German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier | Hacker News Reader

German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier

chemistryworld.com

473 pointssohkamyung149 comments

Best of luck. Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again).

To the average decision maker these "new models" will sound perfectly fine. The EU want to make all research public by 2020? Elsevier and other have very deep pockets, so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.

> so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.

And since we are in guessing mode, here is another one: In a few years we will have multiple sci-hubs and pirate edu sites so by the time the public arrives at completely free research, it won't even be a victory any more - just a symbol of the wretchedness of their fight - which, by then, will make everybody wonder, why it took so long.

While SciHub etc. will help to liberate research for individuals, it won't stop university libraries from spending a lot of money on legacy journal subscriptions just yet.

Maybe, but:

> Gowers hopes that German negotiators and Elsevier will both ‘refuse to budge’ and that contract talks break with no agreement. Under such a scenario he believes it will become clear that Germany’s researchers have not suffered any serious inconvenience. ‘This, I believe, is what would truly embolden other countries and lead to a collapse of the current system.’

> Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again)

This is the key aspect here which everyone needs to address. Just moving from a subscription model to "open access" where you still pay 2000$ per article won't solve or alleviate the problem.

Doesn't "open access" usual mean free-of-charge access the articles (but perhaps at the expense of an open access, publishing fee to the author)? If not, in what sense are they using the term "open access"? Could you link to an example of what you or the parent commenter are referring to?

Why do you need to pay for? What is the service being rendered? I do not think that Elsevier provides any value here.

Advocates of the existing system say that they provide a) the good name of their journal which stems from b) the selection that they're doing, i.e. prestigious papers pride themselves with only publishing the best works of their field.

EDIT: If I had to build a publishing system for research papers, I'd probably have something like Arxiv as a basis, i.e. a site with huge storage capacity where everyone can upload papers given that some basic quality criteria are met (formatting etc.). Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers. It could be integrated right into the same site, similar to how reviewers work e.g. on Steam.

>Then, the role of journals would be performed by reviewers that curate a collection of interesting papers for their readers.

You're skipping a step. The journals' editorial staff performs a quality filter on the submissions before any reviewers/referees even see it. E.g. see the process of a prestigious journal like Nature.[1]

With your proposal, the reviewers with specialized knowledge (e.g. theoretical physicist that understands the bleeding edge of string theory) would have to wade through 1000 papers about "aliens from outer space prove that flat Earth is real." Or mathematicians would waste time with endless crackpot papers that supposedly proved "P=NP".

Since no rational referee with limited time would suffer through that for free, the platform would inevitably require a filter of some sort. Since it's human nature to not want to do something for free ... voila ... you end up recreating another "Elsevier" as middleman again. If an intermediary becomes good at filtering papers for referees and sets a consistent quality bar for readers (subscribers), its human nature to want to be paid for that effort.

Some people wonder why journals exist. They exist because people want them to exist even though they don't realize it. The accumulation of prestige and reputation for curating quality is not free.

Instead of questioning the legitimacy of intermediaries, it's more productive to accept them as a natural emergence of humans' finite time that prevents both reviewers & readers from slogging through an infinite sea of worthless material.

If we acknowledge that something like Elsevier must exist in some form, this lets us concentrate on the recreating the curation platform in a more cost-efficient manner. (You can't do it for free... because charging $0 will not work for the reviewers nor the readers -- even though some in this thread think it does. Sturgeon's Law is applicable here.[2])

[1] e.g. Nature's submission and approval process: http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/get_published/index.htm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

This pre-filtering before the review is done by the editors (editorial board and section editors), who are fellow scientists just like the reviewers.

The only task done directly by Elsevier staff is the copy-editing once the article is accepted.

>The only task done directly by Elsevier staff is the copy-editing once the article is accepted.

Elsevier is looking to fill salaried positions for their editorial staff. This qualifications are scientists with PhDs. Examples:

https://www.glassdoor.com/partner/jobListing.htm?&jobListing...

Either the meme that Elsevier employees "do nothing but spell-check LaTeX markup files" is wrong ... or ... it depends on the particular journals in question. For the job listing examples above, one of the job duties is curation of content (e.g. "assessing submitted research papers") and not just copy-editing. So for that Elsevier imprint (Cell Reports), if you submit a paper about "GMO foods proves Darwin Theory of Evolution is Wrong", their unpaid reviewers won't even see it. One of Elsevier's editorial functions is to filter that crap out.

Just because there is a job listing doesn't mean they do the filtering. I've served on several Computer Science conference reviewer committees and I have seen no filtering done whatsoever.

>Computer Science conference reviewer committees and I have seen no filtering done whatsoever.

The published collection of papers from a conference are more like a anthology of the talks given (Springer is common example publisher) rather than a quality curation via rigorous peer-review. A bunch of experts wasting time with unfiltered crap is probably the norm. Virtually none of those conference papers collections have reputations to accumulate "impact".

