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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

#81

Post by notyourday »

This fight really reminds me of conversation I had with my CEO.

Me: If we stop bitching and start the project to do X, in a couple of years we would be able to do X and the reason for bitching would become irrelevant

Him: You think it would take two years for them to fix it?

Me: I don't know, but I know that it would take us a year to do it ourselves without impacting the rest so in two years we should definitely solve this problem.

Him: Two years is a lot. We have other things that we would be doing

Him: It is so annoying this is still happening

Me: Remember how I said we should do it two years ago? Let's start it now. In two years we...

Him: You really think it will take two years to do it?

The reality is that Elsevier/T&F/Springer etc are providing service that no one bitching about them wants to do.

Journals are just a collection of papers, elected by EIC, produced and owned ( in case the copyright is transferred to the owners of the journal produced for free ) or just produced ( for a fee, in case copyright is not transferred ) and formatted and printed and hosted. EIC gets an honorarium, gets invited to the conferences, events, gets his or her name on a cred sheet, gets to be on panels, etc. for doing pretty much nothing. If the journal is not owned by Elsevier/T&F/Springer/etc the EIC has to a lot more -- especially for journals that have nearly no circulation that still publish 4-6 times a year.

UC and other organizations have more than enough resources to do it themselves. Sometimes they do. Those are called society journals. After a few years of running them societies typically sell them off ( sometimes for $1.00 ) to the likes of Elsevier/T&F/Springer etc. They do it because production is not sexy.

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

#82

Post by dagw »

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…

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.

Elsevier have a lot of products/services other than just publishing journals that they're trying to push. I wouldn't be surprised in most that 65% went to fund those. I suspect even Elsevier sees the writing on the wall is using the massive profits from their publishing arm to try to bootstrap other revenue sources. It's not like the journal publishing side of the business has seen any massive technical improvements over the past decade.

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

#83

Post by bonoboTP »

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.

I haven't used Mendeley in a while. What did they change in it?

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

#84

Post by notyourday »

whatshisface wrote: post #79
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.

Yup. The right question to ask is "Why would the author not do it?"

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

#85

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

bb101 wrote: post #22
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…

The rot starts at the top: https://www.elsevier.com/about/management

Am I supposed to magically understand something from that link? If so, I utterly failed. Mind elucidating?

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

#86

Post by bonoboTP »

tomxor wrote: post #51

Random thought, with fight club math :) - The only remaining value journals like Elsevier have are their giant stash of papers, it's the sole thing perpetuating the whole absurd organization... so: A. How much money do Elsevier take from universities each year? B. How many years will it take for Elsevier to go bankrupt without income from said universities? C. How much money will it take to buy *all papers* from the…

But having public domain papers (eg arxiv) does not advance a carrier in the same way. You need papers in high impact factor journals in many fields to look good in evaluations (at all stages in the academic carrier ladder).

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

#87

Post by notyourday »

plg wrote: post #78
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.

A few of society journals are doing fine. They are funded by the societies and societies either outsource actual production to the publishers for pay but retain copyright ( and strong arm readers into paying for society membership as the condition of accessing the journal or make authors pay to publish in them ) or produce and publish journals themselves.

Publishers make the most of their money by publishing second/third and fourth tier journals not the first tier because in the view of academia someone having access to "Journal of the Society of Librarians" ( circulation : 320 ), and "Cell" has the same value.

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

#88

Post by madez »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
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…

Welcome to coordination problems. Nobody loves them, but short-term, publishing with them is still the optimal move for scientist's career. > If everybody were to just stop, That's the root of all human-created hard problems on this planet; it's not exclusive to scientific publishing. People don't spontaneously coordinate. As long as it's in the short-term interest of any individual to not be the first one to stop, o…

It's not just about coordination. Clearly, coordination would make solving the accepted problem relatively easy. Yet, individual action does solve the problem to a small degree. Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happen, although many people recognize that there is a problem.

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

#89

Post by lonelappde »

cambalache wrote: post #73

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.

Elsevier didn't do this to academia, academia did this do themselves.

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

#90

Post by lonelappde »

mcv wrote: post #33
reallydontask wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.

The sad thing is academy solved this exact problem centuries ago with the tenure system, but academics are still cowards
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