151–160 of 211 posts
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So what's Linux market share for desktops these days?
Or you could ask what does the top 500 supercomputers all run... Linux. See: https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/ Or servers, or mobile devices in the form of Android phones. Desktop usage is only one many use cases for Linux.
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(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?
You are seriously giving authors too much credit. The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing -- that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers. Things that I have seen : ( wife was a production editor, I briefly helped an EIC of a society journal that was sold to a publisher ) 1. Graphs do not fit the page or space allotment - journal is uses two…
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If this is hyperbole, please remove the quotes. If this is an actual quote, please cite it! Ether way it's hilarious, but it would help to be clear.
I don't think they need to cite something that's literally in the text of the posted article. This is a comment section to comment on that very article!
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…
In computer science, the authors do all of this themselves already. The final pdfs me and my authors produce is what gets published.
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…
I agree that they provide some service. That service costs at best $500. I just don't see how they can even ask for $5000 for proofreading articles. I don't value the rest of their pre-publication work at all: It is all done by volunteers, and my experience with their (paid) editors is not good: they do just as much a lousy job on getting reviewers to respond in time as any other journal. They change their minds and…
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> 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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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?
You are seriously giving authors too much credit. The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing -- that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers. Things that I have seen : ( wife was a production editor, I briefly helped an EIC of a society journal that was sold to a publisher ) 1. Graphs do not fit the page or space allotment - journal is uses two…
2 Is something that I have seen caught in peer review twice, and missed once. Again, it would usually go in a batch email to the authors of issues that need to be fixed before publication.
3 is definitely something that reviewers should be catching. I don't know of any journals (especially not open access) that check references for existence. Is the problem the use of footnotes? If so, I could see this legitimately requiring some manual labor / typesetting... But most journals forbid footnotes in their submission guidelines.
4 is quite rare in research articles, and again, would be handled by requesting the authors deal with it.
5. Would be grounds for paper rejection, as it breaks the submission guidelines for most journals. In addition, it seems like an exceptionally rare case.
Overall, I don't think one can justify an average of 10 hours per paper in manual labor (open access fees are always more than 1000 usd) based on these formatting issues...which issues are mostly handled by requesting fixes from the authors.
Then again, maybe your wife worked in the 1 percent of journals which actually print on paper, and carefully proofread for authors.
My background is mostly in medical engineering with journals up to IF10, though.
Truly, a fascinating business combination including science's rent seeker in chief Elsevier, a number of privacy-dubious services under the banner "Risk Analytics" - including for instance your insurer-imposed GPS car tracker, and a service dubbed "Active Insights" that "keeps track of changes in [client's] households" - and another nice looking rent seeker business, LexisNexis, which is if I understand correctly an Elsevier-like gatekeeper to law information and references.
[1] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re...
Clearly Elsevier is not playing nice here. But this bit is great: "UC retains perpetual access rights to most Elsevier articles published before 2019." Whoever negotiated that bit for the UC side must be feeling very pleased with themselves.
Probably standard terms carried over from the print model.
In the 1990s, electronic access was seen as a cost reduction technique: some publishers would even provide it for free to their subscribers, others for a small fee; libraries would buy less copies of the same journal. Later, publishers offered to terminate the paper copies and replace them with electronic-only access, but libraries sensed a trap: what happens if we terminate access in the future?
By the early 2000s, most universities had learnt to include such a perpetual access clause whenever they switched to electronic-only access. (See EBLIDA advice in 2001: ." rel="nofollow">http://www.eblida.org/Activities/Publication/Licensing_digit...)
All this work was not completed quickly: around 2010 I remember we (the board of directors) still had to approve some such conversions in my university. (Germany status in 2010: ." rel="nofollow">https://www.mpg.de/230683/access__hosting_studie_e.pdf>.)
However, most of these clauses have never been used so far, and for some universities it's a lot of work to invoke such perpetual rights, track the back copies etc. https://oadoi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2017.1383964
Not all universities have a self-hosted archival copy, either. https://www.lockss.org/use-lockss/post-cancellation-and-perp...
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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.
No one is saying that we don't need talented scientists writing and reviewing papers or organizing journals. The claim is that the structure of doing this through Elsevier doesn't make sense any more.