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German research institutions boycott Elsevier

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Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#71

Post by a3_nm »

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.

The problem is the following: if there is no established OA journal in the field, you can't distinguish the candidate who "deliberately" publishes good quality work in a non-selective OA journal, from the candidate who publishes low-quality work in the same non-selective OA journal.

The only way to tell is to read the papers and judge for yourself, and this is the root of the problem: evaluating candidates based on the number of papers and the impact factor (or some analogous metric) of the venues is much, much easier for committees, than actually reading the papers.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#72

Post by simonster »

alasdair_ wrote: post #68
mattkrause wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or just make Science OA. Unlike Nature and Cell, it's published by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science). In principle, the American government could just give them money to make everything freely accessible. Or the publishers could ask authors to pay publication fees with waivers for those unable to pay, like most OA journals. Since the goal of the AAAS is (at least theoretically) to publish papers and not to make a profit, the fees need not be much higher than other OA journals. Given the average Science paper probably costs something like $1 million to produce, I doubt the authors would balk at paying a few thousand to make their work accessible to everyone.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#73

Post by [deleted] »

leephillips wrote: post #64
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.

[deleted]

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#74

Post by a3_nm »

leephillips wrote: post #64
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.

I do not understand the point. The barriers to publication (i.e., how selective an academic journal is) have nothing to do with the barriers to access (i.e., subscriptions being required to access the content).

And indeed, there are selective open-access journals, whose content is free to access once it's been accepted for publication; and there are non-selective, crappy journals which are not open-access.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#75

Post by a3_nm »

denzil_correa wrote: post #67
JorgeGT wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of course not. Compare this with LIPIcs http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/lipics -- they have article processing charges of 60 EUR.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#76

Post by angry_octet »

JorgeGT wrote: post #46
mattkrause wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least in my country, I'm thankful for these quantitative measurements, that difficult corrupt practices: Oh, I assure you he's a great researcher, just not in any measurable way. He's my nephew you say? Well, that's not the point...

While this is important, in many fields their are cliques of related researchers (1) on the grants committees and (2) on the journal committees. These people know who works on which problems, so blind review is a farce.

Also, the concept of IF being a proxy for rigorous review and work quality is weak at best. Just read a few pages of http://retractionwatch.com/

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#77

Post by Certhas »

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…

I think the best leverage is with the funding bodies. Declare that all publicly funded papers need to be OA, and this goes away in an instant.

That said, these news made my life a lot easier right now. I was considering whether to accept an invitation to review for an Elsevier journal (which I've usually avoided). Now I'm fairly sure I will not.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#78

Post by Certhas »

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…

We don't necessarily need OA. Nature allows you to publish your papers on the arxiv. If all papers are on the arxiv, and with the journal, the negotiation position of the journals goes away.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#79

Post by brownbat »

a3_nm wrote: post #71
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.

The problem is the following: if there is no established OA journal in the field, you can't distinguish the candidate who "deliberately" publishes good quality work in a non-selective OA journal, from the candidate who publishes low-quality work in the same non-selective OA journal. The only way to tell is to read the papers and judge for yourself, and this is the root of the problem: evaluating candidates based on t…

In a very rough analogy, this is why we have film critics, because we can't trust other institutions in the industry (studios, individual theaters, directors) as a guarantee of quality.

If a panel of respected tenured professors in the field ranked the best works in open access journals each month, or if there was a high profile yearly prize for best open access papers of the year, that could help disaggregate reputational effects from the publication itself.

Bootstrapping this sort of thing is hard. I'm sure Nobels didn't signal as strongly in year one as they do now.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#80

Post by rsfern »

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…

I don't see this as a workable solution. You can't neglect to cite relevant research ideas simply because they were published in a closed journal, and there often isn't an open alternative to cite. I think you really need to have authors stop submitting to closed journals in the first place.
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