Earlier quoted context omitted.
The own the prestigious journal names, you can trivially do what they do, but you lack the prestige.
Like Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry?
No, like Lancet or Cell.
MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
41–50 of 230 posts
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy. I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet. IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyr…
Why would Article Galaxy be shut down? It makes it easier for Elsevier's articles to generate revenue: https://www.researchsolutions.com/
As other commenters have mentioned, MIT paying for articles a la carte worked out cheaper than getting all-access subscription from Elsevier. Presumably Elsevier would want to stem this sales channel so institutions would be forced to pay more.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#43Why not adopt the law school approach? Let the grad students publish the journals.
It’s already the case that many of the people involved in publishing an article are unpaid. Authors and peer reviewers are not paid (indeed authors may have to pay for open access). Editors are sometimes paid. There are professionals employed by the publisher – copy editors, typesetters(?), etc – who are compensated, though it is not clear they are providing that much value.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#44US universities could create enough pressure on Elsevier to make them seriously reconsider their practices.
Can universities just do a buy-out of Elsevier and wind it down? Surely they really have the upper hand here.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#45Question: What is Elsevier’s value proposition? Could that be replicated by on open source offering?
Editing, typesetting and curating are expensive. Yes, authors can do this and they contribute quite a bit, but it's not enough to support the high quality documents produced by Elsevier. Yes, tex-savvy authors can do a pretty good job but it's just not the same. That's one reason authors choose to pay the page charges. Curating is also surprisingly important. Sure, you can often get some author to send you a free PDF…
Curation is not access. Curation is editorial, in terms of having a journal issue contain a selection of available new works and not every single thing posted.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#46Question: What is Elsevier’s value proposition? Could that be replicated by on open source offering?
Editing, typesetting and curating are expensive. Yes, authors can do this and they contribute quite a bit, but it's not enough to support the high quality documents produced by Elsevier. Yes, tex-savvy authors can do a pretty good job but it's just not the same. That's one reason authors choose to pay the page charges. Curating is also surprisingly important. Sure, you can often get some author to send you a free PDF…
Do you know how expensive open access publications are? I guarantee that editing, typesetting and curating could easily be performed for fraction of that price (and it's easy to prove it - just check how much Elsevier makes each year!). Also keep in mind that most of editors - which are responsible for curating - are not paid at all... And if you mean "curating" as in providing access to pdfs, then there is arxiv which does just that - for free.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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In my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent. Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the victims.
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Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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No, they don't. Not unless you want to sabotage your own career. There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of science, and you need to publish in the most reputable journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in most cases.
So you're confirming that somehow the best publishers somehow manage to provide something of value. The people judging your career are the ones you're complaining about and somehow they're choosing to respect a few publishers.
Instead of just imagining that Elsevier is somehow bad, you might ask yourself why these committees respect their journals so much. What are they doing that's right?
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different roles. I could have agreed if you said, say, PLOS. arXiv is a preprint repository, Elsevier publishes peer-reviewed journals.
The preprints on arxiv are read, and responded to, by plenty of peers. The question was what value Elsevier adds; I think the primary value added is just making papers available to anyone who wants to read them. Arxiv does that. (What's more, it does it for everyone , not just academics--as a taxpayer I can go on arxiv and read research that my tax money paid for. I can't do that with Elsevier published journals.) Pu…
PLOS is open-access, as a taxpayer you can read world-class peer-reviewed (more stringent than Elsevier journals in fact) articles in your preferred field's preferred issue.
Re: MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they don't. Not unless you want to sabotage your own career. There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of science, and you need to publish in the most reputable journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in most cases.
So you're confirming that somehow the best publishers somehow manage to provide something of value. The people judging your career are the ones you're complaining about and somehow they're choosing to respect a few publishers. Instead of just imagining that Elsevier is somehow bad, you might ask yourself why these committees respect their journals so much. What are they doing that's right?
It's solely about prestige, and self-reinforcing.