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

Post by dmitriz » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:51 AM UTC

throwaway287391 wrote: post #152

notyourday wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not sure about other fields, but in computer science (or more specifically AI/ML) conference papers are completely free of any “professional” editors — burden is entirely on authors to handle their own editing. But I have noticed 0 disparity between conference and journal papers in terms of copy-editing quality. And my one experience of submitting to a journal matches other descriptions — the “professional” edito…

Post by dmitriz » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:55 AM UTC

jasonmorton wrote: post #150

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 some high-quality open access journals (e.g. https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ ) that don't charge authors. They use arxiv overlay. It is entirely possible.

Post by mikorym » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

dmitriz wrote: post #190

mikorym wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you tell it is not been read?

Post by notyourday » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

dmitriz wrote: post #199

notyourday wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was the case then the journals would not be sold to publishers. They are sold to publishers because EICs and societies that start journals do not want to deal with actually making the manuscript publishable after a year or two. P.S. Average STEM paper takes about 30 hours to "produce".

This was the case 30 years ago when publishing was expensive. Today this should be a button click in a fully automated system. Which is not to say, societies don't benefit from the system -- they actually get a lot of $$ from it. The sad part is, they only get a small part from the much bigger $$$ going to publishers.

Post by notyourday » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #173

notyourday wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

these do not require "enourmous" amount of editing. Still, if sience was published in open access HTML, none of these issues would exist. Graphs could be anything, layout is irrelevant, and the rest can easily be detected with an automated validator.