Germany vs. Elsevier: universities win temporary free journal access
nature.com
nature.com
• Teilnehmereinrichtungen: alle zur Teilnahme an Allianz- und Nationallizenzen berechtigten Einrichtungen in Deutschland.
• Die DEAL-Einrichtungen haben dauerhaften Volltextzugriff auf das gesamte Titel-Portfolio (E-Journals) der ausgewählten Verlage.
• Alle Publikationen von Autorinnen und Autoren aus deutschen Einrichtungen werden automatisch Open Access geschaltet (CC-BY, inkl. Peer Review).
• Angemessene Bepreisung nach einem einfachen, zukunftsorientierten Berechnungsmodell, das sich am Publikationsaufkommen orientiert.
Basically: Give us access to everything you have, publish all our authors open access, and we'll pay you an appropriate amount, relative to how many papers of ours you publish. They call this the PAR model, for publish&read. Springer and Wiley have in principle agreed to negotiate a PAR license [1].
This would be enormous, especially as other countries would have a blueprint what to ask for. It also shows just how poorly the UK has handled their renegotiation (it was generally seen as the UK caving completely) [2].
[1] An English presentation from the end of last year on the state of things: https://www.projekt-deal.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2017-...
[2] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/time-for-elsexit/
You start out with full rights to your paper. Then you hand over a exclusive "do whatever you want license" to Elsevier for free. Then the UK council requires you to further pay Elsevier so the paper is downloadable from their shitty-ass website. That is an unmitigated disaster.
It seems to me that the current peer review model is dying anyway, and new technology (especially the web) is slowly but surely killing it, especially in the fields of computing science and mathematics. I commend Germany's approach, but I don't think the UK's approach was a complete disaster.
Or it will highlight how other governments are corrupt and their regulatory agencies completely captured by their respective industries.
• Participating institutions: all institutions entitled to participate in alliance and national licenses in Germany.
• The DEAL facilities have permanent full-text access to the entire title portfolio (e-journals) of the selected publishers.
• All publications of authors from German institutions are automatically switched to open access (CC-BY, including peer review).
• Reasonable pricing according to a simple, future-oriented calculation model based on the publication volume.
This move by Elsevier implies that they share this expectation, in which case this would be the best move they could do, but by giving away that they don't think their position is strong, they effectively still weaken their position.
So all in all, if the German negotiators remain firm (and it looks like they will), the prospects for open access appear to be pretty good.
(Note that when I talk about open access, I mean the entire set of ideals usually associated with it as described at [1], not just "pay $3000 to $5000 to make a single article available.)
More than 20 days of all agencies closed and almost no one cared. I am sure it actually weakened their position.
The status quo is absolutely unnaceptable.
scheduling, organizing, communicating, file management, vendor management, budgeting, large scale data conversion (e.g., Microsoft Word --> XML, image conversions), editing, proofing, and correcting articles, not to mention running a fairly content heavy website with appropriate search/browse options, etc.
Basically, throwing 1 monthly journal (~1000 pages/year) up on a WordPress site is pretty easy (except for the part about dealing with the authors) and could probably be done by a couple people putting in a few hours a week.
Creating a useful web platform for 100s of journals is an entirely different proposition and almost certainly a poor use of universities resources.
Now, they could pay someone to do all that work, but that is pretty much what they are negotiating with Elsevier.
I was just answering the question about why universities don't just self publish everything.
If Elsevier is overcharging for their services (hint: they are), some startup should go disrupt them or something (hint: the problem will be convincing prestigious authors to publish in your journal rather than Elsevier's).
Yeah, they are overcharging, and the problem with individual authors moving to the competition is the prestige/impact factor associated with a journal (ie a prisoners dilemma/coordination problem), and possible solutions are
- concerted action of editorial boards to resign and found a competing journal that "inherits" the prestige (as has happened several times, notably Journal of Algorithms prodded by none other than Don Knuth)
- concerted action of universities/libraries (as in the article)
- government/funding agency intervention to mandate open access publication
- etc.
I hope Elsevier have overextended themselves by refusing to accept half price, and, having their bluff called, receive even less.
