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Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

theguardian.com

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Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#41

Post by itronitron »

apples_oranges wrote: post #8

By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the…

'measuring influence' was established in the science community long, long before it ever became a social media thing.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#42

Post by dan-robertson »

denton-scratch wrote: post #26

I wonder whether the walkout is connected with this? https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infr... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845085

There are a lot of journals with their own editorial boards and these mass-resignations happen somewhat regularly. My guess is that usually some people on the board will first want to decide to get away and then figure out where to move to (eg find some other publisher that is more preferable / get some funding from somewhere for a cheaper to run journal[1]) and then maybe also figure out a plan for the new journal to have a good start (eg with some good papers ready from people who are less constrained by journal impact metrics). So these things tend to take a long time to happen and aren’t really precipitated by EU rule changes.

[1] In mathematics there is the concept of an ‘arxiv overlay journal’ which is an example of something cheap to run: you have a website and editors and forewords and suchlike but each issue is, in some sense, a list of links to specific versions of papers on the arxiv.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#43

Post by foven »

gtsop wrote: post #37
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #34

Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…

I like your point but let's dive another layer down the rabbithole. Why do researchers need to buy prestige in the first place? Academic research should be done for the sake of advancement of knowledge and of course the people doing it should make a good living out of it. How does buying prestige come into play here? (just asking)

Consider you are another researcher (not the one who has just published).

You may want to keep up to date with your field. This is good to do and it helps foster new ideas for now and for future proposals. There will be a selection of journals that are relevant to you and they will publish work that, generally, will be tiered by either the scope or impact of the journal. Journal A publishes a lot of papers you find very insightful or useful, journal B publishes some work that is good to know but not profound. If you have maybe 20 minutes, maybe you will read one paper that catches your eye from Journal A.

The truest metric of how good the work you do is, at a surface level, is how well cited it is. How much do people read it, and then do they care once they put it down. It is not necessarily the case that putting your paper in a high impact journal gets a lot of citations, but its a lot of exposure and it maximises those chances.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#44

Post by ftxbro »

data_maan wrote: post #27

I wonder who still pays for this, if all you need is a single playment - then it's online on www.sci-hub.se and free forever. So I'm not sure why people don't vote with their feet (well, mouse clicks) regarding Elsevier. Of course, copying and stealing is very bad.

I don't know for sure, but I think that some of their customers are universities, and possibly governments and large enterprises, who subscribe to large swaths of their offerings as bundles.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#45

Post by refurb »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #34

Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…

You’ve pretty much nailed it. I anticipate you’ll be downvoted for it.

Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals!

Pick other, less expensive, prestigious enough journals, and academics will publish in those.

But the system can’t be broken easily. The prestige of many journals has been developed over decades or in some cases centuries. Saying “my paper got published in the same journal that published the first structure of DNA” buys a lot of street cred.

There is a level of snobbery to have published in top journals. The ones that got to their position publishing in those journals, aren’t going to be happy being told “those journals aren’t really much better than an open source journal”.

So the system continues - scientists keep reviewing papers for these journals, libraries pay the fees, and scientists send their papers there. Nobody has the balls (understandably) to step outside because their personal career will suffer.

When people want Elsevier to drop their fees, they just want the current system in place (exclusive, prestigious journals) but not have to pay for it.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#46

Post by auggierose »

ramraj07 wrote: post #38
auggierose wrote: post #10

You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but academia is not paying that cost by simply not doing a proper review. If the money saved by cutting Elsevier out (in this case £2700 per accepted paper) would actually be added to a pool out of which reviews are financed, I would see the point. But as it is, the…

If you’re gonna say you have to pay for reviews, it might be a bad precedent that might establish “professional reviewers” whose main job becomes this. Already reviewing papers is become a stupidly important criteria in green card applications and you see a huge deluge of postdocs emailing editors requesting papers to review (though the top journals will never give a manuscript to a postdoc).

No, what I am saying is that proper reviews are expensive, and that cost should be made explicit. How that should be done, I don't know. Giving prestige to reviews is difficult, given that reviews are anonymous. Personally, I feel reviews should be public and non-anonymous, just like the paper is. If the argument against this is that scientists are so petty that they will hold a negative review against you, well. Even more reason to make everything public, because why would you then trust petty scientists to do proper reviews?

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#47

Post by suddenclarity »

gtsop wrote: post #37
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #34

Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…

I like your point but let's dive another layer down the rabbithole. Why do researchers need to buy prestige in the first place? Academic research should be done for the sake of advancement of knowledge and of course the people doing it should make a good living out of it. How does buying prestige come into play here? (just asking)

You need some kind of ranking. Anyone who have tried to write a scientific paper know how much junk there is being published through the "pay to publish" channels and it will just get worse with the technical development of chatGPT. Journals with high prestige tend to work as a barrier for junk.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#48

Post by signaru »

data_maan wrote: post #27

I wonder who still pays for this, if all you need is a single playment - then it's online on www.sci-hub.se and free forever. So I'm not sure why people don't vote with their feet (well, mouse clicks) regarding Elsevier. Of course, copying and stealing is very bad.

It's not just readers who pay. Scientists also have to pay some journals to get their work published (assuming the submission went through) which is totally backwards. Scientists do not get anything monetary from what the readers pay. Now look at other publishing industries. It's the publishers that pay the creators (even if the rates may seem unfair at times, it is still far far better than negative gain for scientific research content creators). Been there multiple times back when I was a PhD student. So I have absolutely nothing against those who use the free sites.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#49

Post by jasode »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #34

Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…

>Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident,

It's because the outsider's mental model of "academic journals publishing" is dominated by seeing the artifacts of publishing: the pdf files.

With pdf files then driving the intuition about "what I think the publishing industry is", it makes people conclude that Elsevier is just a "glorified pdf server". (E.g. Scihub can host a bunch of pdf files for free... so academic journals hosting pdf files are not doing anything value-added.)

And then to add to the pdf mental model, you have the repeated comments about unpaid volunteer peer reviewers. So the outsiders' intuition follows the same path, if the peer reviewers cost the journal nothing, there is no need for paid academic journals to exist. (E.g. a site like Stackoverflow has unpaid volunteers answering questions and users of that site don't have to pay any subscriptions.)

A more accurate mental model looks beyond the "pdf files" and considers how journals also have paid employees to support the journals. E.g.: https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/ElsevierJobs/?q=editor

If one over-simplifies academic journals to "a bunch of pdf files by unpaid peer reviewers" -- then one will always be confused as to why scientists keep submitting their papers to them and why libraries keep paying for subscriptions.

The real issue is journals like Elsevier charge too much money.

Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

#50

Post by noisy_boy »

a_bonobo wrote: post #33
noisy_boy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for responding - I obviously don't have much idea of academia but this is seems like an area ripe for "disruption" (as much as I hate the tech-jargon). So if the core issue is being reviewed by respectable peers (the publication is mainly the easy to understand condensed outcome of that review), what is stopping the editors of a reputable journal to get together, tie-up with tech solutions and form their own e…

Ah but you see, it takes a few years before a new journal even has an impact factor, the sole number with which it is evaluated. To have a high impact factor means that other journals have cited your journal for years in high numbers. It's a chicken & egg problem - you need a good decade for a journal to be come influential/high IF, but for that to happen you need people to submit their papers to your journal. And th…

I guess it is the equivalent of the Facebook problem. You are on Facebook because all your family is and no one leaves for a new platform because no one else is using that. Except it is worse here and instead of just missing out on updates/photos, it directly affects your livelihood.
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