Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

paidcontent.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 152 posts

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#31

Post by omnisci »

hack_edu wrote: post #11

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…

Yes, I actually do:) Me: Neuroscience PhD at Columbia w/ some a technical background but not a coder.I'm working on going up against academic publishing right now. I have a YC application that is currently being reviewed and I'm in need of a technical cofounder.

Project: Very briefly, I'm working on collecting raw data (positive AND negative), indexing it, and making relationships between datasets. For example, my neuroscience study has relationships to cancer biology, so the data presented to the user would include results from both.

Re: Publishing, I'm going to provide raw data to scientists and create a venue for them to "blog" about these datasets. I think science needs to move incrementally (at internet speed) and get away from taking 3 years to produce a study and publishing a big paper of only positive data. Also, I'd like for the "peer review" portion to be more transparent, so that we can avoid the insane bias that goes into peer review.

Goal 2: Create "big data" by combining small academic science results into a big ass database. Meta data could be the new preliminary data for academic grants.

So yeah, if anyone is interested in playing with this, let me know. klg2142 @t columbia.edu

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#32

Post by hack_edu »

pms wrote: post #23
hack_edu wrote: post #11

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…

I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad review…

I think that could be a successful community, you just have the same problem as any social community, finding users. Especially ones of interest that are open to publishing anonymously and listening to anonymous reviewers.

The real tragedy is the general reference, social science, and humanities journal diaspora where the usage and demand has skyrocketed with the increased access online resources allow to lay researchers. The science journal communities are way ahead in self-sufficiency in adapting, and are increasingly open to the corrupt state of publishing and alternate community publishing platforms.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#34

Post by roadnottaken »

cs702 wrote: post #2

Mendeley's sale to Elsevier reminds me of this video: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/you-have-to-monetize-y... -- one slide shown in the background, in particular, makes me cringe and laugh at the same time: "Only sell your users to whoever has the deepest pockets." PS. More seriously, I've come to feel that only a non-profit organization can solve the "walled garden" problem in academic publishing. We need so…

It's called PLOS:

http://www.plos.org/

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#35

Post by adimitrov »

res0nat0r wrote: post #27
bioinformatics wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference of Mendeley is that they had a good PR team, and composed of academic, "people like us". And they were everywhere, and this PR team banged on the note that Mendeley was going to be open and "grassroots" academic, because it was made by academics. Now, we know the real answer.

All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?

This week? No. One, two, or more years down the road? We shall see.

I'm not 100% behind the Mendeley hate right now, but they're against all odds. While everything I've heard from the team so far, including on the prominent HN threads, has been reassuring and positive, it's still just words.

People are making predictions about the future right now, and no words will be able to sway public opinion. Only action, and time. It seems Mendeley (or, as of now, Elsevier) are betting on the latter, because there has been no action, only PR.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#36

Post by freyr »

bmalee wrote: post #20
Pitarou wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. My bad. I had a real need and Mendeley's software (which is awesome, by the way) came to my rescue; issues of who controls it and what they might want from me someday seemed very far away at the time.

This is how capitalism works. Companies (and individuals) try to maximise their own profits; and (ideally) the most profitable course of action is the one which is the most beneficial to the most people. Altruism has no place in it. And yet, people are continually surprised and disappointed when a company takes a profitable course of action, rather than ignoring profits for altruistic reasons.

> yet, people are continually surprised and disappointed when a company takes a profitable course of action

I think this is a fairly recent phenomenon, that's gone hand in hand with the development of the Internet.

First, we had companies without business plans (or profits) that peaked in the 90s. That bubble burst, but the reputation of "something for nothing" has lingered.

Companies have since found new ways to monetize users (e.g. targeted advertising) in a way that's mostly transparent to the users. This has perpetuated the sense of "something for nothing" associated with online products and services.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#37

Post by rrrrtttt »

pms wrote: post #30
rrrrtttt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with a voluntary system.

Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.

Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#38

Post by Evbn »

pms wrote: post #23
hack_edu wrote: post #11

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…

I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad review…

Arxiv and marxiv are already working on this.

Arxiv even has a paid fellowship, but it is postdoc wages, not professional wages.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#39

Post by Evbn »

rrrrtttt wrote: post #37
pms wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.

Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.

Coercion comes from the employers (tenure/promotion requirements) not from the publishers.

Re: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

#40

Post by pseut »

hack_edu wrote: post #11

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage st…

Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I mean some people care a lot about that issue, some people don't care very much, but I don't know anyone who is opposed to public access.

So there's an ongoing transition now by researchers/editorial boards/etc to move to a system with lower access costs (some of which involves taking back journal ownership, some doesn't). There's some logistical overhead and fixed costs, but those are falling. It seems like in 20 years (conservatively) all new research will be available to whomever wants it no matter what Elsevier or other companies do in the meantime (the papers may not be literally free, but affordable).

So, like I said initially, I can see how some software for logistics or communication would be helpful, but the main issues don't strike me as technical.

Post reply on HN