Not just Dutch universities, other universities within EU should join the effort.
Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 prestigious).
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#103I 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…
It makes much more sense to pay once for publishing a paper than continuously paying for it forever, doesn't matter by who. Searching for a 50+ years old paper and bumping into a paywall is really frustrating. What justifies these journals to make a profit from these papers forever?
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought. I don't find it ridiculous at all. Just because it's intangible doesn't mean it doesn't have economic value. As I mentioned elsewhere, a considerable amount of that economic value comes from non-scientists who can't evaluate work themselves but can look at the organ of pu…
Guys, i m not saying prestige isnt valuable, but it's just ridiculous to sell it to publicly funded scientists in 2015, as if it s american idol.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You validated the necessity for prestige in the modern era, but didn't actually comment on whether 'selling prestige' in 2015 is a ridiculous thought.
Ah, sorry, I thought the comment I was replying to was questioning the need for someone to provide prestige at all, as opposed to being focused on the concept of selling that prestige. In general I don't have a problem with the idea of selling curation/prestige in the form of products and services, so I don't think it's a ridiculous thought (either for 2015 or any other time in history). Let's take another example, s…
So if someone can offer you a stamp of approval that the general public trusts, that gives people a reason to believe your book is worth their time more than other books, that's a valuable service
But a big book publisher doesn't just do this for an author. The author gets to leverage the publishers advertising/marketing budget and connections.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#106It'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…
Prestige is a cornerstone of circular reasoning.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought. I don't find it ridiculous at all. Just because it's intangible doesn't mean it doesn't have economic value. As I mentioned elsewhere, a considerable amount of that economic value comes from non-scientists who can't evaluate work themselves but can look at the organ of pu…
Guys, i m not saying prestige isnt valuable, but it's just ridiculous to sell it to publicly funded scientists in 2015, as if it s american idol.
On some levels it actually is like American Idol.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>> Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access? I didn't understand from your answer why validation and restriction of public access need to go hand-in-hand. When I left academia, I was no longer able to read tax-payer funded research papers without paying an exorbitant fee per paper. Are you saying that lowering the fees is would lead to "losing a ton of money"? Do you mean the publisher would becom…
I'd iterpret that as the fact that right now, any academic or institution who chooses to unilaterally avoid the current system will lose lots of funding, as the publication metrics are actively used by the funding bodies in project evaluation.
I am not aware of any alternative that can replace the current publication metrics for this purpose. The funding bodies have no motivation, capability or resources to make a replacement themselves, so that would have to come as a ready-made replacement in order to be accepted, and actually work (have usable content) for evaluating all current academic disciplines and academics out of the box (which seems rather unrealistic) so that a multi-disciplinary funding body can actually put that metric in their next funding round official evaluation criteria.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#109As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.
There is https://scirate.com/
It's only really used by the quantum information community at this point, but you could try promoting it in yours.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#110Earlier 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…
I would say that the real value of your work could be measured with something like pagerank: basically if your work is eventually cited, it's prestigious. What the journals maybe provide is prestige before your work has been widely cited, plus publicity. Even if the article is on arxiv, more people will take a look if you say it will soon be published in, say, Cell. Maybe they shouldn't even bother publishing- just h…
Irony alert: PageRank was originally modeled on the observation of how academic citations are a network. Back on topic - still many works are read, but never cited, despite their contribution to science (that's another nut to crack though).