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Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

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Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#121

Post by dougmccune »

tprice7 wrote: post #95
dougmccune wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're spot on in that citations are largely the pagerank metric and that's really what "counts", but there's a need for having an earlier metric. Journal impact factor is a computation based on historical citation count of articles in a journal. The leap of faith is then that if you publish in a journal that has a history of publishing highly cited work, that means your work is good and likely to be highly cited. Th…

That makes sense. I'm curious what you think about variants on the PageRank idea that address the slowness problem you point out. You state in an earlier comment “so if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great”. You could theoretically have a PageRank-like system where some nodes are papers, some nodes are committees, and (maybe) some nodes…

There are certainly other data points, once example is Mendeley bookmarks, that can indicate what research is being highly viewed/discussed. If you know what people are passing around organically, and especially if you knew who those people were, then you could apply different weightings to that data. If a leading scientist in the field is digging through your paper, or has started citing it in their unpublished work, that might be an indication of quality that's useful.

The other thing that could make citation data more useful earlier might be taking a more complex view of citations. PageRank doesn't equally weight links, ie links from authoritative sources like the NYT count more than random sites. I think there's plenty of room for improvement in applying similar mechanisms to enhance citation metrics. And maybe some of that could start playing into making citation metrics more useful earlier in the process. If you only have one citation, but it's from a preprint article written by a Nobel Prize winner, that should count more than 10 citations from published articles by random postdocs (although I have a feeling that even that idea wouldn't be accepted without a lot of controversy in academia).

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#122

Post by dougmccune »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #86
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'm a librarian computer programmer, and somewhat familiar with the 'industry'. We've definitely inherited something from a pre-digital age, where it took non-trivial capital and staff to actually publish and distribute stuff. But on the other hand, there are still aspects that make it unclear exactly how to change the 'market'. Someone else in this thread said what the publishers provide is 'prestige'. I don't think…

Thanks for your insight, it's really great hearing from a librarian. One sad, but interesting note: while it seems ridiculous, our costs to publish a paper have typically increased rather than decreased. The margins on traditional journals are actually shrinking, not growing. This is mostly because we simply can't easily drop print entirely for legacy journals. New ones we can launch digital only (although there are lots of reasons that launching new journals is increasingly difficult too). But even though it sounds ridiculous, our customers (you, the librarian, or at least your peers) often demand print in addition to the electronic. So now we have to pay for the electronic distribution as well as the print.

This is purely a problem of legacy. If you launch a new OA journal there isn't the same print expectation. And granted, it's a problem that will go away eventually. But I continue to be surprised that we can't simply stop doing all printing of journals.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#123

Post by nicolapede »

return0 wrote: post #102
dougmccune wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to argue with all the reasons you think publishers are insane. However, I will argue with the comment that "selling prestige in 2015 is a ridiculous thought." Offering prestige in 2015 is even more valuable than it has ever been. There is more research published than there has ever been, from all around the world. The amount of research information is increasing dramatically, just like it is with all in…

Now you are conflating prestige with curation. Journals dont do curation other than an initial check, instead reviewers decide, for free. Publishers' job is basically to make sure that the herd perceives them as prestigious by coddling the big names to publish in their journals (again, for free). This is social engineering. They do not do anything that an openaccess journal can't do. (Look at eLife, open and prestigi…

The quality of the pool of reviewers is not independent on the prestige of the journal I'd say.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#125

Post by aswanson »

PeterisP wrote: post #112
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.

The people generally already do make the papers available, but that's still not a replacement for journals or indexed conferences; if I just put the paper online without it also being in a reputable publication, then from the point of carreer and future funding I might just as well thrown it in garbage. The same goes with low-ranked open access publication venues - publishing in them is worse than not publishing at a…

What seems to be broken, though, is the question of why that place matters; it seems to be cabal-driven and to some extent corrupted. The results of research should be able to matter purely on their own merit, not because of a tag some committee put on it. Idealistic? Of course, but that doesnt mean that is not worth pursuing.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#126

Post by tprice7 »

dougmccune wrote: post #121
tprice7 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense. I'm curious what you think about variants on the PageRank idea that address the slowness problem you point out. You state in an earlier comment “so if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great”. You could theoretically have a PageRank-like system where some nodes are papers, some nodes are committees, and (maybe) some nodes…

There are certainly other data points, once example is Mendeley bookmarks, that can indicate what research is being highly viewed/discussed. If you know what people are passing around organically, and especially if you knew who those people were, then you could apply different weightings to that data. If a leading scientist in the field is digging through your paper, or has started citing it in their unpublished work…

Interesting ideas, thanks for the response.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#127

Post by jrochkind1 »

dougmccune wrote: post #122
jrochkind1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a librarian computer programmer, and somewhat familiar with the 'industry'. We've definitely inherited something from a pre-digital age, where it took non-trivial capital and staff to actually publish and distribute stuff. But on the other hand, there are still aspects that make it unclear exactly how to change the 'market'. Someone else in this thread said what the publishers provide is 'prestige'. I don't think…

Thanks for your insight, it's really great hearing from a librarian. One sad, but interesting note: while it seems ridiculous, our costs to publish a paper have typically increased rather than decreased. The margins on traditional journals are actually shrinking, not growing. This is mostly because we simply can't easily drop print entirely for legacy journals. New ones we can launch digital only (although there are…

And yet the amount of money libraries spend on getting access to published scholarly research has gone up astronomically too. [1] [2] (even if you normalize it for inflation, or per university FTE, or as a percentage of library or university budgets, whatever. Astronomicaly.)

So where's the money going?

When Elsevier reported 36% profit margins in 2010 according to Wikipedia[3], I have trouble believing that publishers are being squeezed too much. At least not Elsevier and other mega-publishers. I can't easily find googlable historical Elsevier reported profit margins, but I would be shocked if they have actually gone down rather than up over the past 10-15 years.

For comparison, it looks like traditional major book publishers have profit margins of around 10%. [4]

Wikipedia states and cites >

It doesn't sound like decreasing margins to me, and it doesn't seem that way to the universities paying for these margins, who can't afford it.

[1] http://www.marywaltham.com/Journal_pricing_change_Oct08.pdf

[2] http://www.library.illinois.edu/scholcomm/journalcosts.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

[4] http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/how-much-money-the-bigg...

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#128

Post by kragen »

thegrif wrote: post #84

I'm the former director of innovation for IEEE. I actually recruited many members of my team from HN. We were developing some great stuff to address many of the comments here. Unfortunately they just didn't have the stomach for it - and hardly none of it hit users (and the stuff that did was so watered down to protect current revenue streams that it's completely different (and in some cases silly). There were a handf…

That sounds really interesting! What kind of stuff were you developing, and what kind of roadblocks did you hit?
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