In most cases yes, peer reviewers are not paid. These companies are pretty much a paywalled pdf hosting service hence the outrage against them.
I can't actually think of anyone who has been paid for a review in the sciences. The most I've personally gotten was a nice note from an editor; I've heard rumors of someone who reviewed enough to get some journal-branded swag (a mug or calendar, I think). If you review a book, you might get to keep the copy. Nobody gets cash.
I've been compensated for one review, and for peer-reviewing a book proposal, gotten some free books.
That is, in fairness, three instances over what is by now probably well over 100 reviews.
Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a senior dev job opening. This is about metadata, not content, but it's a crucial layer, and we are committed to open data and open infrastructure.
At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published infor…
> they sell medical diagnostic tools, text etc. [0].
If they actually do that, that is not represented in the link you provided. The whole page is about teaching materials about the field, and one piece of software to _simulate_ "real-world patient data systems".
On their whole website I couldn't find a single product/service that a company would use in their direct operative work (in contrast to training).
Probably the only journal among this "top Elsevier journals" list that one might have difficulty finding pre-prints for is NeuroImage; I'll bet the other medical journals will have preprints on medrxiv:
At a semantic web meeting sometime back one of the heads of Elsevier reasearch during her talk blatantly stated that "Elsevier is not a publishing company", I noticed numerous heads raise at this comment. Elsevier sells services. They no longer need to publish, or worry about losing their publishing, because the big journals like Cell etc. are not going anywhere, and because they control enough of the published infor…
I work for Elsevier. About 2 years ago there was a big internal push to drive it home that we are now a data and analytics company and not a publisher.
This is certainly important from a business perspective. For-profit publishing is a dead end. More and more venues are community-owned, and only the highest profile publications actually need the degree of professionalization that requires a large publishing house. By now, it is clear that the publishers cannot win this fight. And we see this in the concessions publishers make. IMHO, publishers can either milk the cow as long as it's possible and then die, or transform their business. My university just announced an Open Access agreement with Elsevier, and to me this looks like a confession on Elsevier's side that they will have to go OA in one way or another, or they'll lose their journals one by one. In my community, Elsevier has already lost journals to community-owned replacements.
Traffic from US has always been huge anyway on scihub so thats going to be hard... Put you in the shoes of a grad student. What would you choose (ethics aside) navigate to the website of your library do 20 clicks through a shitty interface to finally get a paper, and thats if you are lucky, or just paste a DOI and wait 5 seconds...
Luckily nearly every university offers their library proxy as a bookmarklet. It's two clicks: 1 to hit the bookmarklet, another to hit login on my autofilled secure sign on page.
My university does (a top national one) and it’s still less reliable and UX friendly than SciHub.
Elsevier knows this. We have just finish negotiating a new national contract with them, and to our surprise did they agreed to all of our demands. They know which way the wind is blowing and are trying to pivot as quickly as an old lumbering giant can.
Curious, what were some of the demands?
The main one was automatic open access on articles written by authors from our institutions with cc license. Better prices and permanent access to some parts of their portfolio was also accepted.
I work for Elsevier. About 2 years ago there was a big internal push to drive it home that we are now a data and analytics company and not a publisher.
I am pleased to hear it but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Elsevier will cease being a publisher first when they stop selling access to journal articles. Until then they are a publisher first and an "analytics" firm second, regardless of corporate messaging.
Elsevier is a publisher, OK, and Google is a PC motherboard builder.
At least in my field (applied machine learning/optics) and my partner's field (cognitive neuroscience) pre-prints are a massive deal. Not only do they allow you to get your work out earlier, google scholar will typically link your pre-print to the published article eventually so anyone who doesn't have a subscription can get a PDF no problem. This probably nullifies the negative effects of not having access to the pu…
Preprint often looks better. I've had publishers send papers to offshoristan where they redid everything including the graphs to match their layout, introducing tons of errors, typos (yes, really...) and problems that even almost 10 rounds of urgent back-and-forth before the deadline didn't fix entirely.
Yes! Literally the copyright for scientific articles should be 1 year. This is how we fix open access.
OK. Step one: Renegotiate the Berne Convention.
Just abandon it. International treaties are mostly hindrances to progress because re-negotiating them is considered hard to impossible. States should aim to be free from such obligations and reduce the amount of applicable treaties as far as possible.