What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by WhitneyLand » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:25 PM UTC

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…

To consider 35% a lot, it's not considered merely "probable" by most financial folks. It's simply too easy to compare to and see that relatively few businesses are higher. It's really a business dream come true.

There's no way to support your reasoning on even roughly estimating their costs by bootstrap deduction, without more information.

Maybe a single person could have compensation valued at 100 million dollars. Yes, it happens not to founders but to employees.

Cost of sales at a large revenue company like this is usually very high. Top performing sales people are extremely well compensated.

It's possible you've guessed correctly, I'm just saying there no reason to assume it's even roughly accurate from your premise.

The bottom line is their very existence go against the concept of maximizing shared scientific knowledge.

They also apparently consider unethical smear campaigns a standard business tactic.

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

#122

Post by xamuel » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:28 PM UTC

bschne wrote: post #55

The basic problem with the alternative of open access journals seems to be the incentives to get as many articles out as possible to reap the per-article publication fees, which ends up affecting review/editing quality. Have there been experiments in yet other, more decentralized models of academic publishing? Think something like Arxiv but with more features for discussion/review/endorsments by other researchers in…

Not all open-access journals have publication fees.

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

#123

Post by ebiester » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:28 PM UTC

leemailll wrote: post #111

sigwinch28 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Which stages are you referring to? In my experiences in CS, publishing a _conference_ paper required: - Writing the paper using a publisher-provided LaTeX documentclass (potentially a significant portion of publisher cos…

Cs is different from many science fields. Many if not most fields rely on published papers on journals not a conference. Many of the post-accepted production work still need to be done by human. think about a magazine, they sort of like that for production work

I know a lot of academics in the social sciences and humanities. Many of these pieces are handled by free labor in these disciplines as well. As paper copies have become increasingly disused, we are seeing that projects like sci-hub can handle the distribution - let's say that it gets a 500k grant for operating expenses and is in turn run on open source software contributed by academic professors who can count it as part of their community involvement for tenure considerations.

That means we're talking about the editors and copy editors themselves as the majority of the cost. Solve that by creating a university consortium. Instead of paying Elsevier, they pay a non-profit run at a set of universities who are responsible for a pool of editors.

Academia handles so much of this in-house already - there's nothing saying they couldn't do this as well.

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

#124

Post by flyingfences » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

qekbg wrote: post #117

geofft wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality? Can they? All pieces of software that are the core part of the Linux desktop (kernel, Xorg, GNOME, Firefox, etc) are backed by big corporations.

"Backed by", sure, but still free and open, which is UC's (and, I believe, the larger academic community's) ultimate goal.

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

#125

Post by xamuel » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:30 PM UTC

perpetualpatzer wrote: post #69

iamnotacrook wrote: post #48

Is there a page which explains how this situation arose, why they get money from universities to access information produced at tax-payers expense, their role as gate-keepers, any work they actually produce which is useful, proposed alternatives etc. As someone outside of academia this is confusing. Why is someone getting stuff produced at tax-payers expense, peer-reviewed for free, and charging for it, and what's st…

>Why is someone getting stuff produced at tax-payers expense, peer-reviewed for free, and charging for it, and what's stopping this from being overturned? They're not. Elsevier doesn't produce the research. They filter it to give you the good bits. Historically, the value they've provided is 1) to ensure quality (i.e. guarantee readers not just any crank can publish a paper and waste your time, guarantee authors that…

Your (1) is not even the jurisdiction of the publisher. It's done by the editors, who are generally volunteers or, at best, receive a paltry stipend.

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

#126

Post by garmaine » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

Jerry2 wrote: post #30

This paragraph made me smile: > Elsevier alleges that “one senior library official has repeatedly pointed to illegal sources of articles, including a Russia-based piracy site.” > We are unaware of any library employee who has been directing users to illegal sources of articles. On the contrary, UC explicitly published a statement on its website, in response to questions asked by users, that states: “The UC Libraries…

"Note: The UC Libraries do not endorse using Sci-Hub for article access. Using Sci-Hub circumvents cumbersome publisher paywalls to access content illegally. The Sci-Hub interface hosted at https://sci-hub.tw/ proxies requests and does not use login credentials, so access to research cannot be tracked the publishers in violation of copyright. The UC faculty and staff and the regents of the University of California would certainly not want students to directly access research papers for free by using Sci-Hub in this way. As there is no way to catch and punish students who use Sci-Hub to conveniently access research papers, we have made this public notice to inform the student body to not use Sci-Hub, not matter how convenient and accessible it might be. We repeat: do not use Sci-Hub, hosted at https://sci-hub.tw/, to freely download published research from any computer."

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

#127

Post by xamuel » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #81

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 sol…

>EIC ... doing pretty much nothing.

I'm friends with one EIC and a few associate editors and I can assure you they do a LOT of work. The EIC in particular, it's like a full-time job, and that's for a fairly obscure journal. It takes a lot of effort to do the initial evaluation of any given submission, just to initially figure out which associate editor to assign it to. Springer pays her a tiny stipend to cover things like personal printing costs. Think something like $100/month (don't know the exact number but it's around there).

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

#128

Post by buboard » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:39 PM UTC

foobarbecue wrote: post #115

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…

If they have a margin of 35%, they are wasting 50%. They do not copyedit. If you drop a nonsense sentance into an Elsevier journal after the volunteer editing stage, it'll be there in the published version. I've noticed plenty of typos in my own papers after publication. > they [open journals] charge authors fees in the high 3-digit range to cover their costs. Most Elsevier journals charge an ADDITIONAL ~$1500 if you…

> It is $2750 per article!!!

Elsevier and nature charge $5000 for full open access, and not even in their top journals. Cell reports and scientific reports have high impact factor but are considered second-tier compared to Cell and Nature (The editors of the latter will redirect you to pay to submit to those open access journals if rejected)

https://www.cell.com/rights-sharing-embargoes

And this is all paid with taxpayer money. Good thing that taxpayers don't know about this situation or we d have riots

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

#129

Post by whereistimbo » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

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…

> But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something

Who knows if these money ends up in lobbying, manager salaries, etc?

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

#130

Post by segmondy » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

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…

How do you know the true margin? They can be employing Hollywood accounting. If they are not, that doesn't mean that they are spending 65% on something worth while either, perhaps a different entity could be more efficient and have a margin of 99%.