I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish.
I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they charge. I, for one, have no sympathy for them.
How might that look? I mean purely publishing isnt just ideal as it lacks the so-called quality control and prestige of established publications.
What might be a middle ground for disrupting this crappy monopoly on the world's knowledge?
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-elsevier-boycott...
Open Access exists, but you don't get the status you need from it (and weirdly it often costs a couple hundred dollars for the graduate student to publish their paper open access in addition to the Journal).
It'd be nice if there was a way to make the community more like open source software where you get status from sharing and collaborating instead of from hoarding information in fear of being 'scooped'.
As it stands the incentives are directly opposite collaborating and sharing information and really the best parts about science and research.
- built on a foundation of open source software
- new ways of presenting and consuming should be encouraged and easily discoverable
- completely outside the influence of the current publishing industry
There's a community of us working on this stuff. We hang out on gitter (https://gitter.im/codeforscience/community).
I believe we need a directory of scientific findings of sorts. It should be possible for each finding to cite other findings it relied on, thus creating a graph of influence/significance. The current situation with citations often involves friends citing friends , so i don't consider it reliable. It should also include open questions , thus giving research directions.
> The rationale behind publishing in long-form journal articles is not really valid in our century.
No, it's perfectly valid. Some ideas can't be expressed in short form. A 5-page long proof requires a 10-20 page article to properly motivate and provide context/explanation. An evolutionary or piece-by-piece doesn't make any sense; you'll end up with fragmented dead ends. Waste of everyone's time.
> and findings are typically summarized in their 3-4 figures anyway
I'm not really sure which fields you're referring to, but I assure you that you're over-generalizing. This isn't even remotely true even for very empirical sciences.
> There are proposals for new approaches
Usually these are appropriate only for a single subdomain or methodology and only provide one particular and extremely opinionated view on the results. Such as the proposal in the article you posted.
The overhead isn't worth it and there's a huge risk the relevant field(s) move quickly enough that the presentation method becomes obsolete before it becomes useful.
> It should be possible for each finding to cite other findings it relied on
...I don't know what to say to this...
> thus creating a graph of influence/significance
Yeah, we have this. It's called bibliometrics. UNIVERSALLY HATED by anyone who's not a bean counter. Good people ignore them. Bad people optimize for the metrics and it becomes a stupid game that has nothing to do with the thing you're trying to measure.
> The current situation with citations often involves friends citing friends , so i don't consider it reliable
This is just one reason among many that bibliometrics (a.k.a. any necessarily poor attempt at "a graph of influence/significance") are a poor mechanism by which to judge science...
> It should also include open questions , thus giving research directions.
In many fields literally every paper includes this. In most it's rather obvious to anyone who comprehends the paper what the next steps are.
> In 2015, Elsevier reported a profit margin of approximately 37% on revenues of £2.070 billion.
Whatever they may claim their costs are, the money does not add meaningful contribution. The meaningful contribution (writing and reviewing) is done by scientists themselves, almost 100% independently of elsevier. Elsevier employs some senior editors who decide which reviewer gets to review which paper, and that's about their entire contribution to scientific process. The rest is their website costs, PR and fluff which is not relevant to the science itself.
They get the research papers for free, the editors don't get paid ... it's such a scam, and always has been.