The prestigious journals like "Cell", "Lancet", or "Journal of the American College of Cardiology" do not forward unfiltered junk papers to reviewers.

Your experience with conferences is a different situation.

Are you talking about an overlay journal?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal

Right. We can have a much finer granularity now than "accepted/not accepted". With modern tagging and rating systems, you can have different levels of filtering and store papers at many different stages while preserving your ability to sift through junk.

Of course, no private journal wants to be just a signed tag in some broader system...

I recently tried to access an Open Access paper.

Apparently it's only open to users with university library access. Otherwise you have to pay for it.

I emailed the author directly and he sent me a PDF.

I see. So rather than providing open access papers in the sense of the common understanding of the term, they're providing them in a "free drink with purchase of two entrées" sense.

I don't think that's Open Access under any definition of Open Access.

Correct. The publisher in this case may have been misrepresenting a paid-access journal as open access, or the journal may have offered open access only to certain articles and presented this policy in a confusing way. I have certainly seen the latter before.

The publishing fee to the author for open access could range unto 5000$ [0]. Why should universities pay 5000$ per article to host a PDF?

[0] https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access

Not that I'm defending the current, broken system becuase it really doesn't provide either of these benefits, but the idea is that the cost of (coordinating) peer-review (as the reviewers are often unpaid) and actual editing cost money. If services like that were actually provided, some fee would be understandable.

$5k though? That still seems a bit much.

One of the reasons the figures end up higher than you may expect is that only the successfully published papers are paid for (usually). So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

PLOS for example is non-profit and charges up to $2900.

> So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

Yes, the other 95% need to be checked, but reviewers are recruited from academics and typically do this task for free. The contribution that the publisher does at the stage of manuscript evaluation is marginal.

It'll go through the editors first, in the case of Nature these are paid positions. There's a paid "Associate Editor" position at PLOS too, responsible for "Assessing new submissions and guiding manuscripts through the review process" and more.

A submitted paper does not simply turn up in reviewers inboxes, there are steps in between.

I think people pick a few elements of the whole process and then say everything else is negligible. If paid, the academic editors and reviewers may well end up costing a huge amount compared to the spend elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as saying those other costs are small. The proportion here is largely irrelevant.

The associate editor position on glassdoor is about £40k/year, which is £45k including tax costs. Let's say that's £47k including pension contributions as it works out neatly. In the UK there are 47 working weeks, roughly so that's £1k employment cost per week purely on that one employee. That's £25/hour. At an 80% rejection rate that's actually £125/hour, at 90% it's £250/hour and 95% that's £500/hour on accepted papers (not quite, but useful for the comparison). For only a single employee, and only their direct salary.

Of course now we need to add things like the HR costs, hiring costs, building rent, computer equipment, management, etc. Double? How much time of their day actually goes to the core task and not other meetings/etc. All these things multiply up and I'm really not that surprised that the costs go up to these amounts.

I have absolutely no doubt that if the other editors were paid and the reviewers were paid then this would go up dramatically, but that's a different issue.

What exactly do the editors do? I have published more than a dozen papers across different publications like ACM and Springer. I edit the article, I am the one who provides in the format as the conferences/journals - the journals just "print". The reviewers don't charge - I know, I have been a reviewer for Elsevier too. What exactly do the editors do?

IMO, Nature is not a representative case. In my area, editors are typically academics, none of them I know receives payment for what they do.

As an example, take a look at the 34 editors of IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, all in academia or employed by a third party:

http://www.comsoc.org/tnsm/editorial-board

> I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.

All those 95% of papers checked are done by reviewers for free. I don't see any reviewers being paid. I know because I have reviewed papers across multiple conferences and journals.

The free reviewer work is not really relevant for this calculation though, unless there is no work done by the journal for those papers. Since papers are not submitted directly to the peer reviewers, there is at least some work happening.

Free peer review mostly only tells us that the total cost could go up significantly if they were paid.

> Since papers are not submitted directly to the peer reviewers, there is at least some work happening.

I am a reviewer and all papers are submitted directly to me. Even if not, the editor is a university professor who does this work.

Which Elsevier computer science journals allow all unfiltered submissions to go directly to you?

Can you tell me which Elsevier Computer Science journals submissions are filtered? How do they filter? What is the criteria?

>$5k though? That still seems a bit much.

Maybe. As someone who has done quite a bit of editing of relatively technical material and coordinated review and rework cycles, I wouldn't be surprised if you're looking at a couple of days of work for a paper. Certainly a lot more than for a quick copyedit of an online article. So you're into the more than $1K range pretty quickly.

