Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
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Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
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Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#2> If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.
Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would think that all the other pieces would be much more replaceable than the actual papers themselves.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#3> If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals. Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would think that all the other pieces would be much more…
Because removing a single editor-in-chief is much more damaging to the publisher than removing a single author?
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#4> If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals. Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would think that all the other pieces would be much more…
The goal seems to be to reach an agreement, not to get embroiled forever. First, show your teeth. Biting can come later.
Also, that biting would be costly, especially for less established scientists. Not publishing in high-ranking journals can be bad for a career.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#5It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value.
That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish). On the other hand i had high ranking university staff tell me "they love how they can just burn €6M in 2 year EU project with zero outcome without consequences". Reviewers of such projects only need to have the right political color and zero domain knowledge.
It's sad really and i'm happy i don't have to work in such an environment amnymore.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#6> If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals. Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would think that all the other pieces would be much more…
Because it also has the highest impact on your scientists. Asking somebody to stop publishing in the major journals of his field is not going to get as much understanding as the weaker measures. You don't want all your potential PhD students running for the hills because they fear they won't get good publications...
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#7I would like to see the governments that fund research get together and create a rule that your government funding requires that a public version of the paper be made available online before that paper could be submitted to a private publisher. This would help to separate the public availability of useful information paid for by the public issue from the academics' career-promotion-via-publication issue.
That would, of course, mean that papers would appear prior to acceptance and peer review, which would speed up the pace of research at the cost (if peer review is of any value) of putting more shaky research out there. I doubt this would be a big problem, since researchers in the field know what is going on anyway (they get early copies or at least early discussion at pay-walled conferences already), and others who read the research could see that it had not yet been published in a journal and decide for themselves what to make of it.
Papers that got peer reviewed and published would still have the published version used in citations, so you could see how far it had gone in the publishing process at time of citation. I wouldn't be surprised if people in the field knew how much credibility to give to a paper based on the researchers without waiting for the researchers' more established rivals to "review" it to death.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#8It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value. That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish…
Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#9It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value. That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish…
Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)
Zürich, Switzerland, isn't in the EU :-)
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)
Zürich, Switzerland, isn't in the EU :-)
For the purposes of European research funding it effectively is.