My objection therefore is that merely mentioning such work could suggest to some unfamiliar with the issue that it’s a mitigating factor in Elsevier’s existence.
Who does the grunt work is just a logistical implementation detail.
When you say non-academic I’m not sure how you were envisioning the review process. That part of course is more challenging because you can’t just hire anyone to do it, there could only be a couple qualified people in some cases, they would have to be incented, or at least motivated or effectively compelled in some way to participate. Not trying to overstate the problem, just that it’s a bit bigger challenge than getting the other work done.
Aside from sending a few emails, the review process is largely managed by academia, although I suppose academia may be happier thinking they are being managed by Elsevier than their peers (who tell Elsevier who to enlist for the work anyway...).
But the non-academic work is what you have to do yourself if you break the lock in.
It is not trivial and as it scales it gets increasingly complex.
There are two moats that protect Elsevier's business.
The first moat is that academics don't trust each other and perpetuate the "Publish or Perish" mindset.
In some disciplines (e.g., Liberal Arts, Math), there isn't enough money flowing through academic circles for this to be a real problem. But for the Life Sciences and some Physical Sciences in particular, there is a lot of government and industry money sloshing around, and academics seem perfectly willing to undercut each other and themselves as a group to get a bigger slice of it.
Elsevier takes advantage of that.
Maybe academics will get mad enough at them over it to unite long enough to break their ability to take advantage of them. Seems like it would be in their best interest to do so.
The second moat is that building a web platform to efficiently distribute hundreds of thousands of pages of content a year while still maintaining access to all the previously published pages is a seriously non-trivial task.
Now just providing that web platform can be done for much less money than is currently paid to publishers.
But, as I'm sure all the web developers and sys admins on hacker news would be happy to point out, hosting terabytes of data and generating consistently formatted HTML/CSS from thousands of individually created Word docs and graphics with nifty social media integrations and customized search/browse options is not a thing that can be done for free at the scale Elsevier is operating at.
Academics usually do the peer reviewing and sometimes the editing (which is almost certainly a waste of their talents as a good editor is cheaper and more efficient at editing than some Biology PhD guy).
Most of the more prestigious journals (e.g., the ones people are paying for) are supported by publishing house staff doing the sort of stuff I mentioned -- or, more likely, managing the vendors in India who are doing the stuff I mentioned.
Source: I worked in scientific publishing for many years. Happy to be out of it...
Since most subscriptions are sold in "big deal" packages, where few of the most prestigious journals get bundled with a lot of the less prestigious ones to get libraries to purchase more of the same publisher, it's not just those ones that people are paying for...
But it hasn’t changed, because it’s incredibly hard to fight inertia of a large and long standing system where parties who disproportionately benefit, or stand to lose something, will do everything in their formidable power to stop it, with no regard for what’s best for the world.
These are not piss-ant companies involved, most people don’t realize how incredibly profitable the major player is, raking in billions and billions every year. That money is their war chest.
Then you have parties involved who don’t really like the system, but don’t [choose one: have the balls to, or, cant afford to foolishly risk damaging their career or livelyhood to] all out buck the system. The path to jobs, promotions, prestige, and other rewards winds through this anachronistic, corporate interest driven system.
Also common with good vs. evil wars like this, is there are some stories of heros to be told. Courageous people who have taken a stand, in various ways, and made real progress. Every one of those small wins helps clear the path for the next attack.
This gain was particularly delicious - their own arrogance caused them to overestimate their hand. I guess it’s possible it wasn’t arrogance, rather, a strategic bluff, but in either case, they just sat down at the poker table and lost a big pot.
That first sentence seems a bit like saying that people suffering from starvation fear their fellow men, simply because they are competing for a scarce resource.
What I, as an academic, fear, or at least have to respond to, is an incentive system that judges the quality of my publications on the established reputations of the journals in which they appear. It's true that my fellow academics are rivals for promotions and positions, and in this respect I suppose that I fear them in some way; but they suffer as much from the system as I do, and some of the most established use their prestige to fight the good fight (Timothy Gowers being one of the big names on that list), and so I think that the antagonistic sound of saying that I fear them is not accurate in its implication even if it is so in some technical sense.