I'm guessing GP meant the publishing fees to the author (which some, not all, open access journals have). The prestigious PLOS STEM journals have fees ranging from $1495-$2900:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees

That's the next stage in the war. First we need to prevent Elsevier etc from extorting readers. So that forces them to extort authors. And it's authors who can choose where to publish. Eventually, Elsevier etc will be forced out of the academic publishing sector. And good riddance to them!

> First we need to prevent Elsevier etc from extorting readers. So that forces them to extort authors.

The extortion will ultimately be of the tax payer money. Authors will ask for more money during research grants citing this "open access" policy.

I don't presume to be aware of all the implementation details, but in the abstract, is this not a pretty excellent use of tax payer money? To support universal access to research, data, and educational materials?

Tax payer money is already funded to conduct research. Why do we need to pay 2000$ to host a PDF article?

You do not need to pay to host a PDF article, there are platforms such as arxiv.org or zenodo.org that do this for free for you.

Yes, but as others have said, professional advancement typically depends on publishing in the expensive journals. And that's no accident, in that predatory for-profit publishers have targeted prestigious journals for acquisition. It's the same game that drug makers play with top-selling drugs.

Eventually, authors will migrate to the not-for-profit open access journals and platforms. But that will take time. Top-ranked PIs must lead the way, given that their reputations are well established, and they have tenure.

Supporting research is an excellent use of tax payer money. But paying monopoly rents to publish? Not so much, I think.

AFAIK this is already happening in some fields, or is actually an individual line item in some grant applications.

I have considerable experience with this issue. For large requests, the granting entity will send a team. They check out the facilities, interview staff, and interactively dig through budgets. I suspect that there will be pushback about paying inflated amounts to publishers. Maybe the amounts are relatively small, but wouldn't PIs rather spend $50K or whatever on productive resources?

I happen to be investigating how best to transition to Open Access, and coincidentally just today concerned myself with potential business models that does not involve individual authors paying thousands of dollars to publish. If anyone reading this has ideas or remarks, I'd love to hear them: https://medium.com/flockademic/towards-sustainable-funding-f...

This is great, but I don't know why the governments and universities don't just fund their own totally free open access journals. Journals can't be expensive to run. You basically just need a few admin people to poke reviewers, and a trivial website to host papers.

Many hiring decisions in academia still rely strongly on the reputation of journals where applicants published. This may be less accentuated in computer science, where most research is presented at conferences and preprints are often available on the arXiv, but it's a very important factor in many other disciplines. It's also the primary reason why researchers don't boycott these journals: most of them are simply not in a position where they can afford to without seriously damaging their career prospects.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_anarchy - a system can get stuck in a terrible state where everyone's best move is to keep going. A much better equilibrium could be constructed (Price of Stability), but how do we get there?

You don't have to boycott anything - if a university starts a new journal and their respective academics start publishing with it they would have a public plausible deniability on why they're also publishing in this journal.

That's a no-loss situation.

The problem isn't that you're somehow branded a 'rebel' if you refuse to publish with Elsevier journals. It's that, when you're applying somewhere, they'll rank you by SUM(paper_i * impact_factor(journal_i)). That score will suffer, and nobody will care about your reasons.

You're also underestimating the independence of researches at a university. They're not employees in the usual sense. In fact, the best method to stop them from publishing at some journal Y would be for the administration to tell them to publish in Y.

that easy? "You should publish only in Elsevier journals!"

Also, in some counties (the UK is a prime example) the rules governing "impact" is largely dictated and/or influenced by central government. So not only do you need to change just your local institution but a whole country's institutions at a go; a multi-year political fiefdom protecting shambles at best.

That "impact" scoring system is utterly useless. I hope it doesn't survive the next non-Tory government.

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007958]. Their impact factor is now 2.450 vs 1.848. Of course I am sure it's way harder to do this for far more conservative and larger industries. At the same time it may be just the case of starting small.

You mean a new journal for every scientific field? That's helluva lot of journals. Then, you need to attract people to send the papers there. There are countless local journals that mainly attract local authors now, and those are a joke when they are not outright junk. To publish even a half decent journal, you need to attract researchers from all corners of the world to send you their best work. How?

Isn't there already a journal for every scientific field, or are you speaking of only a part of the industries?

Many papers have multiple authors from different universities/institutions. It would be difficult if just one was boycotting the top journals in the field.

Those academics would still have less-prestigious publications, which is a net-loss for both them and their university.

A solution might be dual publishing, but I believe some of the bigger journals require some form of exclusivity.

If done collectively that has worked before. In 2001, almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned [1] in order to lend their support to a new open-access journal, Journal of Machine Learning Research, which quickly supplanted the former as the top journal in the field. It helped that this included a lot of senior people in the field (Stuart Russell, Geoffrey Hinton, Leslie Kaelbling, etc.) who would be the ones judging ML hiring and tenure cases at many universities.

