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Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

insidehighered.com

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Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#71

Post by dmos62 »

dankohn1 wrote: post #8

I have so much respect for the editors who were willing to make this jump. I've wondered if there is some cognitive dissonance between the strong feelings I have that scientific journals should be open access and my willingness to buy and use closed source software (even though I run an open source software foundation). But I don't think so. Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is…

> Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used.

In my view, to think that an individual is the sole author of his intellectual product is a bit egotistic, which is sort of normal given a prevailing culture of "you are what you make". In my opinion, my intellectual product is a product of everyone and everything that's influenced me. An important part of that influence was someone sharing.

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#72

Post by techas »

currymj wrote: post #49
afpx wrote: post #40

Not too long ago, I had communications with Elsevier's technology team, and through that experience, I also spoke with some of their directors. Let me say that the experience was kind of mind-boggling and surreal. My impression is that Elsevier is a company locked into the past by a couple of decades. The leadership that I spoke with seemed to have worked in publishing for a very long time. And, probably because of t…

These were almost definitely not even Elsevier employees. They were editors of an Elsevier journal, but likely were paid only a token amount for their work, and probably not even that. The world of academic publishing is very strange, almost inconceivably so. The publishers push off most of the substantive work to unpaid academics (reviewers, editors, and of course the actual paper authors) but then charge thousands…

> It is a wonder their profit margin is not 100%.

This!

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#73

Post by baldfat »

currymj wrote: post #51
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is fine. Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity. Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money. Simples.

For the most part, researchers would prefer to publish open access, and agree with your stance about public money 100%, but with the current state of things, it would have a negative effect on their careers. You have to publish in certain highly-regarded journals to advance. In some countries this is basically enshrined in law: there's a big table of journals ranked from high to low, and you need a certain number of…

Laws are meaningless though USA has a law but it really just is a hurdle.

NIH Public Access Policy 2008 (Within 12 months the public must have access of all publicly funded research. (NIH = National Institute of Health)

The law is bellow:

"The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law."

The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008,[1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy

Three times Congress has tried to over turn this rule and academic protest keep the law in place. Sadly I still think most don't know about it.

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#74

Post by baldfat »

justinpombrio wrote: post #47
geezerjay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true, but in practice these corporations argue that that particular paper is their copyright, not the research. Thus, just because the general public need to pay to access a particular document, that doesn't mean they are barred from the research.

Researcher here. That argument is bullshit. Papers are the main method for researchers to communicate their findings. They're written by the researchers themselves, who are often funded by taxpayer dollars, and reviewed by other researchers for free . I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks. Which is why you can find…

Former Systems Librarian at a University. My budget was over $80,000 per year just to gain access to the journals. Before this happened we had journals out on racks and boxes with previous journals behind them for as many as I could cram there. Then I had these journals in a backroom which I would have someone go get something for a student maybe two times a month.

Usually the new Journals are not even available in digital for anywhere from 12 to 48 months. So we still had to buy the journals at full price (Looking at you Nature (It's over $100 a month) then pay thousands to get access to journals that would not have ever made a profit before.

Main reason I left the field is Librarian would defend these parasites and bad mouth Open Source projects. I would pay $150,000 for my content management system and portal for version releases and about $40,000 a year maintenance fee. It averaged about $0.50 a year per book to have them in a maintained database and public portal. These systems were absolutely garbage technically (I had to reboot my servers daily according to contract) and the interface was backwards. So glad I left what should have been a position to champion for fair use and equal access but found out that librarian for the most part were the police of copy right and closed source projects. Rant Over

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#75

Post by dnautics »

currymj wrote: post #49
afpx wrote: post #40

Not too long ago, I had communications with Elsevier's technology team, and through that experience, I also spoke with some of their directors. Let me say that the experience was kind of mind-boggling and surreal. My impression is that Elsevier is a company locked into the past by a couple of decades. The leadership that I spoke with seemed to have worked in publishing for a very long time. And, probably because of t…

These were almost definitely not even Elsevier employees. They were editors of an Elsevier journal, but likely were paid only a token amount for their work, and probably not even that. The world of academic publishing is very strange, almost inconceivably so. The publishers push off most of the substantive work to unpaid academics (reviewers, editors, and of course the actual paper authors) but then charge thousands…

It's somewhat surprising to me that someone hasn't proposed a policy (for private universities) or legislation (for public ones) that require professors to be paid to review articles that are not open access.

Currently UC Berkeley is negotiating their elsevier subscription, if I were cal, I would put that sort of a policy on the table.

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#76

Post by JadeNB »

rusticpenn wrote: post #42
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is fine. Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity. Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money. Simples.

Researchers dont get any money for writing papers in those journals, Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals.

> Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals.

Is this true? Most Elsevier journals in mathematics (my field) do not have publication fees. In fact, I think of publication fees as one of the hallmarks of an open-access model.

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#77

Post by JadeNB »

justinpombrio wrote: post #47
geezerjay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true, but in practice these corporations argue that that particular paper is their copyright, not the research. Thus, just because the general public need to pay to access a particular document, that doesn't mean they are barred from the research.

Researcher here. That argument is bullshit. Papers are the main method for researchers to communicate their findings. They're written by the researchers themselves, who are often funded by taxpayer dollars, and reviewed by other researchers for free . I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks. Which is why you can find…

> I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks.

By "some copy editing", what you surely mean is "a blind search and replace that introduces last-minute errors", which is the main effect of this copy-editing that I've seen.

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#78

Post by svat »

pfortuny wrote: post #2

The same thing happened with “Topology”, now “Journal of Topology”. After some years it was bought by Wiley and is no longer free... A journal is not an easy task to manage.

Not quite: see this list of all such journals and events: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_indep...

The editors of Topology resigned over the high price (apparently it was $1558 in 2004: https://pages.uoregon.edu/dps/journals.php), and started Journal of Topology which at the time of announcement (https://www.lms.ac.uk/sites/lms.ac.uk/files/About_Us/news/20...) was said would be published by LMS (in partnership with OUP), and priced at $570. Looking at the page now, it is still published by LMS (in partnership with Wiley now), and I can't figure out the pricing. It is fully possible that the price has increased, but there has been no change from free to non-free. Back in 2006, "free" was not one of the conventional options for a journal. Now it is.

As for "a journal is not an easy task to manage", my favourite article is about the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the leading journal in the field of machine learning: https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#79

Post by Fomite »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #30
geezerjay wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true, but in practice these corporations argue that that particular paper is their copyright, not the research. Thus, just because the general public need to pay to access a particular document, that doesn't mean they are barred from the research.

Which is fine. Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity. Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money. Simples.

So you're down with your medical records being made public in perpetuity for all intents and purposes?

Because if all my data needs to be made available, identifiable health data is part of that.

Re: Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

#80

Post by Fomite »

baldfat wrote: post #73
currymj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, researchers would prefer to publish open access, and agree with your stance about public money 100%, but with the current state of things, it would have a negative effect on their careers. You have to publish in certain highly-regarded journals to advance. In some countries this is basically enshrined in law: there's a big table of journals ranked from high to low, and you need a certain number of…

Laws are meaningless though USA has a law but it really just is a hurdle. NIH Public Access Policy 2008 (Within 12 months the public must have access of all publicly funded research. (NIH = National Institute of Health) The law is bellow: "The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's Pub…

Most of the journals I publish in have a checkbox for NIH/CDC/HHS-related funding, and automatically put things in PubMed Central.

Ironically, it's only the CS/Math-type journals where there's lots of people doing OA advocacy where this is more of a pain because I have to remember to do it myself.

And from the researcher end, if it's not in PMC, I can't claim credit for it on grants.

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