The first layer, yes, but after that come non-specialist academics, who aren't qualified to judge my particular work on its merits, and so have to substitute some other metric; and then administrators, whose fitness to judge the merits of any academic work is, let me say, not necessarily a given. For example, even without any worries of bias: as a mathematician, it is always a struggle to get non-mathematicians, even (or perhaps especially) other scientists, to realise that author order on mathematicians' papers reflects only one's place in the alphabet, not one's contribution.
It really is bewildering.
Online academic communities and publishers such as ResearchGate and EndNote could come up with potential solutions here. ResearchGate already asks us to effectively vote about other users' authorship and expertise. Adding a voting system (or similar) whereby users declare the roles played by each author might help dismantle author position hegemony.
Voting might be imperfect, and perhaps there are other options. The current system, though, is ridiculous and contributes towards the exploitation of junior academics, and poor inter-discipline communication. Clearer computational representation of roles could also improve search.
* Edit: Of course, they don't do it in a particularly good way.
Mediocre service, as you say yourself. Furthermore, they earn way above market returns on equity. It's really not a competitive enterprise, but extracting rent (from the tax payer via university library budgets).
Why that doesn't happen is quite involved, but I've written about it in more detail at https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
Elsevier is not stupid. January without access means:
* most scientis realise it's not necessary
* the smaller rest of them, learn how to use scihub
* elsevier is 10% less on revenue (contrary to giving it 'free access' now and retrocharging later) for every month
* people start publicize in different places, diminishing elsevier value, and proving that you can print elsewhere (sic!)
In result elsevier strong grip ends in a bing bang. Would scientific world hold them for just 3..5 months, and they're out of the business. Simple.
Each and every scientist is well aware of that. However, their careers are dictated by scientific production metrics, and these involve getting papers accepted by well established publications, and these are often defined by lists of acceptable journals dictated in a top-down manner by universities or even the state, and these lists are composed almost exclusively of... You've guessed it: commercial publications managed by the likes of elsevier.
However, if that means that German researchers (and perhaps later others as well) are less likely to read work published in Elsevier journals, that might in turn lead to people being less likely to publish there - because of those same metrics. If fewer researchers read your work, fewer will cite it.
Awesome! It's going to be fun when Elsevier eventually tries to go after SciHub in Germany for copyright violations. I can imagine state prosecutors asking: "So you want us to prosecute someone for not paying you for access to public research?". One can hope...
sci-hub.la sci-hub.hk sci-hub.tv sci-hub.tw sci-hub.name sci-hub.mn
See the Wikipedia entry
Yes: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...
States could solve this whole mess tomorrow by just passing a law that states "if you take our money to do research the end result needs to be available to the general public for free". The chicken-and-egg problem of everyone just moving to open-access journals for everything would be solved.
A law would be best, that way it instantly applies to all government grants, but it could just be terms of the grant money. "In accepting these funds you agree to only publish through open access."
Elsevier lost when they agreed to allow people (mostly just some people in math and physics back then) to post preprints online.
If you're interested, I've written about why they're forced to do so at [1] and [2]. (And the reason I'm following it so closely is because I'm trying to fix it - if you want to follow that, see [3].)
[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
Indexed preprints make a whole lot of sense, if they'll let you do it.
That said, there are often funds available from e.g. the library, your funder, or even nationwide funds such as in the Netherlands and I think the UK, that will cover the costs of making articles available as open access. It's pretty much a no-brainer to use them for researchers.
Not in my experience or at least no exclusively. A lot of researchers are paying for open access. Sure they all grumble about it and think it's a stupid system, but since it's neither their money nor in many cases their decision, they still do it.
Researchers will (and have) find effective ways to share research results w/o traditional publishers. This would surface very quickly once access was temporarily revoked.
Or Elsevier’s belief that the opposition is tenuously formed. If temporary free access prompts a critical mass to decamp, Elsevier will have staved off both permanence and precedent.
I don't see how granting free access unilaterally improves their negotiation position other than goodwill in manipulating the executive and legislative government..
People tend to become politically involved (loosely defined) when desperate. Remove the source of desperation and engagement fades. Convincing people to come to a meeting or go to a rally or draft a letter to the dean or call or write to their representative gets harder when the problem goes from specific, e.g. I need X study to write my paper, to abstract.
