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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

#91

Post by boomboomsubban »

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…

>there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks.

I understand why you would think this, but most editing is done by unpaid volunteers. They have 20,000 editors and ~8000 employees. Which means institutions are already "paying" to submit reports, with exceptions for those who can't afford it.

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

#92

Post by lonelappde »

mikorym wrote: post #71
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 t…

Are you sure people would read the article just if it were published?

Fields of math are small and narrow. Emailing people and posting to forums might be easier and more effective than publishing in a journal.

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

#93

Post by lonelappde »

bonoboTP wrote: post #80
CrazyStat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In math they did. In other fields, they depend on funding from government agencies who support Elsevier.

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

#94

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

bonoboTP wrote: post #80
CrazyStat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a tenured professor, so my own position is not in danger if I boycott the likes of Elsevier (salary bonuses and grant money still would be, but at least I could still get a reasonable paycheck every month and keep a good standard of living). But the overwhelming majority of my publications are coauthored with PhD students or young postdocs who are fighting for stable positions, and their career depends on high-impact publications. If I decided to boycott for-profit journals, I would be throwing them under the bus.

In mathematics, most publications are single-author, and I suspect this (plus less reliance on funding to buy equipment) is an important factor why they are more successful than other disciplines fighting parasitic publishers, as established tenured professors might as well fight the fight. But for most disciplines, the lock-in is really difficult to escape...

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

#95

Post by geofft »

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…

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is good for people setting up websites at home, but professional users are going to prefer Oracle."

Much like with open-source software wasn't so much about it being free as changing the development model (you could see the source, send in patches, and have a direct discussion with the engineers who wrote that code), one of the more interesting changes is how much research progress now happens via preprints or even just blog posts. There is definitely a valuable role for journals as the gatekeepers of what research you should pay attention to and the facilitators of communication, but like account reps that insulate engineering teams from customers and help prioritize what's important, in practice they aren't working well enough any more to justify having them.

(And the implication, then, is that this work is hardly menial; you want a person actually familiar with your discipline to triage bugs or sort through preprints. And it turns out you're in a better spot to find or train up those people than the middlemen are.)

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

#96

Post by gbrown »

notyourday wrote: post #84
whatshisface wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Because it's a big upfront cost.

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

#97

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

geofft wrote: post #95
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…

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is g…

So what's Linux market share for desktops these days?

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

#98

Post by pbhjpbhj »

gbrown wrote: post #96
notyourday wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because it's a big upfront cost.

(Actual question:) How is a standard journal-style typesetting a big upfront cost?

Surely the authors do all the hard parts, make the graphs, section, maths markup, footnotes. What's left that can't be automated in almost every situation?

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

#99

Post by notyourday »

gbrown wrote: post #96
notyourday wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because it's a big upfront cost.

Costs of publishing in a journal are a part of the grant proposal(s).

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

#100

Post by pbhjpbhj »

tomxor wrote: post #49
dessant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The papers they hold hostage have not been fully backed up [1] and made accessible for everyone. Elsevier does deserve to go bankrupt, but we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/

> we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged. Hopefully it all gets backed up by sci-hub before that point.

What's preventing Sci-Hub from having it all, and who is backing up Sci-Hub?
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