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Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

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Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#111

Post by anonymousDan »

Jugurtha wrote: post #71
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…

And for what! I left Universtiy a year ago. To prepare my dissertation, I had to read hundreds of articles like everyone, and like everyone, I had to sort through all the crap that somehow makes it to IEEE. I expected that peer reviewed articles would be the best there is. I was working on ECG signals that were acquired in our institute and in a hospital to deal with all sorts of unbearable noises and artefacts. And…

IEEE is meaningless. You need to look at the top 2-3 venues in your field and submit there. Most of the rest is noise. Except perhaps for work published in 2nd tier venues by people that have other papers in top tier venues, as most likely such work is at least solid if not quite novel enough to get in to a top tier venue.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#112

Post by PeterisP »

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 all; since it prevents me from publishing that research in some place that matters.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#114

Post by mnw21cam »

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.

Why just the professors' papers? You have lecturers, postdocs, PhD students, and other researchers all churning out papers too.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#115

Post by ramblerman »

dougmccune wrote: post #72
return0 wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

You severely underestimate the ability of the greater community to curate given full access to the information.

Look at stackoverflow, hackernews as simple examples in different fields.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#116

Post by return0 »

ramblerman wrote: post #115
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…

You severely underestimate the ability of the greater community to curate given full access to the information. Look at stackoverflow, hackernews as simple examples in different fields.

You forget that the "greater community" of scientists already curates these articles for free (the reviewers). It's not the curation that's wrong, it's the closed-access.

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#117

Post by bluenose69 »

The main funding agency in my country is starting to demand that we publish in open-access journals. It seems like a wonderful thing, except for one little detail: the agency is not supplying any extra funding. The difference in cost between conventional and open-access grants is a significant fraction of the typical grant. Are researchers expected to publish less frequently, or to reduce students stipends?

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#119

Post by acaloiar »

Someone wrote: post #31
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…

"If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere that does not support open access” Don’t they do that? https://publicaccess.nih.gov : "To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH…

That is good news indeed! Thank you for letting me know. This is my first publicly funded work and I am not familiar with many of the policies. I will sleep better knowing that our work will not be holed up exclusively in the Elsevier-beast.

Also of interest: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access/agree...

Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

#120

Post by dougmccune »

freyr wrote: post #96
dougmccune wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

They don't have to go hand in hand. Others have pointed out eLife as an example of high prestige open access. There's no reason, other than history and inertia, that the validation has to come at the expense of access. However, I'd argue that I haven't yet seen a good model where the validation isn't expensive (by some definition of expensive). So I definitely think curation/validation can be delinked from the paywall, but I'm not convinced they can be provided free or cheap (and yes, the standard argument that reviewers aren't paid is valid, but the idea that publishers don't have real costs managing that process is simply naive).
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