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Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

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Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#31

Post by Someone »

acaloiar wrote: post #15

I'm currently co-authoring a paper that will be submitted to an Elsevier journal because it is a good fit for our work. All of my time and that of one other co-author is funded by an NIH grant which of course is funded by US tax dollars. I'm fairly certain the Elsevier agreement stipulates that I cannot share my paper without their permission – assuming the paper is accepted. If I were the NIH, I would make it illega…

"If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere that does not support open access”

Don’t they do that? https://publicaccess.nih.gov:

"To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication"

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#32

Post by lultimouomo »

I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access.

Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article:

  the university or the financier of the research pays to get published
In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal.

It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with the service of having the article reviewed and doing its best to make sure the research was solid. Now the emperor is naked, and it's finally official what's the purpose of academic journals: let people have their grants renewed.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#33

Post by Coding_Cat »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #28
Coding_Cat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually something I have been thinking about writing myself. Look at all the major social networks, and all their metrics, analysis, ranking systems and the like. Imaging what you could do with a social-network like publication database (research-gate sort of is, but it doesn't think big enough and the UX is confusing, imho). Every publication became a "post" so to speak. You could easily include discussions…

Note that there are some projects that are related to this, for instance a social network for scientists [1], a Github-like site for article creation with public comments [2] and some unknown third party comment systems for arXiv [3]. (I just found this one by googling.) For any success of such a project, the official endorsement from arXiv is crucial. Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a soci…

Hmm, authorea looks pretty interesting. Researchgate I touched on before. the last one looks more like a quick experiment than a serious attempt.

I don't think official endorsement by arXiv is necessary, what is important is to gain a critical mass. I think authorea has the right idea to give users a incentive to use the program. If possible, I would offer more free access to gain that initial traction, but of course this requires an investor with deep enough pockets to take the hit. Networking would also be key, to bring it back to the original article: if you could work with those involved here and offer your services to host all these open-access papers...

>Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social network might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source recommendation systems pop up.

I think we need something similar in openness and positioning as Github. AFAIK Github did not market itself as a social platform at first, but it just made it so easy for its users that it ended up being key to its success.

I think that is the overall approach one should take, don't force the users into a pattern, that will not work and definitely not in rigid-academia. You have to guide them by a good UX, make them think they want to use your features because that is what's good for them (they're like cats in that regard).

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#35

Post by dougmccune »

badlogic wrote: post #5

It'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…

I'll take a little of the publisher bait (I sit on the board of a "dinosaur paywall publisher"). I'd like to question the popular thinking that publishers do not add anything of value.

There has never been a time in history when it has been easier to publish your research output in any number of other places than a paywall journal. You can post it on your own blog. You want a DOI? You can post it on The Winnower. You need it in a journal with an impact factor (even though you hate impact factor)? Submit it to PLOS One or PeerJ.

By publishing with a paywall journal you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. You can argue all day about whether that prestige is earned or not, but it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige, it's the tenure committees and faculty. Everyone is "against" the journal impact factor until it comes time to apply for tenure, at which point your tenure committee weighs it so highly that you can't avoid pandering to it. So you publish in the highest impact factor journal.

We're all hoping to change this system. Publishers don't like being held hostage by Thomson Reuters (who controls impact factor) and having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor. In a lot of ways we'd all love to move to academia-accepted alternative metrics. I would love a system that allows third parties to provide editorial review of the importance of a paper, and allow that to be separated from the journal. As a publisher that's what we're really trying to do, provide a way to judge the importance of a paper before you can get all the citation data coming in over the years. I would love to figure out a different way of doing so. But changing that means changing deep-rooted behavior throughout all of academia. And that is HARD.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#36

Post by ricardobeat »

lultimouomo wrote: post #32

I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access. Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article: the university or the financier of the research pays to get published In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal. It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with…

Aren't universities the main customer of journals already? They pay millions for subscriptions.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#37

Post by sago »

lultimouomo wrote: post #32

I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access. Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article: the university or the financier of the research pays to get published In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal. It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with…

But the financier of the research is already paying for the research to be done, rarely for their economic interest, but so that it gets out there, establishes the science, furthers knowledge, cements reputations, etc. For research done by economic interests the incentive is even stronger, a drug company, say, wants to get their drug out, proven, marketed.

Your response seems high on derision, but you've not actually made any point about why it shouldn't be the people paying for the research's role to pay for the research's availability.

The counter arguments is on availability, the hegemony of large institutions, and the lack of transparency of funding bodies.

So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#38

Post by _delirium »

lultimouomo wrote: post #32

I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access. Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article: the university or the financier of the research pays to get published In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal. It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with…

In reputable open-access journals, you can have the fees waived if you don't have grant or institutional funding that's earmarked to pay for publication/dissemination of research. What usually happens is that universities take at least some of the budgets they previously used to buy journal subscriptions, and put them towards publication fees instead. NIH and NSF and those kinds of grants will also pay publication fees (along perhaps with other ways of disseminating research). If you have access to neither, then you don't pay. Here's is the policy from PLoS, for example: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/plos-publ...

In CS there are typically no fees to begin with, at least in the areas I work in (JMLR and JAIR are no-fee open-access journals). Instead journals are run basically without staff, authors format their own documents in LaTeX, and an institution (in the case of JMLR, MIT) donates some server space and maybe the time of a student assistant. The main downside to this is that publication quality control tends to be a bit worse, as there's no copyediting or layout type of service (JMLR has quite a few surprisingly badly edited papers, despite being a generally good journal). But it is usually "good enough".

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#39

Post by NotOscarWilde »

Coding_Cat wrote: post #33
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that there are some projects that are related to this, for instance a social network for scientists [1], a Github-like site for article creation with public comments [2] and some unknown third party comment systems for arXiv [3]. (I just found this one by googling.) For any success of such a project, the official endorsement from arXiv is crucial. Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a soci…

Hmm, authorea looks pretty interesting. Researchgate I touched on before. the last one looks more like a quick experiment than a serious attempt. I don't think official endorsement by arXiv is necessary, what is important is to gain a critical mass. I think authorea has the right idea to give users a incentive to use the program. If possible, I would offer more free access to gain that initial traction, but of course…

Notice that arXiv does not need any money from its users; it is fully funded from academic/private donations and it does not seek to maximize revenue.

Authorea is very different; it has a very tough pricing model where you have to either choose to publish even partial work while you are writing (unacceptable to most scientists I know) or pay per article AND per month.

Basically, my issue with it is the same as with the current open-access model: I am trying my hardest to produce good science and release it for free; yet somebody tries to profit not from my own results, but from my desire to have those results published for free. ArXiv helps me while refusing to profit from this desire, and thus I love it.

You have to keep in mind that a lot of scientists (I think this is true for compsci/math/physics) choose a 50% pay cut so that they can do science, and not go into the (programming) industry. Speaking as a PhD student, we have modest means and do not like to be gouged.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#40

Post by obstbraende »

lultimouomo wrote: post #32

I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access. Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article: the university or the financier of the research pays to get published In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal. It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with…

Put more favourably, the purpose of an open access journal is to arrange a critical evaluation of my stuff and to point other researchers to it (curation). To justify paying for this, I think of it like hiring a consultancy and, later, a marketing firm for my research.

Perhaps in a better world, we would disentangle the review and the curation aspects -- I'd pay for the arrangement of peer review of my article, upload it freely to the arxive, and pay separately for unbiased, curated lists of noteworthy articles in my field.

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