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What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

osc.universityofcalifornia.edu

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Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#101

Post by buboard »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

I agree that they provide some service. That service costs at best $500. I just don't see how they can even ask for $5000 for proofreading articles. I don't value the rest of their pre-publication work at all: It is all done by volunteers, and my experience with their (paid) editors is not good: they do just as much a lousy job on getting reviewers to respond in time as any other journal. They change their minds and are very, very swayed by politics. And , tbh, i don't care about the proofreading. Some journals have extremely detailed authoring guidelines that are useless: Typesetting a subscript in italics doesn't provide value to science, and most typos will be found out by anyone who reads your article. The assumption that a paper must be "print ready" is stupid in the 2010s. Anyone can spot your typos and you can correct them on the spot. Proofreading can in no way be a justification for publishing with elsevier or NPG. I found e-life's editorial process much, much more professional and it's open access too. They value the time of scientists and will reject your paper fast. In fact many other journals are experimenting with new formats. Hopefully the new established science reporting format will be something better.

The key is to get reviewers to stop reviewing articles for them. It's this that keeps them relevant. Whether the end publication is on wordpress or on medium doesn't matter much.

Also, https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-sci...

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#102

Post by leemailll »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #91
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

>there are a few billion in that industry being spent on editing and coordination tasks. I understand why you would think this, but most editing is done by unpaid volunteers. They have 20,000 editors and ~8000 employees. Which means institutions are already "paying" to submit reports, with exceptions for those who can't afford it.

The editing is not done by volunteers, the reviewing process is. Editing, proofreading, layout, and submit related info to different databases need to be done by someone. Editors for academic journals usually did not do the late part.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#103

Post by sigwinch28 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

> Going from a final draft to a published, peer-reviewed paper involves quite a few menial tasks, and scientists will either need to fill those roles themselves, or someone needs to pay someone else.

Which stages are you referring to? In my experiences in CS, publishing a _conference_ paper required:

  - Writing the paper using a publisher-provided LaTeX documentclass (potentially a significant portion of publisher costs went into developing this style)
  - Submitting the paper, via third-party conference management systems
  - Review, performed for free by other researchers
  - Responding to reviews, performed by me
  - Submitting a camera-ready version of the paper. The checks were mostly performed automatically (PDF metadata, page size, fonts, text size, balanced last page, page limits, margins, etc.)
  - Checking of the camera-ready paper (this seems like an actual menial task performed by someone on the publishing side, although I think that this was also contracted out)
  - Assembling the proceedings PDF (again, I assume this was automated, with the menial task of checking TOCs, headers, and footers)
  - Attending the conference itself (I assume the most money goes into this, renting the venue, organising AV teams, large amounts of co-ordination)
Things then get worse, because one specific publisher charges for intstitutional access, again for Gold OA (though Green OA is a free option), and then several hundred dollars for attending the conference.

It seems to me that most of the menial tasks are already automated. A lot of the menial tasks are even contracted out. I have colleagues who go to great lengths to organise local seminar series, run workshops, Perhaps I am missing some, or some of these are much more involved than they appear on the surface.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#104

Post by pbhjpbhj »

n1000 wrote: post #52
dash2 wrote: post #4

Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service. I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu. A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a…

Another fun fact about Elsevier: In their contract with university libraries they exclude the right of fair use as described in the US copyright law. That means one can download papers, but technically mustn't use the data found in them without consent. This is just ridiculous.

Isn't that illegal? Or at least, doesn't that cancel the copyright as it explicitly breaches the copyright contract with the demos.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#105

Post by geofft »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #97
geofft wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is g…

So what's Linux market share for desktops these days?

About 40%, because if you're comparing relative to the early 2000s, mobile devices are now filling the role that only desktops filled them. Drawing a distinction makes about as much sense as distinguishing desktops and laptops.

Plus, given that when folks like Darl McBride said "He can't have written an entire OS" they were clearly not thinking about just the Linux kernel, I think there's a solid argument for counting macOS and iOS too, both of which depend on the assumption that open-source code is of comparable quality to proprietary, commercially-developed code. Everything from their core kernel to the shell to the database for storing contacts (SQLite) is code developed in ways that the McBrides of the world said was untenable. That bumps it to almost 60%.

