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

Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal

insidehighered.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 128 posts

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

#81

Post by Fomite »

JadeNB wrote: post #77
justinpombrio wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've actually had extremely good experiences with both copy editors and layout, including a journal - an Elsevier journal by checking - redoing a figure.

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

#82

Post by Fomite »

avar wrote: post #37

There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open journal. Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which is available in open journals will be considered. You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but making all their backlog available as well to in…

One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual projects.

In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000.

Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000.

That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects.

It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb those costs.

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

#83

Post by Vinnl »

burtonator wrote: post #63

This is awesome. I'm working on something that would VERY much benefit from open access journals: https://getpolarized.io/ With Polar you maintain all your research in one place and can annotate and share with other users. One thing I want to add is the ability to sync up with open access sources to fetch PDFs, get metadata for them, find related PDFs and research, etc. Going to go heads down into this today.

You probably know about it already, but you'll probably want to use Unpaywall: https://unpaywall.org/

It catalogues Open Access links given a DOI, provides an API, and also provides links to direct PDFs (or web pages containing the complete article, if available).

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

#84

Post by walrus01 »

Vinnl wrote: post #60
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…

To be fair, there isn't really anything the leadership can do. The profit margins they are able to attain now are artificial, and anything those in the technology team can think of doing will be very unlikely to achieve those margins. All Elsevier can do is postpone the inevitable for as long as possible, and prepare for the period after that. (Which they're doing somewhat, btw, but probably not in the way those in t…

From a networking perspective, Elsevier is like people running SS7/PSTN phone networks who are suddenly surprised that people are making voice calls between each other using whatsapp, facebook messenger, skype, etc. Anything they can try to do at this point won't help them, it's a fundamental business plan/architecture problem akin to polishing the brass doorknobs on the Titanic.

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

#85

Post by krull10 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #46
rusticpenn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pay out of their research budget with your tax dollars

Not all researchers have thousands of dollars available in grants to cover the types of publishing fees that have become common as the burden of payment shifts from readers to researchers. Graduate students, postdocs or even professors may end up having to pay out of their own pocket to get a publication in a high-profile journal that is necessary to advance their career.

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

#86

Post by jgamman »

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…

Your impression is probably correct. For instance, The Economist magazine's editor is finally learning some science during his retirement[1]. Heaven knows what he thought of their tech quarterly supplement for 50+ years...

I suspect Elsevier's upper management layer is dominated by the PPE set of the Oxbridge upper class.

[1] http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/10/lea...

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

#87

Post by krull10 »

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…

It is also highly debatable whether it is a good use of taxpayer funds to cover thousands of dollars in page charges (which is not uncommon for many journals these days). Think how much money could go towards funding more postdocs, graduate students or researchers, but is instead spent paying page charges to journals...

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

#88

Post by krull10 »

Fomite wrote: post #82
avar wrote: post #37

There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open journal. Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which is available in open journals will be considered. You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but making all their backlog available as well to in…

One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual projects . In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000. Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable), you get $75,000. That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting less productivity from the same projects.…

Exactly, this is a major issue that non-academics always miss when talking about OA. The replacement to charging readers seems to have become a shift of costs to researchers, with an expectation they'll have lots of grants that are willing to pay huge publishing fees.

The only effective way I see to get around this is for granting agencies to start putting massive caps on what they are willing to pay for journal articles. If they mandate $200 max per article, no one is going to be able to afford a $5000 article anymore. Journals would be forced to adapt.

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

#89

Post by a3_nm »

specialp wrote: post #54
ArtWomb wrote: post #25

Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques recently published a breakdown of their costs hosting an open journal. Approx. $100 per annum ;) http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html

Last year they published a grand total of 8 articles with the editorial staff doing the copy-editing, and web work for free. It is nice they are doing this but it isn't indicative of the cost of hosting/peer review/copy-editing more substantial journals.

As for "peer review", this has no cost: reviewers are not paid.

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

#90

Post by JadeNB »

Fomite wrote: post #81
JadeNB wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've actually had extremely good experiences with both copy editors and layout, including a journal - an Elsevier journal by checking - redoing a figure.

That's good to hear! It's probably my own fault for having fairly complicated TeX code for my files, but it's still frustrating.
Post reply on HN