that doesn't publish and edit any articles itself. Its reviewers would pick the top 30 new papers published in their field each month, and just publish links to them. If this would get established, it could be used by funding and promotion committees, and the brand of the original journals would matter less.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#66

Post by hyperpallium »

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…

The second one is the hard one, because prestige is the very thing they have.

Something like PageRank (itself a citation-weighting scheme) should do it, based not on the coarse-grained prestige of editor-gatekeeper publishers, but the fine-grained prestige of researcher-authors and the work itself.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#67

Post by denzil_correa »

JorgeGT wrote: post #42
Fomite wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publishers provide three major things: 1. They coordinate the submission of papers, and their dispatch for peer review. 2. They handle layout, typesetting, copyediting, etc. 3. For journals with print editions (of which there are many), they handle distribution. All of those things could be replaced by the internet, but they take time, and they cost either time or money. And I much prefer reading journals with profes…

If anyone is wondering "how much do points 1 and 2 cost?!" the financial overview of notorious not-for-profit publisher PLOS is a good starting point: https://www.plos.org/financial-overview Article Processing Fees for their journals range from $1500 to $3000 per article: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees

> Article Processing Fees for their journals range from $1500 to $3000 per article:

Does it really though? I can say it takes 10,000$ but does it really take that much money?

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#68

Post by alasdair_ »

mattkrause wrote: post #40
JorgeGT wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

This seems like it would be fixable with a fairly small amount of money, relatively speaking: offer something like $250K for the most important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature to instead be published in an open-access journal. After all of the major papers for several months are published in open access journals and the most well-known journals are reduced to publishing only the dregs that are left, opinion could change quite quickly. Sustain this type of payment for a couple of years and I'd bet there would be a sizable number of other people publishing open-access, since to be published in Nature would imply that your paper wan't important enough to be offered the $250K reward.

(Disclaimer: I used to work in this field at biomedcentral.com)

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#69

Post by mizzao »

antennas wrote: post #45
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's a prisoner's dilemma. If you (researcher) defect (publish in Elsevier journals), you perpetuate Elsevier's business, a shitty situation. But it's not as bad as cooperating (not publishing), because there's a chance that everyone else defects and you screw up your career, a really shitty situation. So out of self-interest everyone defects and perpetuates Elsevier's business.

More of a public goods problem (n-player PD).

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#70

Post by a3_nm »

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…

Don't forget that you can also decline to review for them: it should also be quite effective, and it should be quite risk-free in terms of career.
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