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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

#121

Post by jrochkind1 »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #118
jrochkind1 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed it's not just Elsivier. Agree that some of it is about "prestige", although I think it's somewhat more complicated than that. But let's just take your model, sure. Where does the prestige come from? The editors of the journal, recognizing that they are pretty much solely responsible for the rigor/quality of the content (well, plus the authors of course), believe they can take their prestige with them. Are they…

> They wound up with a contract that provided much more open access than ever before Elsevier wanted them to buy more open access. That's one of its main long term goals for its journal business: switch everyone to open access. That's guaranteed money, compared to if everyone just started using a preprint server. (I believe it's on some page of their website, they say they want to move their journals more towards ope…

And if "negative press about profits" can lead to a threat to their revenues in some way, then it would appear something other than "research no longer depending on prestige" can do so, right?

I would guess US federal (and other) government mandates for open access when receiving publishing are part of it -- and the increasing general "public" discussion of the market ("negative press about profits" if you like) has something to do with those government mandates, sure.

But yes, there is currently a bit of a battle going on, where the universities that largely pay for the journals are trying to change the way the market works -- while trying not to disrupt publishing and promotion too much -- while the major publishers try to find a way to counter-move that preserves or increases their huge profit margins anyway.

Absolutely. I think we basically agree. Except I don't see why you'd describe this changing situation as "so nothing will change as long as academic careers depend on prestige".

I gather you work for a major publisher, which perhaps makes you sympathetic to their position? (And yes, I already revealed I am a librarian, which makes me sympathetic to the position of those paying the subscription bills).

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

#122

Post by JackFr »

refurb wrote: post #104
krisoft wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in? I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t car…

Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant. Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are…

> Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper?

Think of it in these terms: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. The science isn’t the issue. The money is.

Academic publishing is much like the US healthcare system, bond rating companies and various other interests, industries and organizations in that through quirks of the path of history they find themselves in a position to extract rents either through regulation, historic convention, effective monopoly and/or misplaced incentives.

When the current state is shown to be obviously deficient, these rent seekers among other strategies will say it’s much too complicated and there are you simple solutions. If you dream that there might be you simply don’t understand the problem.

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

#123

Post by fast_neutron »

Elsevier is far from the only offender in the academic publishing space. This price gouging is rampant, and it affects everyone you could call a "customer." The only variable is who gets stuck with the bill.

When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because the price was unaffordable.

For unaffiliated readers, such as those doing industry R&D or individuals researching a medical condition, there are no circumstances under which $30-$50 price per article is affordable, let alone justifiable. This is more expensive than many books, and it's just to read a 10-page PDF which may or may not even provide sufficient context to answer the reader's question. Sci-hub is a literal life-saver for this audience.

"Open access" alleviates the price problem for the reader, but just pushes another unaffordable burden onto the researcher. My group could not afford the multi-thousand dollar "processing charge," and those that could were paying for it with taxpayer money anyway.

So no matter what, someone is getting gouged, be it the reader, the University, the PI, or the public. Prices need to come down by at least an order of magnitude before I would even consider the for-profit academic publishing industry to be anything other than a predatory anachronism.

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

#126

Post by spamizbad »

refurb wrote: post #104
krisoft wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in? I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t car…

Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant. Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are…

Your argument makes no sense.

Journal publishers don’t weigh in on tenure or grant decisions. While they provide a conduit for materials that impact such things (the researchers papers), they have no say in anything (including, incidentally, sometimes what gets published)

A publisher provided distribution. That’s it. They aren’t even the chef in this analogy: they’re FOH staff.

Journal editors are faculty at academic institutions. They may or may not be paid a small fee by the publisher for their efforts but it’s typically not significant. Reviewers are unpaid volunteers.

Journal publishers historically charged money because they managed the printing and distribution of print journals. Some also facilitated distribution of drafts. That’s it. The bulk of the intellectual labor was done for free by academics.

As you can imagine, in the age of the internet, this entire process can be replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud.

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

#127

Post by shishy »

VHRanger wrote: post #114
j-bos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Given the replication crisis, maybe scientific publishing as it works today also can't tell quality.

The replication crisis is much worse in fields without open publishing. Computer science/physics/etc. (arxiv), economics (NBER) and other fields with freely available papers tend to have much better replication numbers than fields that are closed-off. This is even better when data and code are publicly available.

scite (where I work) makes understanding reproducibility much easier -- we have access to full text articles with agreements from publishers and are able to show you the statements from papers where each reference was used in text with the textual context, section, and a classification, so you can see if newer research indicated a difference in empirical findings, etc. Might be of interest for you is the only reason I'm bringing it up- https://scite.ai/home

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

#128

Post by mistrial9 »

FabHK wrote: post #91

Excellent. Don Knuth instigated a similar walkout 20 years ago at the Journal of Algorithms . Wikipedia has its own section on these walkouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Control_of_journals

I was told onsite at a major pharm research house in California, that "science publishing in Japan is controlled by their mafia" .. with "Reed-Elsevier" as the Dutch version of that. historical note: the Dutch worked with Japan before many other Western nations, long ago.

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

#129

Post by boppo1 »

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…

>WEF plays the conspiracy angle

What, you're saying that's intentional? What's the WEF business model, anyway?

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

#130

Post by AlbertCory »

mjklin wrote: post #64
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…

It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.

I thought that was politics.
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