Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan • Hacker News Board

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#51

Post by ori_b » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:28 PM UTC

tsurantino wrote: post #47

dougmccune wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige". Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation. If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is…

> "by publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" and then going on to say "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige".

No. the grandparent post is pointing out that journals do provide value in practice, because people care that someone was published in the journal. This has nothing to do with the publisher, and everything to do with the people reading the papers.

> If validation is so important, why can't there be a subset of tax dollars towards a committee?

You're confusing "ought" and "is". The system, as it works today, isn't that -- you can push for that change, but as it stands, journals add value in an academic career.

Until a researcher can actually submit their research to a tax dollar funded committee (or whatever other alternative people dram up), and get that weighted as heavily as a journal publication when applying for tenure, journals will not be replaced. Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#52

Post by bovik » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:29 PM UTC

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…

Aren't all serious Math and CS papers free on the arXiv anyway?

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#53

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

dougmccune wrote: post #35

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…

Beyond that, journals can help financially support their attendant society if they're a society journal, and while it gets dismissed, having a copy editor and a layout person improves papers.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#54

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #31

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…

They're allowed to drag their feet a little bit, but yes.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#55

Post by dougmccune » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:35 PM UTC

tsurantino wrote: post #47

dougmccune wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige". Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation. If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is…

I think we agree. It would be better if there was a different way to validate the importance/impact of research. Particularly if there was a way to evaluate the importance immediately, as opposed to waiting years to see how the impact plays out (via citations, etc). So if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great (great from the viewpoint of humanity, maybe not publishers' business models).

Hell, if you were guaranteed that your tenure committee actually read your full papers and then made their decision about the importance of your work entirely on their own, then you don't need any other validation of your work. But at that point we're sadly living in a fantasy world. In the real world academics making hiring decisions need external validation to judge their applicants. Figure out a better way to provide that without losing a ton of money and you're golden.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#56

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:36 PM UTC

sago wrote: post #42

anigbrowl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the administrators have outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers and pay for this service indirectly through journal fees, so from an accounting point of view it makes total sense. If not publication, what metric should funding agencies use to decide who gets grants? Of course they could hire senior scientists in the field to evaluate grant roposals, but that would mean hiring lots and lots of s…

> outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers Except that, by and large, those reviewers aren't being paid. So the 'outsourcing' argument isn't quite it. If it were there would be no problem with open access. It is more about brand. They're outsourcing the need to determine quality by buying into a brand. That brand is kept afloat by unpaid labour on all sides, yet charges heftily for its brand. It is an…

While their not being paid directly, it should be noted that reviewing, and sitting on editorial boards, is considered in a great many tenure decisions.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#57

Post by Coding_Cat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

xiaq wrote: post #48

Coding_Cat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both ideas have merit. Which works best in practice would depend on the degree-of-shit (that's the scientific term) on your network. I fear special interest groups will, if they want, always outnumber legit researchers. If your network becomes large enough to attract the interest of these groups you might end up with "attacks" on climate research and other 'controversial' issues. Verified users could prevent…

I don't see how special interest groups will be a problem. Surely, they can flood the reviews with unlegit attacks, but the academia can just ignore them and only stick to the high-reputation review groups. They can make a lot of noise, but I don't think it can be a big problem for the academia.

I'd say that from a UX experience you want the default-settings to work 99.9% of the time. This includes the ratings and reviews of articles. Which you could then only do by effectively censoring these groups when calculating ratings. If you're going to do that, why let them on in the first place?

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#58

Post by dougmccune » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #53

dougmccune wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Beyond that, journals can help financially support their attendant society if they're a society journal, and while it gets dismissed, having a copy editor and a layout person improves papers.

Thanks for pointing this out. The revenue to scholarly societies is another big aspect that people often overlook. One side effect of killing off paywall journals is that a lot of scholarly societies will need to figure out different ways to make money to survive. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can get behind the idea that a society should not base it's financial existence on revenue from a paywall journal. But that's a reality of today's situation.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#59

Post by Coding_Cat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:43 PM UTC

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #39

Coding_Cat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

True, which is one of the reasons why I'd like to do some number crunching regarding hosting costs vs. sponsors/ads and premium features (like GitHub's private repos) separate from the Open Access features.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#60

Post by capnrefsmmat » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 10:44 PM UTC

lultimouomo wrote: post #45

sago wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? The fact that the interest of the journal is now naturally aligned with that of the writer, instead of with that of the reader. This makes it very useful for the writer, which pays[0], publishes and so gets to live another year having his grant renewed; it also mak…

I don't know if that's true. "Readers" currently means "research libraries", who act on behalf of the scientists doing the research, so shift isn't so great.

Additionally, open access journals still must maintain an image of prestige and quality -- authors want to publish in the most prestigious possible journal. There is incentive for journals to compete on quality even when paid by authors.

In any case, I think the role of journals as gatekeepers for quality is overstated (peer reviewers and editors generally do a bad job assessing article quality), and as science shifts to alternative forms of peer review and publication, journals will matter less.