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German research institutions boycott Elsevier

sub.uni-goettingen.de

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Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#91

Post by hkmurakami »

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…

Could leading institutions come together and create journals of their own, run by representatives from the institutions?

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#92

Post by kriro »

thomasDE wrote: post #22

German researcher here. There are multiple problems with the offer from VG Wort (which is the German association "representing" authors and publishers). One is that they raised the license fee. Another one is that they want to replace the current "flatrate" (where a university pays a fixed sum for the right to copy books or parts of books for education) with a individual billing concept. That means, lecturers have to…

We got a university wide mail yesterday that nothing will change for us due to §52a because of the "settlement" with VG-Wort. I entered mild rage mode because it was written as "great news, everything is awesome" while my personal interpretation was WTF are you doing settling this...more like negotiating with terrorists.

Oh well, this boycott is very welcome. I'd also like to see a consortium that aggressively sues these publishers for breaking copyright. There's many cases of OA licensed material being illegally reused by closed journals etc. but usually it's just "please stop"...ok. At the same time the publishers bring down the law with full force for the most trivial stuff.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#93

Post by vivekchandsrc »

Who is going to build "TheFacebook" of academic journals. Journal publishers have become SCAM artist. Opening countless new journals and charging hundreds to thousands of dollars to get into open access articles or charging millions from institutes. This market is ripe for disruption plus scientific data is going to be the next "refined OIL" in the data and AI economy...

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#94

Post by toothbrush »

mattkrause wrote: post #61
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…

If the F&A is 70%, you'd need to raise $333k to have $100k left for your research budget...

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#95

Post by pelario »

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…

Agreeing with you, and also answering the GP:

The issue I see is that "Academia" is not the same as "the scientists", there is a larger community, that includes institutions, processes, administrative people, etc.

So, yes, for instance, I would love that we all published our papers in, say, arxive, an we were evaluated by the actual impact of our publications (~ PageRank). But that is not how the funding organizations, hiring committees, etc, are going to do it.

How to do the transition from the current state of things to a better one, and not to commit career suicide? That is the question, and that is what those boycotts are aiming to, I believe.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#96

Post by tomjen3 »

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…

Sounds like we need to make it illegal to use government founds to publish in a non open access journal.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#97

Post by JorgeGT »

mattkrause wrote: post #56
JorgeGT wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Couldn't you just require people to recuse themselves from hiring decisions involving relatives? Particularly for early career people, I suspect most of these "quantitative" measurements are basically reflecting where and wtih whom you worked.

> Couldn't you just require people to recuse themselves from hiring decisions involving relatives?

They used to have this nice trick where you hired the son of your friend and your friend hired your son. But at least now there are some non-subjective requirements to be met before anyone can get admitted.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#98

Post by PeterisP »

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…

If you had any kind of realistic measure to identify "important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature" then the problem would be already solved, since all the evaluation criteria could look at that instead of the journal ratings. However, we do not - currently the only actually usable way to identify "important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature" is simply asking "has this research been published in Nature?"

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#99

Post by PeterisP »

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's solved by "publishing" it in an open access repository - so the data is available to public, but all the ratings and citations and relevant rankings go to the closed access journal where you initially published it.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#100

Post by Vinnl »

udp wrote: post #29
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…

The journals have an "impact factor", an arbitrary metric that determines how noteworthy they are. My impression is that very few journals are actually read directly - most papers are found via Google Scholar and the journal they're in doesn't matter. However, in academia, the "prestige" of the journals you have published to is hugely important. Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish, so…

> Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish

It should be noted that this selectivity is not just on quality, but also e.g. on how "groundbreaking" the results are. This results in papers in top journals actually being retracted more often than in others, since they're more likely to be false.

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