Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier | Hacker News Reader

Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier

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234 pointsstargazer-337 comments

Just a note that we have asked the European Commission to investigate Elsevier for abuse of a dominant market position: https://zenodo.org/record/1472045, and also now Education International (32 million members, 400 member organisations) are taking the fight to them through academic unions. https://bit.ly/2PPjwRK

I wish people would work on the systemic issues of access, rather than acting like Elsevier is somehow uniquely responsible. If Elsevier disappeared overnight, there would still be the other 84% of the market.

Efforts like the above just lead to the open access movement getting co-opted by anti-capitalists, which hurts progress.

Overview of distribution of costs by 5 main publishers -- Elsevier share is larger than all other 4 large publishers combined:

https://oa2020.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/B14-12-Lidiia-Bor...

I'd encourage all active researchers who support the move to open access to sign the following petition: http://michaeleisen.org/petition/

It basically tells funders that you support them to negotiate better open access deals, even if that risks limiting the number of venues you can publish in.

Every nail in Elsevier coffin is a great news, paywaled scientific publications is an archaic, dystopian and shameful legacy that should never exist in a first place.

I agree with the sentiment but I do think the service journals provide was once worthwhile, before the web, as disseminaters of academic knowledge. Universities paid a subscription fee for physical copies of journals, allowing their employees to keep up to date with what was happening in the world of science. Once the web took off the proposition was no longer good value, as scientists could bypass publishers. It just took two decades for academia to change the habit of a century.

The proposition is still ok value if not too expensive - collated and vetted research reviews are highly valuable. Such as some journals and annals.

However, preventing anyone else from creating them or running their own analysis via exclusivity and access pricing is just selfish and stifling.

There's more to it than that. Elsevier etc are just bleeding out the academic publishing business. Just like Alden Global Capital has been bleeding out The Denver Post and many other newspapers.

Added value:

"The Lancet finds itself connected to... global arms trade: a trade that inflicts physical and social harm in the poorest and least stable regions. Since 2003, The Lancet's owner and publisher, Reed Elsevier, has organised some of the world's largest arms" https://t.co/rIbch7S6dy

Dmitri, I feel like you're being deceptive here. RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade, and in fact Lancet led the movement to divest! https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.w...

There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous.

> I feel like you're being deceptive here

Giving precise quote with full source link for everyone interested is deceptive? How so?

> RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade

Yes, the article is dated 2005. It was clearly a major issue for the journal's reputation at the time, that went through the trouble to write it. The guardian article is from 2008, so 3 years after. Does 2008 being 10 years ago erase that part of the history?

This very subject was brought in this tweet: https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1062402097172414464

> If anyone doubts the value provided by academic publishers, they should read this story of the inner workings of @TheLancet, one of @ElsevierConnect 's leading journals http://bit.ly/relx-lancet, the link celebrating 200 years of history of the journal!

Either Elsevier takes credit for 200 years of The Lancet, including the last 20 years, or we need to erase all the history up until 10 years ago? :) Wasn't that tweet perhaps deceptive?

> There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous.

It was a quote, no added critics on my part. If you note "suggestions for publishers" under the following link, that can hardly be intepreted as criticising :) https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/100#s...

This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for review in the first place, manage the review process so that you don't have nasty, unhelpful reviews or personal vendettas getting exercised, manage ethical concerns, deal with authorship disputes, etc, and that's just the review piece of things. There's a whole information infrastructure behind the scenes making sure that once something is published that it can be found, indexed, searched for, aggregated by author, connected to the data and code and protocols and other entities that it mentions... I mean, I've been at this for 8 years and there's still so much I don't know.

All that just to make the point that the value proposition is still very much there, though I'll agree publishers could do more to make this apparent.

Aren't most editors unpaid volunteers? There are paid type setters and web people, etc., but the editors who are knowledgeable in the field are not paid except for maybe top 10 journals like Science and Nature.

Yes, the common belief (and it's mine too) is that the gatekeepers like Elsevier use free or low paid experts to pick the good papers and edit them and keep that expensive fee you pay them. Is this only in CS? In my experience all the work was done by free-to-the-publisher editors and what the editors got was listing they were on that journal.

Yea, I brought this up because I have published in a few Earth science journals and that was how it worked in that field.

The editors look at the papers and are the first level of rejections. The ones they think are decent they send to people they think would be good at reviewing the content. The reviews come back (or not, and they send the paper to someone else to review), the editor reads the reviews and, if the reviewer think the paper should be published, the editor sends the reviews to the author for the author to make changes to the paper as needed. The author returns the paper with the edits and explanations for why some suggestions from the reviewer were not followed. The editor now usually accepts the paper for publication and hands off the author to a typesetter that will help in getting the Word doc or TeX formatted paper into the style that the journal wants. This last person is paid by the journal, but in no way needs a PhD in the field or much knowledge of the material he/she is reading.