[1] Resignation letter: http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html

That only works if the editorial board "flips", though - unfortunately, universities mostly aren't able to start journals with reputable editorial boards.

I'm currently leaning towards finding a way to convince large numbers of boards to flip as the most viable path to proper open access.

> Many hiring decisions in academia still rely strongly on the reputation of journals where applicants published.

This is very weird to me. It seems to me like a variant of the 'argument from authority' fallacy. Publications should be judged on their content, not on who owns the printing press.

Oh, yes. The problem is not rasearch, the problem is the Administration and its permanent quest for "objective" (whatever that means) rating criteria...

If I'm reading a paper in Nature I can assume that the editors and reviewers did first checks on content (BS can still get through, but it is rare). Self-published, unknown journal gives me none of that. Thus when making hiring decisions it does help to overweight established journals. And most tenure tracks in academia make mistakes costly.

I do not like the current system, but established, well curated journals do provide some benefits in academia hiring. They do damage, too, but to a different group. My 2c.

Would it a good use case for a blockchain validation system ? Decentralized (scientific) content reviewer ? Pay scarce resource (attention odf the well educated/trained scientist) with some new coin "SCI-coin" ?

>BS can still get through, but it is rare

The data[0] suggests the exact opposite: the more prestigious the journal, the more bad science it attracts.

[0] http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-to...

That's possible in a few exceptional cases, but at least in CS, you can see a very visible quality drop as you go from the top conferences to the second-tier conferences.

That was looking at only a very small part of the curve of journals. There is a long tail of really terrible journals publishing terrible science.

> Self-published, unknown journal gives me none of that.

How can you know that?

Edit: I don't know why I get the downvotes. My question might be naive, but its serious. I think it is not self-evident why an unkown self-published journal couldn't give you that. Elsevier was also once unknown. For me it sounds like a logical fallacy, but I wanted to know your take on it. It's pretty cheap to just downvote me for asking.

It's the opposite. You can't be sure that a self-published journal has editors and reviewers do a first check. This means you need to confirm and audit their practices.

Compare this to a publication in nature. There, by virtue of the name, you know the article is worth more. (Note that in practice, Nature apparently has quite a few sham publications)

If we were talking about self-published articles, I'd agree, but we are not. We are talking about self-published journals.

Under self-published journals I understand a journal brought out by the researchers or research organisatons. I don't see why Germany's or even Europe's universities and research institutions couldn't publish a peer-reviewed and checked journal in collaboration, without a third entity, that can provide the quality of, say, nature.

I don't see why Germany's or even Europe's universities and research institutions couldn't publish a peer-reviewed and checked journal in collaboration, without a third entity, that can provide the quality of, say, nature.

You mean a university press or a society journal? That model worked extremely well for > 100 years, until in the 1990s the societies sold their journals to Wiley, Springer and Elsevier, and somewhere around that time Springer took a wrong turn. You'd really like to ask why the selloff happened when it did.

But then why again did I get downvoted?

I believe when they said "self-published, unknown" journals, the key word was unknown rather than self-published. They're not talking about journals self-published by established scholarly societies and so forth, who are "known." Nature (or other known journals) come with an established reputation (deserved or not) for publishing high quality work; an unknown journal (i.e. one with no established reputation one way or the other) by definition cannot provide this.

In recent years, journals that claim to have a peer review process but which actually offer dubious or no review or quality control have proliferated (some are even published by companies like Elsevier). Having no established reputation doesn't prove that a journal is bad, but having an established reputation is a heuristic shortcut for evaluating whether it is good (at least in the "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" sense). Hiring committees use this heuristic to save time when filtering candidates.

Perhaps we should use the equivalent of "page-rank" for scientific papers and their citations as a quality measure (?)

Maybe, but it will take some work. IMO the main challenge is to get wide buy in.

Many researchers do not love the current system, but are mostly OK with it. They are not looking to topple it; if everyone is using a different option, they will switch, too, but they are not your passionaries to drive the change.

Well, that exists in the form of citations. The more a paper is cited the more valued are its authors. Just as the more often a site is linked to, the higher its page rank. And since you're not dealing with massive numbers of sites with lots of SEO experts, straight citation count is good enough without any of the corrections included in the page rank algorithm.

Hiring committees look at both quantity of publications and citations to those publications. The problem is that quantity doesn't always indicate quality. Which is why journal prestige acts as a proxy measure.

> Well, that exists in the form of citations.

Page-rank is "transitive" in the sense that it not only counts citations, but also citations-of-citations, etc.

I wonder though if such a system can be easily gamed (see SEO), without damaging the reputation of offending authors.

Also, we should perhaps have the concept of "negative citations". For example, when the text contains "In this paper we show that the approach of [..] is incorrect."

