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Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

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Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#111

Post by kriro »

impendia wrote: post #82
matheusmoreira wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering why submitting papers to these journals is necessary. Does the research not stand on its own? > I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family I feel the same way. ArXiv accepts submissions from any registered researcher¹ and it seems so much easier. ¹ https://arxiv.org/help/submit

> Does the research not stand on its own? Academic mathematician here. It does, sort of, but ..... Say a mathematics postdoc is applying for a job, and she works in underwater basketweaving. The two underwater basketweavers in her dream department read her application and can see that she's brilliant. She's developed a new methodology for weaving rattan under 100 feet of ocean without even getting it wet. She has let…

I feel like one step for fixing this would be a pledge by hiring committee members. Say the university of X thinks publisher Y is a burden on the scientific community and as such will ignore everything the applicants have published there (or even weight it negatively). It's never going to happen but these issues need to be attacked from all angles that affect the careers of scientists. Employers, publishers, peers and students.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#112

Post by ztakeo »

Balgair wrote: post #54
dkarapetyan wrote: post #24

The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me. What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publi…

Its because most PIs could care less about the actual research, but rather only care about their 'rank' in the pissing contest that is academia. The internet should have, and in some more lucrative and distributed areas of the ivory tower it actually has like Archiv, made journals redundant and pointless. Only peer review should have remained. One would naively think this based on the idea that the academy is about k…

While I agree that some of the blame falls on the PIs, it should fall on the university system as well. My PI recently read his mid-tenure review to our group, noting that there are explicit publishing metrics evaluated by the department which play a major role in his performance review. Things like ranking of journals published in (ref. Reuters InCites), # citations etc. I understand a department's desire for a quantitative evaluation metric, but at the same time as long as this mechanism is in place the system will not change.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#113

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rflrob wrote: post #108
impendia wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do those sorts of differences in early publishing predict later success? Absolutely yes. They are perhaps the most reliable yardstick for past success that we have available, and past success is the best predictor of future success.

Citation? Also, it's worth pointing out that the question was not "do they predict success", but "do they predict success controlling for pedigree ". Ive been thinking for a while on how you might actually measure the effect of pedigree, beyond the identity of university. I believe that the specific research group matters, but that's a lot harder to prove (smaller N, harder to get reliable data about counterfacuals).

> it's worth pointing out that the question was not "do they predict success", but "do they predict success controlling for pedigree"

This is a valid social question. As a hirer, however, you are measured by your success, not your success benchmarked to some other thing.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#114

Post by a3_nm »

vacri wrote: post #91
a3_nm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arXiv website operates on less than $1M per year (source: Wikipedia page) and takes care of everything that is needed to disseminate knowledge except for arranging reviews (don't forget that traditional publishers are not actually doing the reviews). In terms of arranging reviews, it shouldn't be hard to do better than the publisher-run reviewing platforms (which in my experience are all incredibly crappy). I don…

arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines. You're comparing apples to oranges. EasyChair is also something to run a conference with, not a blinded review system per se. Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy and Elsevier can be so massively undercut,…

> arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines

Yes, you should probably scale the operating costs of arXiv according to the number of papers published. arXiv's reported overall cost is a few dollars for each paper hosted. Compare this with Elsevier's subscription fees or most journal's $1000-plus fees to put your article in "author pays" open access.

> Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews

Yes, an editor, which in my field is essentially always an unpaid volunteer.

> Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information

This should probably apply to arXiv to. Can you show me evidence that arXiv is having lots of legal trouble just because they are distributing PDFs? The only legal trouble I could see them getting into is essentially trolling from Elsevier et al about "their" papers getting uploaded.

> If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy

I do not think this.

I think we agree that, as you say, "the technical part is not the difficult part", but I disagree with you in that you seem to imply that large for-profit publishers are somehow necessary (see your earlier message, "from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head"). Again, Elsevier has a profit margin of 37%, which is ridiculously high, and shows that a large part of the money they take in is a net loss for research. Of its other operating costs, I suspect that lots cover things like lobbying, litigation, having useless booths to be seen at conferences, etc., that research doesn't need either.)

