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Comment by DrBazza | Hacker News Reader

Elsevier have always been like this, it's just that now, with cheap internet globally available and having seen what Napster did to the record industry (indirectly creating Spotify, Apple music, etc.) they're fighting to protect their monopoly with whatever (dirty) tricks they can muster.

As far as I can see, the only things they now provide that hasn't been replicated as a 'free service' is matching editors and referees to submissions, and journals of repute, i.e. publish in Nature and it's a bona fide article, publish on your blog and no-one knows who you are or whether your work was refereed.

To be clear Sci-Hub merely provides copies of work that has been accepted for publication in a journal, it's not a free replacement for the full 'service' that Elsevier and other publishers provide.

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> As far as I can see, the only things they now provide that hasn't been replicated as a 'free service' is

...providing a brand name that signifies whether someone's work is considered good enough. (It's debatable whether it's a good measure of being good enough, but it is the measure that is accepted.) That's the main reason why researchers keep publishing in the same old journals - even if alternative journals exist providing exactly the same services.

The biggest thing Elsevier does that requires actual work is final typsetting and editing of your article. They have someone take your preprint submission and take care of the formatting for the final article.

I don't think this justifies their ridiculous fees and business practices, but it is a service they provide that costs money.

I have published with Elsevier and Springer. Every single time they proof my article it comes back as unreadable garbage. Sometimes a non-native English speaker has 'corrected' my grammar by adding incorrect articles everywhere, sometimes they fail to wrap formulas that are wider than the page, sometimes they make tables or figures so small they are entirely unreadable.

Elsevier and Springer and others hire the worst bottom-dollar outsourced 'proofers' they can find and every single time it takes so long to get across to them what they've done wrong and to pore through the paper to find all the errors that it would have been better for everyone if they just told me how they wanted the paper and I supplied the PDF!

Anyway I don't disagree with what you've written but I had to get the rant out. Has anyone NOT had this experience??

Indeed, their "typesetting" is mostly done by people with no subject expertise who is more likely to introduce a mistake than correct something that matters.

Elsevier requires a strict format on submissions so it can be put through their typesetting pipeline. There's almost no humans involved in that. Nor do they have professionals that edit the papers.

This is the case for the whole scientific publishing industry.

Not true, having just gone through publishing in an Elsevier journal (and not for the first time). There was a person involved, because I discussed several of their edits over the phone. It's partially automated, but there is definitely a person involved doing actual work.

It is not, however, a full blown copy editor - it's primarily just minor changes, fixing formatting, and figure placement etc. Again, I don't like Elsevier, but it's not fair to say that they do nothing.

That was not my impression when dealing with them as author. Any justification for that?

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