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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also provide the world's crappiest service.

I have to use their web interface every time I submit a paper to an Elsevier journal. It's like sticking needles into my eyes. It's this bad: in 2019, they still use an image map for their main menu.

A particular pleasure is when they force me to compile my TeX into a PDF. Via a web interface.

Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.

And then there's the stuff the article talks about: the huge fees universities pay so that our own work can be "open-access".

I hate them. I hope they go bust. I hope their CEO becomes homeless.

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While we’re doing “as well as”s about Elsevier...

I hate how soulless the journals feel. Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site. Where is the history? Where is the pride? Instead it looks just like any old rubbish journal, and any reader who stumbled upon it would think the same unless they read its history in Wikipedia.

> I hate how soulless the journals feel.

I certainly sympathize with you!

That said, personally I'm happy about this development. Journals don't really fill a practical need anymore, and (as you point out) they increasingly don't fill an emotional, intangible one either. Perhaps then we will muster the effort to kick the entire industry to the curb.

Which journal?

All of them use the same process.

I was asking about:

> Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site

The OP is describing how all journals are treated the same, despite the the fact that they are essentially mini societies, some with more important histories than others

Of course they won't do it as that would show the world the other 99% of their journals are in fact old rubbish. And they don't buy us drinks as we know...

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/104

The papers they hold hostage have not been fully backed up [1] and made accessible for everyone. Elsevier does deserve to go bankrupt, but we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/

I had a laugh reading this.

> Readers should note that, in many jurisdictions, use of Sci-Hub may constitute copyright infringement. Users of Sci-Hub do so at their own risk. This study is not an endorsement of using Sci-Hub, and its authors and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers. There is a possibility that Sci-Hub users — especially those not using privacy-enhancing services such as Tor — could have their usage history unmasked and face legal or reputational consequences.

> Sci-Hub is currently served at domains including https://sci-hub.hk, https://sci-hub.la, https://sci-hub.mn, https://sci-hub.name, https://sci-hub.tv, and https://sci-hub.tw, as well as at scihub22266oqcxt.onion

"We are not telling you to use Sci-Hub, but you can use Tor and here are some addresses where you can find it."

> Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals. For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States.

"See, Sci-Hub works that well" :-)

Managing to have this hosted on a .gov website seems noteworthy.

Note that the former and current Editors-in-Chief of that journal are both UC Berkeley biologists (also huge critics of paywalled science).

> Since the ledger of Bitcoin transactions is public, we can evaluate the donation activity to known Sci-Hub addresses (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM, 14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA, 1EVkHpdQ8VJQRpQ15hSRoohCztTvDMEepm).

Subtle

At this point, this article is a masterpiece.

Thanks for the joke praptak.

Almost like this old joke: "How long can we tolerate this nest of indecency and moral corruption at Smith street 2, pink door on the second floor, knock three times?!"

> we must ensure that the information they have amassed gets salvaged.

Hopefully it all gets backed up by sci-hub before that point.

What's preventing Sci-Hub from having it all, and who is backing up Sci-Hub?

All articles are already assured to get salvaged via services like LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and Portico. All we need is to have them go bankrupt, preferably fully, so stories like that won't repeat: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/22

If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them? Their entire business depends on the people who hate them: the scientists who submit their articles to them and the universities who subscribe to the journals.

If everybody agrees Elsevier is terrible, you'd think it should be easy to set up a competitor that does it better, but someone everybody still wants to get published in Elsevier's journals, and everybody still wants to read what's in them. If everybody were to just stop, Elsevier would be out of business within a month.

If scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month.

As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place

If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact.

But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.

> If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact.

That's irrelevant. Researchers are forced to publish in high-impact journals to preserve their career, and any newly created journal has zero impact.

Furthermore, some countries/universities enforce a journal whitelist, and evaluate the eir researchers based on the number of papers published in the pre approved list if publications.

Those lists are subject to change, though.

So the problem is really with the bureaucrats that force researchers to publish in Elsevier journals. They should reward publication in equally well-reviewed open access journals just as much, if not more so, as publication in Elsevier journals.

And because those bureaucrats are often distributing public funds among those researchers, they should also have an interest in the results of that research being accessible to the public, and as many researchers as possible.

No, that's not attached to actual reading. Having access to their whole library, I still preferred to Google for preprint PDF. Even better a "research report", which usually is the same content, but before they were forced to remove half a page of text the last day, because the system forced different margins.

The problem is that many bureaucracies attach some kind of point value to journals on this list, and a different on that list and so on. It's reforming those that is a problem, especially since according to their metrics, which are defined by counting the papers in journals in the lists, everything works perfectly.

It's not a matter of "stopping reading". Impact factor metrics are based on number of citations. And if I publish a paper on a new method to do X, I am expected to compare to (and thus cite) previous papers that did X. I cannot just decide not to cite relevant previous work because it is published in an Elsevier journal.

Of course, sending papers to OA journals, going the extra mile to cite them, and preferring them to non-OA alternatives when any paper will do (e.g. when you are just providing some examples of applications of X, without being exhaustive, and you can find some in OA and others in non-OA journals) does help.

The sad thing is academy solved this exact problem centuries ago with the tenure system, but academics are still cowards

Tenure only exists in upper levels of academic career.

It varies a LOT by discipline. There are niches where OA already won and for-profit journals are essentially irrelevant, or even where the entire paper publication mechanism is just a legacy used only for dick-measuring contests and to ration funding - all the real work happens as GitHub PRs, or as mail to a mailing list maintained by some random guy or a Facebook group or something (Warning: Examples somewhat facetious).

