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Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

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Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#61

Post by viraptor »

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…

> having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor

I'm confused by this bit. Isn't impact factor just a complex indicator of the amount of citations, so really an indicator of the quality of the journal? Why is it "worrying about impact factor", rather than "worrying about publication quality"?

This reminds me of the pleasing the shareholders vs. trying to run a successful company disconnect.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#63

Post by dougmccune »

viraptor wrote: post #61
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…

> having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor I'm confused by this bit. Isn't impact factor just a complex indicator of the amount of citations, so really an indicator of the quality of the journal? Why is it "worrying about impact factor", rather than "worrying about publication quality"? This reminds me of the pleasing the shareholders vs. trying to run a successful company disconnect.

Your analogy is spot on. It's a perverse incentive system. It doesn't make any rational sense, but that's the way it is. Even more ironically, the impact factor of open access journals matters even more than for paywall journals. Once a paywall journal is established it's fairly stable. If it loses its impact factor that's bad, but doesn't mean the death of the journal. But with an OA journal if you have an impact factor and then lose it, your submissions drop off a cliff, which directly ties into your revenue, and that will often be the actual death of the journal.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#64

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Agreed. When I use the term 'outsourcing' I mean that from grant administrators' point of view the scientific journal is a black box, providing X level of quality control for Y subscription cost.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#65

Post by return0 »

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…

These publishers added value back in the days when they actually enabled communication via printing. They should have been abandoned the day after WWW was invented. The "established" publishers literally suck the blood of academia and taxpayer money nowadays. First, they appropriate other people's work in all stages (writing, review, corrections, illustations etc etc.). Then they stymie the development of open-access journals by keeping every good scientist busy reviewing their papers for free (coddling them, showering them with "prestige"). Then they keep the copyrights of work they didn't pay for, they make it impossible for data scientists to collect the experimental data, they hide the papers behind paywalls and they don't even add a comment section where readers can post legitimate q&a's, comments etc. And on top of that they require to be paid for all this free work. If that is not insane, i don't know what is.

The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought.

Lastly, consider this. My institution can only afford to pay subscriptions to the most widely read journals, so I find myself using some obscure russian proxy to download them illegally. Apparently there is a need for that, and there are entire websites dedicated to that. This is outrageous.

The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all they need is a kick in the butt.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#66

Post by Maken »

bovik wrote: post #52
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?

Only recent papers and only from publishers which allow it.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#67

Post by ylem »

bovik wrote: post #52
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?

It's not math or CS, but some chemistry journals don't allow preprints on the arxiv. Also, for some new results in physics, you don't put them on the arxiv if you're worried about being scooped...

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#68

Post by ylem »

The following is interesting: http://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-increase...

It will be interesting to see how this evolves. I also see more open access publications (where the publication is free for the public, but the author pays the publisher) these days--but I'm not sure if they have subsidies for researchers from smaller institutions.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#69

Post by Maken »

aswanson wrote: post #62

Why don't all universities just make all their professors papers available online. No journals, etc, just put the damn pdfs online and let people cite by hyperlink and normal inline citations. To hell with the publishers.

Most people do that, and most publishers allow authors to publish preprints of their works. Google Scholar is the usual place for looking for citations.

But all this rely on the good faith of the editor and universities preserving the author personal pages forever. And the entire system lacks any standardization or interoperability.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#70

Post by rsfern »

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…

For most Elsevier journals, you can post your preprint or even the accepted manuscript online--for example on a personal site or the arXiv. Sometimes I wonder why this point isn't brought up more often in discussions on open access publishing.
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