I always though this was the impact factor of a journal. However, according to [1] that is not the case. [2] Mentions the 'eigenfactor' which seems to be closer to emulating page-rank. I haven't read much about it though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor [2] http://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact

I agree that good papers are likely the most cited ones. However, how are the people citing a paper going to find it? The traditional mechanism is for the paper to gain exposure by being published in a prestigious journal.

>"If I'm reading a paper in Nature I can assume that the editors and reviewers did first checks on content (BS can still get through, but it is rare)"

You think stuff published in nature is better? I found the opposite, that Nature publishes papers with "sexy" results and poorly described methodology. Nature is one of the worst journals, I cringe when info I want is in a Nature article (although with supplements it is getting better).

> Publications should be judged on their content

They are but it takes time to build that reputation. Also publishing houses with big pockets can hire good reviewers etc and get established quicker. If Nature churned out rubbish papers all the time people would stop trusting it but their hit rate is pretty high and retractions are issued for poor papers.

There are some open source websites that are trusted (e.g. https://arxiv.org/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) but they are archiving content from already trusted journals. Then there is the 1 Open Source journal I would trust* : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/

I hope that we can accelerate this open sourcing in the years to come.

* I'm coming from a Medical Physics background. There may be others I'm not aware of that are also worthwhile.

Are you sure you are well-informed about this? For instance:

* the scientific journals I know do not pay their scientific editors ([1], this can differ for absolute top journals like Nature/Science);

* arXiv is a preprint server, not an archiving server [2];

* you call "open source" what is usually called "open access", I think.

[1]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/43574/how-much-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

1) I was trying to talk in general terms. I understand that the peers doing the peer review are usually not paid but that there are other editors involved. I probably should have made that more clear. One of my fellow PhD students is now an editor for a journal.

2) I was aware of this also. I have seen some weird stuff on arXiv but it is normally trustworthy within the realms of Physics. I must admit my use of it was higher as an undergrad than a postgrad. Again I was probably being imprecise in my terminology but it is an archive of pre-prints.

3) 'Slip of the tongue'. I'll edit that in my original comment. Turns out you can't edit a comment after that long. I didn't know that but I think that is probably a good idea overall. I meant Open Access not Open Source.

I would consider myself pretty well informed as I was in academia until a move to industry a few years back and still work fairly closely with academics. That being said I am always happy to be corrected, I know people's opinions on this subject are a moving target and it is probably different at different hierarchies within academia. Thanks.

See, this is the point I still don't understand. None of the things you mentioned involve the publisher or title of the journal. All of those reputational aspects are functions of the reviewers and editors, right?

The people accepting and reviewing the papers are the sole source of any journal's value. I mean, people didn't stop listening to Lou Reed or Prince or Radiohead just because they switched labels. Nobody buys music because of the label.

So what's stopping a mass defection of a reputable journal's editorial staff to a new, open title? I'd expect this level of brand loyalty from mindless consumers buying material junk, but not from a scientific community supposedly dedicated to objectivity and quality.

But you don't know the reviewers when you are looking for articles about something.

Reviewers aren't related to the articles: you don't know who reviewed your paper, and in good practices reviewers won't know the author of the papers either. The point of trust is the journal: the journal has its impact, its reputation, built as good articles are published and cited. And the cycle goes on: good reviewers means good articles published (on the average), that attracts attention to the journal, that will be looked for new articles and will attract better reviewers, that will do better revision, that...

Want to break that? Begin to give credit to the reviewers, and it will be gamified too: people will have to pay to publish with good reviewers (and there will be impartiality?), or they will make a journal/company so that you take off the weight of the reviewers names and will put the impact factor on the journal... ops...

"There are some open source websites that are trusted (e.g. https://arxiv.org"

Lol. Citing arxiv is even worse than citing wikipedia, and some reviewers will reject arxiv citations all together. It's full of junk 'science' by crackpots. Not just 'hey look I ran this regression on a public dataset' bad, but all-out 'I was abducted by aliens, and I made up an equation to show that they took me to Pluto' bad. Maybe it differs by field, I don't know - but suggesting arxiv is 'trusted' the same way Nature is 'trusted' is inane.

Yeah, nobody would consider an arXiv-only article by an unknown author. There are plenty of P=NP "proofs" published on the arXiv. But that isn't what it is for. It's a preprint server where you have to do your own quality control. A lot of work in the theoretical CS community is published in conferences and on the arXiv, often in extended form (additional proofs, plots, etc that didn't fit into the conference publication's page limit)

From https://arxiv.org/help/general: "Disclaimer: Papers will be entered in the listings in order of receipt on an impartial basis and appearance of a paper is not intended in any way to convey tacit approval of its assumptions, methods, or conclusions by any agent (electronic, mechanical, or other)."