Agreed. I worked (a long time ago) at BioMedCentral - an open access journal company, and was surprised at the amount of work that went into validating and editing a single paper. Things like paying statisticians to do a proper unbiased statistical review of the methodology, or to co-ordinate peer reviewers and their relationships.

That's true, but I'm not so sure all of that is still really necessary with the way science dissemination is chaging. In computing science for example the de-facto standard is to self-publish papers on arXiv where there is no peer review prior to publication (beyond arXiv's moderators who check papers are properly categorised, formatted, etc.). The "peer review" comes in the form of the community reading and citing or not citing papers in later publications.

You could argue that publishers only ever needed reviewers - and all the administration baggage that you mention that comes with it - because they had to choose what to compile into each paper issue that would be mailed to subscribers. If we remove the concept of "issues" and just have everyone self-publish on arXiv, a lot of the value you mention regarding journals is no longer needed.

Of course, everyone publishing on arXiv has downsides. It's no longer easy to just read Nature/Science/Physical Review Letters/etc. to find the best research in the field - some other mechanism will be needed to show scientists the best papers without them spending huge portions of their time reading - but I am sure we will find solutions to these problems in time. In fact, with some of my astronomer colleagues it is also pretty normal for them to spend an hour each morning skimming through 10 or so new papers posted to the arXiv.

> but I am sure we will find solutions to these problems in time.

Solutions have been found -- overlay journals:

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/94

I am a bit on the fence about the violent nature but if publishers play hard ball, I'm not sure who to blame. In the meantime, if access through libraries is revoked and if that could go on for a whi... oh right, sci-hub, but that works because of running subscriptions. What's the end-game, it goes on slowly and gradually, untill the currently invaluable material became obsolete while a substantial pre-print based reaches critical mass for all disciplines? The landscape is fractured enough despite the giants. Anyhow there's overlap with the patent problematic that you can't just unsubscribe; maybe walls need to be teared down one by one, but you don't need to torch the place (to step up your rather violent imagery).

If publishers play hardball, no researcher will ever work for them as authors, referees or editors. Or they come down to more reasonable prices and perhaps reduce their 40% profits to ones in line with other industries?

Again, Dmitri, there's plenty of reasons to criticize Elsevier without making things up. RELX doesn't break out profit by division, but the operating margin for Elsevier is around 22%, which anyone can read for themselves in their annual report.

Which division has the highest operating margin (and what is that margin)?

The figure of 40% appears in quite a number of sources. Do they all make things up? Does the "operating margin" somehow refute it? Does "operating" here mean 22% after subtracting all additional (possibly luxurious or generously allocated) expenses?

No one really wants to criticise anyone and every work should be fairly rewarded. It is the unfair part that people are objecting to.

did you forget a zero on that figure? Where do the expenses come from if they do not pay editors, reviewers and authors? Is the discount for libraries so big that they can claim a 60% to 80% loss over a fictive idealized price?

Also, it's less the price but how the money is (not) redistributed, I thought.

additionally I came to think that keeping anyone not associated with academia from, err, academia would be on purpose, and the strikes are just increasing the pressure.

Glad to see interest in Elsevier is declining.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=elsevier...

Interesting to see the long-term decline, but to be fair, I don't think many people who are looking for a particular paper would start by Googling the word "elsevier." They would, however, Google "scihub" to find out their latest hosting domain.

The Max Planck Digital Library has already set in place mechanisms to address the content needs of its researchers when Elsevier shuts off access at the beginning of January.

What is it? Sci-Hub?

Some longer term solution? https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/journals-declaring-indep...

Most other DEAL subscribers rely primarily on inter-library loan, I think.

How to make journal bundles ("big deals") fair and promote quality? https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/100

Isn't Elsevier just borrowing credibility from scientists and institutions, I mean, they could all self publish, because it is still their names that lend credibility to these reports, data and papers, not this aggregator/publisher?

Good time to change publisher...

https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/journals-declaring-indep...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162

https://declaring-independence.org/

They ll still keep publishing in elsevier journals though

Certainly less in the country where Elsevier has such fantastic reputation :)

> Researchers at the 200 institutions supporting the DEAL negotiations have consequently foregone access to the Elsevier platform and are broadly making use of alternative routes for their research needs.

I wonder what "alternative routes" those are... /s

In many cases the library service of these institutions can still obtain copies of journal articles via inter-library lending or individual purchases. Yes, researchers will probably bypass this and use Sci-Hub simply because it's quicker, but Elsevier can't argue that universities expect researchers to obtain Elsevier journal articles illegally.

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