To borrow an argument from https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/why-sci-hub-will-win-595b5...: contrary to most fields of human activity, if large for-profit publishers were to disappear overnight, I'm confident that a self-organized, free, Internet-based way to distribute and review articles would take over very quickly and run at a fraction of the cost. This isn't just speculation: Sci-Hub already exists, works fine, and the main obstacle to its growth is copyright trolling from large publishers, not some intrinsic difficulty.

So, in my opinion, the challenge to replace Elsevier is not technical (as you say), but it's not caused either by some intrinsic need for something like Elsevier: it's just a question of inertia of researchers and of the prestige of journals. Of course academic publishing is hard to do right, but Elsevier is not doing it right, they are simply milking the prestige of the venues and smaller publishing companies that they bought.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#115

Post by CaptainZapp »

impendia wrote: post #82
matheusmoreira wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep wondering why submitting papers to these journals is necessary. Does the research not stand on its own? > I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family I feel the same way. ArXiv accepts submissions from any registered researcher¹ and it seems so much easier. ¹ https://arxiv.org/help/submit

> Does the research not stand on its own? Academic mathematician here. It does, sort of, but ..... Say a mathematics postdoc is applying for a job, and she works in underwater basketweaving. The two underwater basketweavers in her dream department read her application and can see that she's brilliant. She's developed a new methodology for weaving rattan under 100 feet of ocean without even getting it wet. She has let…

  That was a bit long winded, and please forgive me if it's a bit silly
It was neither. For somebody not working in science it was a fascinating and very illustrative summary and represents very much one of the reasons why I'm here.

Thanks!

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#116

Post by refurb »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #24

The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me. What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publi…

I don't think it's hard to figure out at all. These journals have something people want, prestige.

Scientists are free to publish in whatever journal they want, including open source. They chose not to. Yes, you could argue it's not much of a choice since their tenure is dependent on publishing in these journals.

Start convincing the people who make the important decisions to stop looking for "Science" and "Cell" in CVs and the problem will solve itself.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#117

Post by pmyteh »

socmag wrote: post #76
pmyteh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends a lot on the field. At the more philosophical end of my discipline (politics) a good book published by a first-or-second-tier publisher (one of the major university presses, plus the best of the commercial publishers) is a major career progression requirement. In my part (quantitative, mainly methodology) it's all done in journals and monographs are rare. It really does depend.

I get that in academia there is a standard publication path for thought and insight in the form of scientific papers. It's a cool thing. Scientific papers are not everyone's cup of tea though, and somewhat inaccessible (to publish for) for older people or those outside of academia. Surely there is a middle ground between "JavaScript for Dummies", "Studies in Global Illumination" and "Computation on the modular hypers…

It's a problem. The incentives are for getting published, not getting read. We are somewhat rewarded for producing accessible content in the form of teaching, but anything popular in writing (even if scholarly and read by millions) just isn't quite recognised.

And that deliberate obscurity is a thing, though not a universal one. And that is evil.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#118

Post by [deleted] »

socmag wrote: post #76
pmyteh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends a lot on the field. At the more philosophical end of my discipline (politics) a good book published by a first-or-second-tier publisher (one of the major university presses, plus the best of the commercial publishers) is a major career progression requirement. In my part (quantitative, mainly methodology) it's all done in journals and monographs are rare. It really does depend.

I get that in academia there is a standard publication path for thought and insight in the form of scientific papers. It's a cool thing. Scientific papers are not everyone's cup of tea though, and somewhat inaccessible (to publish for) for older people or those outside of academia. Surely there is a middle ground between "JavaScript for Dummies", "Studies in Global Illumination" and "Computation on the modular hypers…

[deleted]

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#119

Post by _lpa_ »

nacc wrote: post #39

I always wonder why some disciplines are more open than others [0]. As someone in biology: the state of publication is very sad. We have to pay thousands to _submit_ a manuscript, and then: - get rejected right away, or - the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or - we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and g…

We just had a paper accepted after 11 months. There is no good reason for it taking this long. I wish biology would adopt the publishing practices of physics or machine learning.

Re: Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier

#120

Post by return0 »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #24

The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me. What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publi…

To be clear: it's not for the lack of alternatives, like http://frontiersin.org or http://elifesciences.org .

It's purely a cultural problem with life sciences . The problem is how to get way more people to publish in open access journals, so that they become prestigious. Elife is doing good progress with it.

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