I was not meaning to equate ArXiv to Nature. I can see how I implied that though.

As I've said in another comment it was used much more frequently during my undergrad years than at postgrad. Within Maths and Physics it is generally trustworthy as they are pre-prints of papers to established journals.

Would I cite an arxiv reference in a paper for submission or thesis? 99% of the time, no. Useful for citing on the web though where your users may not have access to the final journal article behind a paywall.

That sounds to be a better idea, but people say (and as an outsider, it does sound believable, I guess) that that's pretty much impossible - see for example [1]:

> I regret to say that in reviewing perhaps a hundred grants or job applications and trying to find the ten grants to fund or one person to employ, I do not read every paper in the bibliography and assess the research on the basis of my limited understanding. I just don’t have the time or expertise to read and judge all the papers.

[1] https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...

> Many hiring decisions in academia still rely strongly on the reputation of journals where applicants published.

Maybe there could be a policy of only counting articles in open-access journals.

> It's also the primary reason why researchers don't boycott these journals: most of them are simply not in a position where they can afford to without seriously damaging their career prospects.

Then that's where the log-jam is.

> Maybe there could be a policy of only counting articles in open-access journals.

Unfortunately it's not a policy, it's the easy option for those evaluating scientist, which is why they do it. Sometimes there's a policy to ignore the reputation (or actually, the flawed metric that's supposed to represent it called "Impact Factor"), but that's not widespread. Academics unfortunately have more to concern themselves with than spreading Open Access.

> the reputation of journals where applicants published

Yes which is why ordinary individuals can't just start a journal. But governments and universities come with already-established reputation. If Cambridge University started their own open access biology journal (or whatever) and encouraged their scientists to contribute I don't think it would be hard to imagine it succeeding.

Have any universities actually tried?

To have a successful journal, you don't need a particular university's researchers to publish in it, even if it's a very reputable university. You need everybody working in the field wanting to publish there. All the supposedly really simple solutions suggested in this thread don't work. It's not like academics haven't thought about it.

Sure, that's why you get a particular university's researchers to publish in it. That's exactly how you start making it so that everyone in the field wants to publish there.

They may have thought about it but has anyone actually tried it? I'm genuinely asking.

Edit: It seems they have and it worked. See mjn's answer below.

Their scientists have careers that span beyond those universities, so "encouraging them to contribute" is easier said than done. (Also, their scientists have very diverse disciplines and thus many, many different journals to contribute to - so each individual journal still wouldn't have enough good scientists contributing to carry them.)

So why not divide and conquer?

1. University-scope undergrad journals

2. University-scope grad journals

3. University-scope science journals

4. University-scope humanities journals

5. Regional-scope science journals

6. Regional-scope humanities journals

7. Nation-scope obscure science journals

8. Nation-scope obscure humanities journals

9. Nation-scope science journals.

10. Nation-scope humanities journals.

11. Nature.

You start with the people who haven't been educated to rationalize the racket, in journals that have the least amount of reputability in the first place. (Ignoring fake journals, journal mills, etc.) They are also more likely to understand the underlying technology and probably do a lot of the implementation work, too.

Same for grads.

Then you get the journals that only function within the scope of a single university-- i.e., they are used to publish and gain notoriety within the university but are of only limited value outside of it. Probably best to start with a high-fallutin' uni whose stature could be used to convinced them the publicity of being the first mover is reason enough for the risk.

Then regional journals, where again the notoriety is relatively low and personal relationships are leveraged more for notoriety/credibility. (For example, an anthropological journal that covers a small region.) Because these academic communities probably already can recite the names of all the current scholars in the field, moving the research content isn't as disruptive.

In each case the science journals should go first. Humanities have a natural envy of science's verifiability/falsifiability, so they'll quickly follow whatever the scientists do.

Edit: clarification

The research system is kind of ill[1] and this illness (ratings, prestige, grants, publications, metrics) is very much in line with the interest of publishers. So both the researcher and the business man have a shared interest - and this is why it is hard for universities or other public entities to compete.

[1] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...

Because that's illegal.

The government is not allowed to compete in the free market, so they can't just make their own. Even subsidies or support for an independent open one could be sued against by Elsevier.

I really doubt Elsevier would have any grounds to sue in Europe. The US on the other hand...

Universities surely could though, even in America. They already compete in loads of free markets.

It's like trying to launch open Facebook or Google after these established the network effects.

Although the university base is far smaller, so this will be interesting to observe.

This is an excellent article from The Guardian that chronicles the history and current business practises of academic journal publishing if anyone fancies a read:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

(It's also on the Guardian Long Read podcast if you subscribe to that)

Elsevier in its core is a bunch of managers/investors trying to get rich from exploiting scientific achievements for profit. They do not have in mind what's best for science, they've made that perfectly clear.

