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The Elsevier boycott one year on

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Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#41

Post by femto »

aswanson wrote: post #2

I would like to see a similar effort directed towards the IEEE and Acm publishing associations. They both leech off of publicly funded research and impede scientific and technological progress with their myriad paywalls.

IEEE and ACM are supposedly democratic organisations. The way to change them is from the inside: get a core group of members on-side, put candidates up for election and start building support among the membership.

Reading around, there's at least some movement on the open-access front in the IEEE. IEEE allows authors to pay a hefty up-front free to make their paper "open-access" [1] and one of the candidates in the last election has the words "open-access" in his statement [2].

[1] http://theinstitute.ieee.org/briefings/business/ieee-expands...

[2] http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/election/2012candidates....

Edit: grammar

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#43

Post by rnadna »

clicks wrote: post #13
rayiner wrote: post #8

This "free as in speech" == "free as in beer" shtick has become weird. When you're more fundamentalist than RMS it's time to step back and introspect.

Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts? If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator. Near 8 minutes in, he says this: This is the introduction to the free s…

Re "deprivation ... from everybody"...

I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.)

Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citations. My guess is that no more than a quarter of citations indicates a thorough reading, so we indeed get a readership that could be counted on one hand.

For an author, a big factor is page charges. A popular [society, noncommercial] journal that I use has a special deal for providing content to readers for free. It "only" costs 3K. At that rate, the one or two potential readers who lack a university subscription could just phone me and I could buy them a ticket to visit, where I could explain the work in person.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#44

Post by pseut »

rnadna wrote: post #43
clicks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts? If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator. Near 8 minutes in, he says this: This is the introduction to the free s…

Re "deprivation ... from everybody"... I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.) Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citat…

Yes, exactly. I think people arguing for "freedom" here need to start listing what papers they want to read and why. Most research isn't exactly accessible even if you hand someone a copy of the paper.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#45

Post by [deleted] »

takluyver wrote: post #40
czr80 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's all they wanted it would be easy - just post it on a blog. What they really want is access to the journal infrastructure - I'm reminded of the French newspapers who want Google to pay them for inclusion in Google news, on the basis that they produce the content.

It's not so much the infrastructure, it's the stamp of approval that publishing in a peer-reviewed journal gives your work. Work you post on a blog wouldn't be seen as serious scientific output.

[deleted]

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#46

Post by czr80 »

takluyver wrote: post #40
czr80 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's all they wanted it would be easy - just post it on a blog. What they really want is access to the journal infrastructure - I'm reminded of the French newspapers who want Google to pay them for inclusion in Google news, on the basis that they produce the content.

It's not so much the infrastructure, it's the stamp of approval that publishing in a peer-reviewed journal gives your work. Work you post on a blog wouldn't be seen as serious scientific output.

Sorry, infrastructure was a poor word choice. I mean the whole journals system, and so yes, the brand and signalling value, the network of relationships and cultural norms that make peer review work, and so on.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#47

Post by bingobangobongo »

ScottBurson wrote: post #31
rayiner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journals offer a service: branding and aggregation. There is nothing devious about it like you're implying (not any more devious than Google making money from aggregating other peoples' news articles). Your disagreement seems to be with the value of the service, and I think that's just a matter of you undervaluing branding and signaling. There are a lot of people who write a lot of tripe. Kooks, quacks, etc. Any…

So you agree, then, that this is just a business situation and has nothing to do with Stallmanesque ideology or Swartz-ish liberation of information, despite the superficial similarity to the latter (universities and journals are involved). You may not agree with the boycotters' perceptions of the situation, but that doesn't change the fact that they are acting in their own perceived self-interest. Your comment that…

This is mostly right. This is certainly not about the boycotters believing all information (or even all academic publications) should be free, as the other branch of rayiner's thread assumes. And if Elsevier was more reasonable in their rates, this issue might never have come up or gained momentum.

However, as academics look around and see that the costs of publishing and hosting have become negligible compared to the value of their volunteer contributions, most of them feel that their own works should be freely available online or even that other academics ought to make their works freely available in accordance with culture of academia.

This is perfectly reasonable (of course it is -- look at the people involved) and I agree with you that rayiner is off the mark on this one.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#48

Post by gmac »

czr80 wrote: post #34
gmac wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you acknowledge, the branding is almost nothing to do with the publisher itself though. Nobody cares a jot that journal X is from publisher Y (I don't even know who publishes most of the big econ journals I read papers in). The 'branding' (and I think most academics would prefer the term reputation) is developed over many years by good decisions on the part of editors and reviewers — generally academics working fo…

Well, for what it's worth publishers are responsible for maintaining those editorial boards, over time periods much longer than academic careers. They care about the long term sustainability of the journals for commercial reasons, of course.

I guess so. Though do the same journals stay at the tops of their fields for that long?

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#49

Post by victorh »

rnadna wrote: post #43
clicks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts? If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator. Near 8 minutes in, he says this: This is the introduction to the free s…

Re "deprivation ... from everybody"... I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.) Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citat…

That's because that journal is doing it wrong and someone there is getting too much money. You give me 3k and I'll seed a torrent for one thousand papers as long as my Internet is billed per month instead of per GB. I just saw some redditors link a torrent with tens of gigabytes of technical books, so the method appears to work just fine. And if the author's intent is to distribute it wouldn't be violating anyone's copyright.

Re: The Elsevier boycott one year on

#50

Post by scott_s »

czr80 wrote: post #37
scott_s wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are professional organizations, not just publishers. As professional organizations, their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field. They may not always have paywalls; unlike Elsivier, their organization exists for purposes other than getting money from publications. The co-chairs of the ACM Publishing Board recently wrote an editorial, "Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future":…

Elsevier and other large publishers publish many journals on behalf of societies, so the distinction between the interests of professional organisations and publishers doesn't really work.

I think there is a clear distinction: Elsivier cannot go to an open access model, because it would cease to exist from lack of revenue, while the ACM and IEEE can continue to exist with an open access model because of membership dues.
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