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Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

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Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#31

Post by dmitriz »

MrGunn wrote: post #25
dmitriz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If publishers play hardball, no researcher will ever work for them as authors, referees or editors. Or they come down to more reasonable prices and perhaps reduce their 40% profits to ones in line with other industries?

Again, Dmitri, there's plenty of reasons to criticize Elsevier without making things up. RELX doesn't break out profit by division, but the operating margin for Elsevier is around 22%, which anyone can read for themselves in their annual report.

The figure of 40% appears in quite a number of sources. Do they all make things up? Does the "operating margin" somehow refute it? Does "operating" here mean 22% after subtracting all additional (possibly luxurious or generously allocated) expenses?

No one really wants to criticise anyone and every work should be fairly rewarded. It is the unfair part that people are objecting to.

Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#32

Post by Latteland »

njarboe wrote: post #26
MrGunn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for r…

Aren't most editors unpaid volunteers? There are paid type setters and web people, etc., but the editors who are knowledgeable in the field are not paid except for maybe top 10 journals like Science and Nature.

Yes, the common belief (and it's mine too) is that the gatekeepers like Elsevier use free or low paid experts to pick the good papers and edit them and keep that expensive fee you pay them. Is this only in CS? In my experience all the work was done by free-to-the-publisher editors and what the editors got was listing they were on that journal.

Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#33

Post by njarboe »

Latteland wrote: post #32
njarboe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't most editors unpaid volunteers? There are paid type setters and web people, etc., but the editors who are knowledgeable in the field are not paid except for maybe top 10 journals like Science and Nature.

Yes, the common belief (and it's mine too) is that the gatekeepers like Elsevier use free or low paid experts to pick the good papers and edit them and keep that expensive fee you pay them. Is this only in CS? In my experience all the work was done by free-to-the-publisher editors and what the editors got was listing they were on that journal.

Yea, I brought this up because I have published in a few Earth science journals and that was how it worked in that field.

The editors look at the papers and are the first level of rejections. The ones they think are decent they send to people they think would be good at reviewing the content. The reviews come back (or not, and they send the paper to someone else to review), the editor reads the reviews and, if the reviewer think the paper should be published, the editor sends the reviews to the author for the author to make changes to the paper as needed. The author returns the paper with the edits and explanations for why some suggestions from the reviewer were not followed. The editor now usually accepts the paper for publication and hands off the author to a typesetter that will help in getting the Word doc or TeX formatted paper into the style that the journal wants. This last person is paid by the journal, but in no way needs a PhD in the field or much knowledge of the material he/she is reading.

Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#35

Post by posterboy »

dmitriz wrote: post #20
posterboy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit on the fence about the violent nature but if publishers play hard ball, I'm not sure who to blame. In the meantime, if access through libraries is revoked and if that could go on for a whi... oh right, sci-hub, but that works because of running subscriptions. What's the end-game, it goes on slowly and gradually, untill the currently invaluable material became obsolete while a substantial pre-print based re…

If publishers play hardball, no researcher will ever work for them as authors, referees or editors. Or they come down to more reasonable prices and perhaps reduce their 40% profits to ones in line with other industries?

did you forget a zero on that figure? Where do the expenses come from if they do not pay editors, reviewers and authors? Is the discount for libraries so big that they can claim a 60% to 80% loss over a fictive idealized price?

Also, it's less the price but how the money is (not) redistributed, I thought.

Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#36

Post by posterboy »

posterboy wrote: post #17
wetpaws wrote: post #2

Every nail in Elsevier coffin is a great news, paywaled scientific publications is an archaic, dystopian and shameful legacy that should never exist in a first place.

I am a bit on the fence about the violent nature but if publishers play hard ball, I'm not sure who to blame. In the meantime, if access through libraries is revoked and if that could go on for a whi... oh right, sci-hub, but that works because of running subscriptions. What's the end-game, it goes on slowly and gradually, untill the currently invaluable material became obsolete while a substantial pre-print based re…

additionally I came to think that keeping anyone not associated with academia from, err, academia would be on purpose, and the strikes are just increasing the pressure.

Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#37

Post by dmitriz »

sleavey wrote: post #28
MrGunn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for r…

That's true, but I'm not so sure all of that is still really necessary with the way science dissemination is chaging. In computing science for example the de-facto standard is to self-publish papers on arXiv where there is no peer review prior to publication (beyond arXiv's moderators who check papers are properly categorised, formatted, etc.). The "peer review" comes in the form of the community reading and citing o…

> but I am sure we will find solutions to these problems in time.

Solutions have been found -- overlay journals:

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/94

Re: Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

#38

Post by dmitriz »

MrGunn wrote: post #22
Protohedgehog wrote: post #15

Just a note that we have asked the European Commission to investigate Elsevier for abuse of a dominant market position: https://zenodo.org/record/1472045 , and also now Education International (32 million members, 400 member organisations) are taking the fight to them through academic unions. https://bit.ly/2PPjwRK

I wish people would work on the systemic issues of access, rather than acting like Elsevier is somehow uniquely responsible. If Elsevier disappeared overnight, there would still be the other 84% of the market. Efforts like the above just lead to the open access movement getting co-opted by anti-capitalists, which hurts progress.

Overview of distribution of costs by 5 main publishers -- Elsevier share is larger than all other 4 large publishers combined:

https://oa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/B14-12-Lidiia-Bor...

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