Sorry for the naive question, but why don't the universities collaborate to publish their own open access journals? Don't the ivy leagues have enough prestige to pull it off? Why is Elsevier needed in the information age?
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.
The status quo is absolutely unnaceptable.
* 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...
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...