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What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

osc.universityofcalifornia.edu

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Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#71

Post by mikorym »

dash2 wrote: post #4

Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service. I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu. A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a…

Mathematicians have for a couple of years now started to rely on preprints on ArXiv and this is a successful change in culture.

However, the related problem of research not being read (and the more subjective "not being worth read") is still unsolved to a large extent. My single paper on ArXiv has probably not been read and despite that my MSc reviewer commented that the work is suitable to be published (apart from the MSc) I now have a full time job outside of academia and little incentive to get the paper into a reputable journal by extensive formatting and layout changes or self-lobbying, if you will.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#72

Post by dr_dshiv »

mxcrossb wrote: post #17
dash2 wrote: post #4

Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service. I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu. A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a…

While we’re doing “as well as”s about Elsevier... I hate how soulless the journals feel. Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site. Where is the history? Where is the pride? Instead it looks just like any old…

Which journal?

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#73

Post by cambalache »

It is amazing how a leech company like Elsevier can extract so much rent from the academic system. It is ironic how they trick the academic world offering just "prestige" and getting back not only the exorbitant journal prices, but what I suppose are thousands if not millions of PhD+ level man hours for practically free.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#74

Post by tialaramex »

reallydontask wrote: post #27
mcv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals. If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still w…

If scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month. As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place

It varies a LOT by discipline. There are niches where OA already won and for-profit journals are essentially irrelevant, or even where the entire paper publication mechanism is just a legacy used only for dick-measuring contests and to ration funding - all the real work happens as GitHub PRs, or as mail to a mailing list maintained by some random guy or a Facebook group or something (Warning: Examples somewhat facetious).

But there are also niches where the reality is that key people are happy as Elsevier Journal editors, and they function as gatekeepers, and for the foreseeable future the only route forward in those disciplines will be to get published in those high impact Elsevier Journals.

Because of this variation, lots of people can't do anything. It's a highly distributed problem. No amount of Computer Science professors however prestigious can change how Social Sciences do journals. And we shouldn't want it any different, even though in this case it kinda sucks.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#75

Post by dboreham »

taejo wrote: post #37
lordnacho wrote: post #12

I read a lot of bad things about Elsevier, so who is supporting them? Why aren't editors moving their publications en masse to some free and open platform? You'd think a reputation transplant would be possible if you just took the key people.

This has happened: the example I know is that the editorial board of the linguistics journal Lingua resigned en masse to create the open-access Glossa . My impression from the outside (just a friend of linguists) is that Glossa is generally considered "the real Lingua" and "Zombie Lingua" has become significantly less selective. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=34106

A hard fork.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#76

Post by [deleted] »

zwaps wrote: post #10

Elsevier essentially does nothing but funnel money from researchers to rent seekers. They add just about zero to science, indeed everything they done - which includes absolutely ruining good programs like Mendeley - has directly worked against scientific progress. They are an evil company, through and through.

[deleted]

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#77

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far.

Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something. Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks.

Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else.

This is well proven by the current alternative, Open Access journals: they charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs.

So, for authors, Open Access means going from providing your work for free to actually paying to publish your work. Of course the institutions will usually cover those fees, and they have exceptions for people who can't afford it (payed by those who can).

The research will then be freely available, which is great. But the changeover isn't done with setting up some CMS on some virtual server somewhere.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#78

Post by plg »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

Tell that to math and physics. They seem to be doing just fine.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#79

Post by whatshisface »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

Given a choice it's better for the author to pay for typesetting because once they have, it can be distributed to readers for free.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#80

Post by bonoboTP »

CrazyStat wrote: post #65
kevinventullo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: if you hate Elsevier, why are you submitting to their journals?

It would be optimal for all researchers to coordinate to move away from Elsevier, but as long as everyone else (or the majority) is publishing in Elsevier the local optimum for each researcher is to continue publishing in Elsevier. I know a few researchers who have publicly committed to not publish in Elsevier journals, but there's a career cost to doing this, particularly for early career researchers. Outside of a s…

Why do the well established and well known, successful researchers not boycott it? It could start a chain reaction.
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