That's because absolutely no one cares about it except for whining about Elsevier.

We have a perfect way of distributing papers - it is called "Publish it on your blog". If your blog is the most awesome blog or even just more awesome than the lousy blogs, the concerned scientists would go there.

Why isn't it happening? Because the content of the papers published on the blogs suck and no one cares.

So it's not that perfect after all? I've read some history about this publishing dependency problem with Elsevier. The scientists are part of the problem too. They are not completely innocent nerds who got bullied into this system. Most of them embraced it for convenience and fame, because, see, they haven't got time and money to do that on their own, because they are so busy 'sciencing' (honestly, most of it isn't 'research' anymore). I admire the German scientists who finally realized that mistake and now are trying to reverse it, if it is even possible.

Because the issue is not hosting/prodiding publishing venue.

The issue is that submitted original papers that are produced are garbage and neither EICs nor their reviewers give two cents about quality. Had not been the case this would not have happened:

http://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scien...

Most of these companies have XML First type programs. What those who are so passionate about this topic should do is do is pay XML First fees for a sample of random 100 papers in 10 random publications and write a scraper to pull the papers in different production stages - from manuscripts to the end result. The beginning state would horrify you.

Expect the blog to attract about 3 readers per day. The audience for high quality high complexity scientific papers is tiny.

That's every one who was interested in the topic and looked for it on Google.

> We have a perfect way of distributing papers - it is called "Publish it on your blog". If your blog is the most awesome blog or even just more awesome than the lousy blogs, the concerned scientists would go there.

That would be an extremely worrying way of publishing, as there's no permanence. I regularly hit academic homepages for software or extra data that has now gone. There's also no DOI.

Places like figshare ensure you get a DOI and that the public content is archived so that if they shut down, the data or paper is still available. https://figshare.com/blog/Ensuring_persistence_on_figshare/2...

Other services also offer this, look for CLOCKSS in relation to data storage or publishing.

[disclaimer, work for Digital Science, who are a parent company to figshare]

I used to think that Elsevier et al were just rentiers, and that bringing them down would be a pure win. But I'm not so sure anymore. When money left journalism we saw a big big quality drop. We now have lots of problems with fake news. It makes me think: what if the same thing will happen in science?

I guess the affiliation of the researchers will still be there, but it still leaves me a bit uneasy.

Researchers are not paid for the research, just the publishers. I can only see quality going up without them moderating and filtering with their misaligned incentives.

Elsevier doesn't pay for review nor to the authors.

But they pick trustworthy reviewers though?

Yes, but if Elsiver disappeared tomorrow, those reviewers could just go to other journals.

No, the editor and their associate editors do that, and they don't get paid by Elsevier either. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/43574/how-much-...

Authors can typically "suggest" reviewers for their papers. There have been a few scandals in the past where papers were published after being reviewed by family members, or even the original author using a maiden name. Elsevier, and many of the related companies under the Reed Elsevier family, make their money by facilitating the process, or making data searchable. Once upon a time this was huge as doing either of those things was a significantly costly and time intensive exercise. Today, they continue on pure momentum. If a few major research universities were to band together and form a cooperative non-profit journal, things would start to unravel for Elsevier.

A salient point. However, NPR shares an interview with a person (Justin Coler) who was responsible for generating a lot of fake news during the US election campaign last year [1]: "Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait."

Academics tend to be left-leaning and overall they operate on a principle of self-regulation (with a few rogue fabricators that make it into the spotlight periodically), so this may not be as a big of a concern as you fear.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

The money for the research does not come from Elsevier nor the journals, at least not in Germany. If they could get rid of Elsevier and go open access, they would have more money for the science.

We now have lots of problems with fake news. It makes me think: what if the same thing will happen in science?

Well, already two-thirds of published scientific research cannot be reproduced http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39054778

Fake news have been in newspapers for a very long time. Most newspapers have a political bias and have been heavily digesting the news-feed.

Scientists publishing original research in academic journals are not paid by the publishers, and neither are the quality control measures such as reviewers.

Previous discussion of these negotiations and Project DEAL 8 months ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187315

Also, the article's link to Project DEAL is wrong (it goes to the German Research Foundation), it should be https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/

My minuscule contribution to the debate is lying on github [1].

The idea is to distribute papers over a P2P network. Uploads and metadata are digitally signed with PGP and you get to filter out all rubbish that is not originated from your WOT. You get "peer reviewed" when enough people of type "recognized reviewer" in your WOT publish a signed metadata "reviewed" stamp.

It still needs a whole lot of work, I only ever managed to make it work over to machines on a LAN, it is OOM prone, GUI is fugly, and I could (should) probably re-start from scratch.

