MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.

A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?

But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more.

It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.

Well crap there are pictures of it in a book too now.

Then you'll have replaced the problem of making research results actually available somewhere. But what it doesn't solve, is the problems of a) deciding what research to read and b) deciding which researchers to hire.

Note that the current system, which relies on the brand name of the journals in which works (or an author's works) are published, is very flawed, but it's what people use, and is therefore what's making people refrain from actually publishing in those journals the universities would found.

(Disclosure: I volunteer for https://plaudit.pub, a project that aims to contribute to solving the mentioned problems to enable transitioning to Open Access journals.)

> Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.

No they don't. Their editors do, not the entire organization, and really it's the selected (volunteer) peer reviewers who do.

> A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied.

Agreed.

> One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors?

That's why I think universities should be the founders. The top professors in a certain field can nominate a good editor, who will be paid full-time.

> There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?

Prestige comes from being relevant and innovative. Also, who said this has to be a new journal? Why not convert an established on?

I'm an academic.

For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks:

* There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now? I'm sure that many of you can devise solutions to this, but they will be costly, and they will need constant labor to implement. How do you pay for this? It is OK when 20,000 researchers in a field are downloading papers every once in a while, but what happens when every student in the world wants to read these? The bandwidth charge becomes non-trivial. It seems like it needs to be outsourced, and some commercial entity with experience handles it.

* The tenure process is slow to change. Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors" in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure committees in older institutions use these metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not stupid: it is just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals represent "the highest quality work" and thus use the presence of those publications to judge researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in Elsevier/Springer journals.

When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way...