(Well, technically, there was a short one at the start of last year IIRC, but Elsevier prolonged access then just as well.)
Some fraction of the people whose support is necessary for the negotiators to remain empowered are. The question is how many.
This is a very good clause to the German institutions. Everybody will like to exchange letters, informations, get in contact with German authors. And when we have communication, we have knowledge and data sharing, and everybody benefits from it. Specially the corresponding authors.
I wonder if this is another argument to overthrow Elsevier to as clearly their peer review for publication is a poor filter. Or, is it possible the peer review process will become even weaker in a new more open paradigm?
I'm not a scientist, I'm not affiliated with any academic institution at the moment (I still TA here and there though).
(Don't know if this is true for Cornell, but my own alma mater will accept and confirm arbitrary earmarks, even on small donations. It encourages more donations, and it doesn't actually mess with their priorities because money is fungible.)
I tried their service before and did not like that the papers had to be read in the browser. I'd prefer living near a research library.
This is a huge win for proponents of free information sharing like Scihub and others. Germany's argument seems to basically boil down to, make us a favorable deal or we'll just pirate or obtain from other sources and Elsevier will lose out completely. Brilliant! I love their boldness and willingness to have some balls to fight for science instead of corporate greed in this negotiation.
I'm still not enitirely sure what value they offer?
All these domains are working!
(And there's a ton of other things, like making sure people pay to access articles when they have a subscription and the like, but those are services they provide to themselves...)
With respect to typesetting and proofreading, my personal experience is that the 'service' provided by Elsevier was of such a low quality that it actually caused _increased_ effort on the author's side.
Making the articles available is indeed the core business of a publisher. However, prices for that kind of service should have decreased significantly over the last two decades, not increased.
For example, the Journal of Membrane Science is one of the most highly regarded journals in my field. Anyone in the field can be pretty confident that an article in that journal is a high-quality work, meaning it's scientifically rigorous and representative of the state of the art. Researchers want to publish in that journal so that they are associated with 'the best' in their field.
Articles in another journal, Membranes, which I just discovered now on Google, would not receive the same amount of credence from professionals in the field. This is partly due to practitioners themselves unwilling to trust lesser-known journals; however, professionals are busy and need an easy way to filter feed from the chaff. The value provided by Elsevier in that sense is that they maintain a type of filter of quality.
I'm sure all of the same authors and professionals could start a new journal and immediately stop publishing in Journal of Membrane Science, but it could be a less-than-optimal career choice. In a sense, timing would be everything.
An interesting case is Lingua, an Elsevier journal. A few years ago, its editorial board (i.e. regular researchers not employed by Elsevier) collectively resigned and founded the new journal Glossa. That is now the journal that provides that stamp of quality, proving that its not Elsevier itself that provides it.
I'm curious why/how it was possible for them to do it. The Wikipedia link mentions that there was a disagreement between the editors and Elsevier. How were the editors able to collectively organize and leave en masse? What can editorial boards of other journals learn from this?
Interestingly, I'm working on a blog post right now on what others can learn from this (because I'm trying to make it happen more often), so if you (or others reading this) are interested, you can follow along via https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic
As can be seen in the Elsevier Wikipedia page, it has happened several times (not often enough). The Journal of Algorithms case is instructive [1]. Any individual researcher that "fights" the publisher will lose out, but collectively in a concerted move one can be successful.
I think Don Knuth provided enough credibility to transfer the prestige of the journal, and enough of a towering figure to give everyone the impetus to go ahead with the defection collectively.
It would be very interesting to examine cases where this worked successfully and where it failed (or wasn't attempted) and see what differentiates them. I'm pretty sure Elsevier is examining these cases very carefully...
Cases that might be closer to many HN readers are:
1999: Journal of Logic Programming editorial board resigned and created Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
2003: Journal of Algorithms board resigned and founded ACM Transactions on Algorithms, prodded by Don Knuth (see links)
2006: Topology -> Journal of Topology
So, it is possible to overcome the coordination problem and cooperate to defeat Elsevier.