But if you like the idea and feel like helping, do ping me... we can save the world! ;)

[1]: https://github.com/ecausarano/heron

Aaron Swartz's influence on open publishing is still unfolding more than four years after his untimely death. The forces arrayed against open publishing are formidable: governments and big business.

It's good to see a nation's universities working together on this.

Governments are actually in a bit of a gray area. On the one hand, a politician can score cheap points with the public by saying "we should all be able to read what our tax dollars pay for!", and on the other hand, the government would ultimately be footing the bill for open access in the short term because their grant money would funnel to publishers by way of pay-to-publish open access fees. So there's significant incentive for the government to figure out an open access solution that involves as little publishing fees as possible. They just don't want to be the ones who pay for it and administrate it.

If scientists continue tolerating the monopolies of big editorials, this situation is not going to change. It is time to embrace open access journals. Meanwhile, I use SciHub.

Seems like the trend is gaining momentum, though slowly. It's recent news that editors of a Springer journal (Springer is another large publisher) left and started their own journal [0].

[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/31/math-journal-...

A related read:

The shackles of scientific journals- https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21719480-and-how-cast...

The problem with scientific publishing https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/03/e...

they will find out soon that they are fine on their own without Elsevier...

How did Elsevier acquire the wierd position it is in? What added value does Elsevier provide?

Added value: Reputation. You get your paper published in an Elsevier journal, your reputation amongst you peers rises. Usually this means more funding and better career prospects.

Think similar to Fitch and Moody's in the financial sector (right?).

1) Largely through mergers and acquisitions

2) Network effect (although with newer technology (social media, cheap hosting, cheaper devops, etc) this value is dropping precipitously)

They bought up a bunch of academic journals. Added value is arguably negligible now, but some of the publications have the highest profile in their fields for years.

Before the internet, publishers actually printed journals on actual paper. This cost a lot of money, and it makes sense that universities payed for subscriptions to physical journals.

Today, the cost of these subscriptions hasn't changed much. But the added value is much less since everyone reads papers online.

If you're really interested, The Guardian recently did a very good longread on it: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jul/10/the-lucrat...

Discussed in January https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187315

If the German consortium is so big and influential worldwide, why bother with other journals like Elsevier? They might as well start their own open-access journal. Or isn't the Consortium that big/influential?

Because they only decided to band together in 2014, and didn't want to spend their time and money on creating something new (which might even be illegal, the government can't compete with private companies)

Sure it can. Many, many government companies compete in the open market in my Country. I'm sure it's the same in Germany.

It's not in Germany. And the government companies that did have been sued all the time, and lost every time.

My city currently has the issue that we need new low-income and student housing, the private companies refuse to built it (not profitable enough), but say they'd immediately sue if the city would build on its own.

The resulting housing crisis has driven up rent for 2 decades now, but we can't do anything. It looks like they're slowly coming to an agreement now, with the city making a deal that they can build such housing, in small amounts that are unlikely to influence the market prices, if it's built in places where no private developer wants to build.

Where I live the government does compete with private companies. It works good for the people.

Why do they even need that company? How hard could it be to just make everything open source and free?

For real, this is like the easiest problem to solve. Just stop giving that corrupt company any money and do it themselves.

perhaps also of interest: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Go Germany!

Good for them. I never understood why people are paying Elsevier anyway. It seems like everything they do can be done for free.

They are prestigious gatekeepers

It's not people directly, it's the institutions who are paying.

This is like a university taking on the evil computer manufacturers or something. Sure, you can do it yourself, but you have to put in the work and the money to do so. Distributors and publishers exist for a reason.

Interesting, I'd love to know what level this has escalated to behind the scenes - governmental? EU? If Merkel did a deal could the universities be forced to back down?

That is so far outside of their competence that I'm not sure how you constructed this absurd scenario. Why would Merkel be able to sign a contract on universities' behalf? The EU is pushing for more open access publishing, but the way it can do that is via regulation or adding it as a requirement to EU-funded research.

I was merely asking a question.

Elsevier no doubt contributes large amounts of money to the Dutch tax authorities. Governments pick up the phone about this type of thing all the time. There is ample evidence of deal making at the EU level - I'm thinking of the watering down of emissions legislation to benefit German car makers. I don't think it's far fetched at all to imagine a quid pro quo taking place behind the scenes. My question was partly around what kind of leverage Merkel might have down at the university level, as I have no knowledge about this.

The funny thing is that the EU has largely been pushing for more Open Access due to the Netherlands' EU presidency last year - the Netherlands was already taking the lead at that point.

Then again, the way the Open Access transition appears to be taking place right now seems like it could end up creating really nice profit margins for companies like Elsevier again, so maybe that was their plan all along.

The federal state is not supposed to meddle in education in Germany, policy is decided on Bundesländer-level. They frequently do anyways, but I don't think it's important enough to them to get involved in this case.

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