Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by vanderZwan » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 12:31 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #91

jgamman wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Great piece, deserves an HN submission all its own. Of course, that has to be weighed against the productivity cost associated with encouraging people to visit Derek Lowe's blog for the first time...

Just don't mention the "Things I Won’t Work With" category and they'll be mostly fine

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

#102

Post by robertwalsh0 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 12:40 AM UTC

Making academic journals more accessible is a problem that I’ve been working on the last few years with my project, Scholastica. We provide software that allows journals to manage their entire toolchain from peer-review to publication.

Homepage

https://www.scholasticahq.com

Two journals that use our software: https://www.surveypractice.org (OA journal published by American Association for Public Opinion Research)

https://discreteanalysisjournal.com (arxiv overlay journal started by Fields Medal winner Tim Gowers)

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

#103

Post by dougmccune » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 12:44 AM UTC

apo wrote: post #95

The board's letter is linked in the article. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-... There appear to have been multiple complaints: 1. Ownership of the journal is non-negotiable. 2. Article Publishing Charges (APC) are non-negotiable. APC is the charge paid by an author to get an article published under the journal's current Open Access policy. 3. Unwillingness to participate in an initiative…

> The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost.

I know you're asking about the full cost including the time of the people working for free, which you're right, is an impossible number to get. But I fail to fully see your point. The new journal that's going to be run by MIT Press isn't going to start paying editors and reviewers any differently than Elsevier (meaning not paying them).

To answer one of your questions, the article mentions they are indeed going to try to charge less for APCs ($600-800 instead of $1,800), and they're going to be fully OA, but those are the only major changes.

But to part of your question about the cost of publishing, PLOS publishes their financials [1], as does eLife [2]. eLife published 1,307 papers in 2017 and had total expenses of 5.3m GBP (~6.9m USD) for an average per-article expense of $5,244. PLOS published ~27,000 articles in 2016 [3] and had total expenses of $42.8m USD for an average per-article expense of ~$1,500. These of course aren't apples to apples comparisons, since what they're trying to do with this journal isn't the same as what PLOS does or what eLife does. But I think those are some good ballparks to understand what the range kind of looks like.

[1] https://www.plos.org/financial-overview

[2] https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-repor...

[3] https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-Update-2016-online.pd...

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

#104

Post by dougmccune » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 1:38 AM UTC

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.…

Your lab only has to pay grad students $7,500 a year? Seems like that might be the number that’s out of whack in the equation. To be fair, I live in the Bay Area, where $7,500 only gets you like 3-4 months rent.

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

#105

Post by dnautics » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

skwb wrote: post #94

dnautics wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just Berkeley, but the entire UC Library system including fairly large university campuses, making it one of the largest university libraries in the world.

Thanks for the clarification!!

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

#106

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 4:27 AM UTC

bertil wrote: post #32

globuous wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, github does too. Some projects have 0 stars, some have 16k; some have 0 contribs, some have thousands; some have no forks, some have hundred. You know what I mean ? All these variables are a pretty good measure of recognition, I check them every time I add dependencies to my projects. And just like any other measure, it isn't perfect and is hackable in ways I haven't imagined yet. Forks are similar to citatio…

The number of stars on GitHub is significant because most people whose opinion you’d care about are on GitHub, they wouldn’t star project that they were not interested in and there aren’t widespread fake accounts. I don’t believe that there is an equivalent in academia, one that would capture the h-index dynamic (copied by PageRank) that a star from a prestigious professor is worth a lot more. It’s trivial to build,…

You've made an argument for looking through the projects which people whose opinion you care about have starred, not an argument for why GitHub stars are significant. Simply looking at number of stars doesn't provide you with much meaningful information.

It's also worth considering when someone starred a project. In my experience, people don't usually won't go and update their old stars, so it shouldn't be taken as endorsement. You don't know what state the project was in at the time it was starred. It's common for project to evolve over time, and it's not always for the positive.

The significance of starring a project is also poorly defined. Many people use GitHub stars as a form of bookmarking. You generally don't know the reason why someone starred a project. For example, just because someone has starred a library doesn't mean that they'd use it in production.

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

#107

Post by xiaodai » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 4:56 AM UTC

If you have the means to do so, can I suggest you sponsor one paper that you like to support for open access? It's $600m, which is a significant sum, but if you feel that your career has been helped in a significant way by research performed by others that freely available to you, and if you have the means to do so, this would be a good way to start giving back to the community. Now I just wonder if any of the journals allow such individual contributions.

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

#108

Post by owenversteeg » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #84

Vinnl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So what do you do if you're Elsevier then? Do you try to pivot? Do you try to fight to hang in there? Do you give up and spin down the company?

I really wonder, especially because they're so old (around since 1880) and so profitable (37% profit margin!)

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

#109

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

dougmccune wrote: post #104

Fomite wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Your lab only has to pay grad students $7,500 a year? Seems like that might be the number that’s out of whack in the equation. To be fair, I live in the Bay Area, where $7,500 only gets you like 3-4 months rent.

^For a year. Which is still a significant loss, but yeah.

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

#110

Post by simula67 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

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…

Kodak and Fujifilm faced a similar dilemma when digital photography emerged. Fuji adapted while Kodak collapsed. But there market forces where at work.

Usually when a company faces issues like this it is very difficult to adapt because existing power structures within the company benefits from the status quo. Usually you need an external force to destabilize the existing system. It has been discussed here on HN that this is very difficult to do in scientific community because of the network effects of scientific publishing : more scientists publishing in currently established journals gives other scientists incentives to publish in the same established journals for the sake of reputation.

Reputable editors starting a new open access journal could improve this situation