Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

German research institutions boycott Elsevier

sub.uni-goettingen.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 127 posts

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#101

Post by Vinnl »

ianderf wrote: post #89
udp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, so the assumption is that if you have publications in a good one you must have done more groundbreaking research. I wonder why nobody created a single peer-reviewed platform for all scientists to use? Elsevier is just piggybacking on other people's work and funds.

Because there are more than a single one :)

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#102

Post by PeterisP »

ianderf wrote: post #89
udp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, so the assumption is that if you have publications in a good one you must have done more groundbreaking research. I wonder why nobody created a single peer-reviewed platform for all scientists to use? Elsevier is just piggybacking on other people's work and funds.

There are many possible platforms, however, there's a significant network effect since it's very harmful to your self-interest to switch to such a platform before everyone else does and (even more importantly) all the funding agencies acknowledge that this is the thing to look at.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#103

Post by Vinnl »

I wonder if, in a year or two, this will affect the Impact Factor of these journals - i.e. will their articles be cited less often now academics have (theoretically) no access to it? And then a few years later, will this the number of articles submitted drop as well?

(Assuming, of course, that no agreement will be reached at all.)

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#104

Post by Vinnl »

Someone wrote: post #16

No, they don't boycott; they play hardball in negotiations: "The DEAL project, headed by HRK (German Rectors' Conference) President Prof Hippler, is negotiating a nationwide license agreement for the entire electronic Elsevier journal portfolio with Elsevier. [...] In order to improve their negotiating power, about 60 major German research institutions including Göttingen University cancelled their contracts with Els…

By boycotting?

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#105

Post by PeterisP »

carbocation wrote: post #34
Fomite wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps this is field-dependant, but I have never failed to find the full text of a recent paper I'm interested in even if the original paper is closed access - the paper is inevitably available on the webpage of the author, or their university/research group, or arxiv, or something like that.

For classic papers from the 1980s I have to bother with getting the VPN required for my university subscription access to work properly which is a pain, but I don't recall having any issues with publications from this millenium.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#106

Post by jonathanstrange »

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…

Exactly, this nonsense of mostly just counting publications must stop. If at all, there is only a very light correlation (or perhaps even a negative one, who knows?) between the number of publication and the quality of a scientist's research. And what's so crazy about it is that everybody knows this. No one has ever been called a great scientist, because he published many articles. Such scientists may be called prolific, but that doesn't necessarily reflect on the quality of the content.

The same for counting quotations, by the way. This may be different in STEM fields, but I'm in the humanities. In the humanities bad papers are sometimes quoted as often as brilliant papers, because everybody wants to correct the authors. I've seen more than one colleague literally make his career by writing a polemic and obviously wrong book (books=often improper peer review) and then sneaking a few apologetic articles in which they half-retracted their claims past the reviewers. What's worse, I know postdocs who are actively looking for such untenable topics that will surely stir up a reaction. We're talking about theses, conjectures or claims that nobody defended previously, because they are so obviously wrong or flawed. I've also met people at the postdoc level who literally replied "Who cares, it's one more publication" when I raised doubts about their main claim in an article and mentioned that it might not 'work' for purely formal reasons (but adding that I'd have to check, to be polite).

I'm sure it's a bit less drastic in CS and the STEM fields, but in the humanities publication counting almost enforces mediocrity and the publication of uninteresting, pointless papers with vastly overlapping topics - and it's completely obvious that it does so.

The situation is particularly frustrating, because the system makes it harder to publish good science. Good science needs larger studies and/or better formal underpinnings, both of which take more time and more effort than duplicating fake papers about fake problems.

Well, enough ranting for today, you get the point.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#107

Post by bainsfather »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #51
d0mine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the .ac domain has the expected owner.

Lately, sci-hub has been sending me straight to the paywall I'm trying to avoid. I think the lawyers got to them.

Still works fine for me, for e.g. Nature articles.

Is it some particular journal(s) that you cannot access?

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#108

Post by visarga »

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…

> However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access

Scientific domains with open publishing, like machine learning, have a very fast pace and amazing evolution.

Won't biology as a field be affected severely by all this closeness? I think in the long run the whole field is suffering.

Re: German research institutions boycott Elsevier

#109

Post by wedesoft »

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?

ELCVIA is a high quality open access journal without any fees http://elcvia.uab.es/

If you create an electronic document of a few MByte size, 1500$ should cover hosting it for the next 1000 years! The largest cost (besides writing the paper) is reviewing it and that cost is already externalized by publishers.

Post reply on HN