(Don't try me, I still have my Slashdot-honed debate skills.)

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#106

Post by buboard »

geofft wrote: post #95
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #77

I know we all hate Elsevier, and I do, too. But the assumption in this threat that one could get rid of publishers without any thought and with absolutely no downside is simplifying it slightly too far. Elsevier currently has a margin of about 35%. That's a lot, and probably too much. But it also means they are spending 65% of revenue on something . Even assuming a decent chunk is marketing and sales, there are a few…

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is g…

Thats not a valid analogy because reviewers and authors already work for free for closed-access journals. And open-access journals are not of lower quality, just not as popular. The closest analogy would be the App Store which forces programmers to pay an extortionate tax to have their code 'recognized'.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#107

Post by tjansson »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #97
geofft wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument sounds very much like the arguments I remember hearing in the early 2000s about open source. "Sure, Microsoft is bad, but can random hobbyists on the internet produce something of the same quality?" "There's just no way that this Finnish dude wrote an entire operating system from scratch, he must have stolen work from this commercial UNIX that took years of paid engineering work to develop." "MySQL is g…

So what's Linux market share for desktops these days?

Or you could ask what does the top 500 supercomputers all run... Linux. See: https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/

Or servers, or mobile devices in the form of Android phones. Desktop usage is only one many use cases for Linux.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#108

Post by notyourday »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #98
gbrown wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a big upfront cost.

(Actual question:) How is a standard journal-style typesetting a big upfront cost? Surely the authors do all the hard parts, make the graphs, section, maths markup, footnotes. What's left that can't be automated in almost every situation?

You are seriously giving authors too much credit. The vast majority of the journal papers require enormous amount of production editing -- that's exactly why the EICs and societies sold those journals to publishers.

Things that I have seen : ( wife was a production editor, I briefly helped an EIC of a society journal that was sold to a publisher )

1. Graphs do not fit the page or space allotment - journal is uses two column format, author decided it did not apply to them. Graphs do not fit the color scheme - the author decided that the graph will be blue and the legend would be green. This is a black and white journal. Graph is a photograph of a graph, not a graph. Photo was taken on an iphone.

2. Sections went out of order. Author did not use the numbering system and numbered them by hand. Author cross referenced sections by hand, changed the ordering and did not update all of them, referring to non-existent sections.

3. Footnotes referred to non-existent papers.

4. Author included someone else's figures. Author did not obtain a permission to use them.

5. Accepted paper is written in a monospace font in WordPerfect for DOS. In 2014.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#109

Post by tomxor »

bonoboTP wrote: post #86
tomxor wrote: post #51

Random thought, with fight club math :) - The only remaining value journals like Elsevier have are their giant stash of papers, it's the sole thing perpetuating the whole absurd organization... so: A. How much money do Elsevier take from universities each year? B. How many years will it take for Elsevier to go bankrupt without income from said universities? C. How much money will it take to buy *all papers* from the…

But having public domain papers (eg arxiv) does not advance a carrier in the same way. You need papers in high impact factor journals in many fields to look good in evaluations (at all stages in the academic carrier ladder).

That is true in the past, and present out of sheer momentum, but it's clear opinion is changing on the value of these journals, especially in light of various absurd failures of their peer review process. I think they are only "high impact" merely out of critical mass, not any intrinsic quality of the journal itself.

You are correct in pointing out it's a significant factor in the perpetuity of these organisations, and hopefully it's an opinion that enough boycotting will topple.

Re: What you may have heard about the dispute between UC and Elsevier

#110

Post by michaelmior »

BorRagnarok wrote: post #58
michaelmior wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope their CEO becomes homeless. Not having experienced homelessness myself, this still isn't something I would wish in anyone.

Oh I would, and that he may go completely broke too, and die miserable, alone, and in pain. These people's greed has caused enormous harm and cost uncountable lives. That's what keeping this knowledge to yourself does, otherwise our doctors would still be doing bloodletting and sacrificing small animals. And in a certain way, we still are. Which doctor has the money to access all those journals? Lost of clues to a cu…

I'm not arguing that what Elsevier is doing is good, but I do think desiring terrible things for others however "bad" we may perceive them to be is ultimately not productive.
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