But there are also niches where the reality is that key people are happy as Elsevier Journal editors, and they function as gatekeepers, and for the foreseeable future the only route forward in those disciplines will be to get published in those high impact Elsevier Journals.

Because of this variation, lots of people can't do anything. It's a highly distributed problem. No amount of Computer Science professors however prestigious can change how Social Sciences do journals. And we shouldn't want it any different, even though in this case it kinda sucks.

It would also happen within the same month if the EU and/or the US simply made it illegal to publish publicly funded research behind a paywall. All the content would disappear and the "industry" would reorganize. As a citizen the fact that this has still not been done is outrageous. Explaining that to the general population instead of pretending that this is something that's specific to the scientific community could be a way forward. It's simply a scandal that citizens are not allowed to read for free the research they paid to be performed.

It is already being tried with Plan S. But the problem is to choose the right alternative, of which the alternative pay-to-publish model isn't.

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/86

Welcome to coordination problems. Nobody loves them, but short-term, publishing with them is still the optimal move for scientist's career.

> If everybody were to just stop,

That's the root of all human-created hard problems on this planet; it's not exclusive to scientific publishing. People don't spontaneously coordinate. As long as it's in the short-term interest of any individual to not be the first one to stop, or to not stop when others are stopping, almost no one is going to stop.

It's not a "problem". elsevier has been creating actual value for years. It's becoming a problem now precisely because we think they are creating more problems than value.

It's always the value market which dictates what happens. Even a dictator has provide values for enough people (not necessarily its citizen) to stay in power.

It's still a problem. Each individual scientists is better off short-term, in terms of their own career advancement, if they support Elsevier (by publishing with them), even though they'd be much better off longer-term if they all stopped supporting Elsevier.

Markets do love this sort of thing; this is one way of capturing customers and extracting money from them, whether they like it or not.

It's a kind of vendor lock-in. Elsevier is leveraging monopolistic power.

I agree with you but that's none of my point.

My point is just that you have to weight the cost: it provided tremendous value through the system of journals, while not really giving a "real" drawback since everyone in research who has ever wanted to get a given paper in the past 5 decades has been able to find it despite the locking by trying hard enough to bypass it.

i don't even understand the downvotes: i don't agree with the system and Elsevier can die but my point is just that they never were a really tangible "problem". Mostly a "1rst world problem".

Well, they became a problem due to their firm control over the system where they mostly profit from work that others do for them for free.

If scientists write the content and other scientists review it, merely publishing the results of that process shouldn't cost that much. Elsevier is extracting a lot of value from the work of others, and locking the results of that work up.

The act of publishing does add value, but not nearly as much as the researcher and reviewer have added, and yet Elsevier takes ownership of it all, because they happen to be sitting in a position of power built on that work done by others.

What sort of value have they been creating?

providing the system on which is based a major criteria for scientist's career advancement

not saying it's good, just that it's a fact

It's not just about coordination. Clearly, coordination would make solving the accepted problem relatively easy. Yet, individual action does solve the problem to a small degree. Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happen, although many people recognize that there is a problem.

The problem is that often changing your own behavior hurts you more than it works to effect change, unless lots of others also spontaneously jump onboard. Which, more or less certainly, they won't, so you're basically just self-flagellating in a closet, which might make you feel morally pure but isn't doing anything to change the world. This is a pretty well-studied part of political science (and probably is covered in other disciplines like sociology, I'd expect) so there's a ton of both theoretical and practical (case) studies on the topic.

Coordination problems (and very serious problems of information access & distribution) are why things like boycotts are in fact, however much we might wish otherwise, so laughably bad at enforcing community norms on e.g. large companies, and why the market doesn't do a great job of just "sorting out" all kinds of things most people would consider to be problems.

> Which, more or less certainly, they won't, so you're basically just self-flagellating in a closet, which might make you feel morally pure but isn't doing anything to change the world.

I think you are factually wrong and condecending in the way you express it.

One case I can bring is the vegan product market in Germany. For many years, individuals were "self-flagellating in a closet" and simply avoiding animals products and buying the alternatives that were offered. That triggered the production of more of these products, which triggered more consumption of them. Today the market is big and makes a meaningful difference. This the result of individual action without coordination by all market participants.

I don't make a claim about the relative cost of individual change. I rather call the thinking that individual cost will only be accepted if everybody changes arrogant. I've heard more than I'd like to count sentences like "If I/we change, the others still continue, so the problem won't be solved", while in fact it will be solved to the degree that I/we are causing it. Demanding that everybody changes just because you change is arrogant.

I'm not saying individual costs are negligible compared to the influence one can have with individual change. There may be good reasons to not change.

Well, I'm just coming at it from the perspective of observed efficacy in the real world. It's fine in a Kantian moral sense or whatever, if your goal is personal ethical edification. If your goal is to make things better it's a poor tool to rely on.

The problem's not so much that they can fail—any method can—as that they can fail with anything short of overwhelming and sustained support, that is, they can be wildly popular and still have no long-term effect at all. Better to look elsewhere—no amount of "if we'd all just do it, we could fix this!" will change that.

Again, as a personal choice, fine. As an alternative to more-effective means, no. It's not "arrogant", it's an outcome-focussed stance fitting with observed reality and current scholarship.

[EDIT] "They" being "movements mostly based on changes in personal behavior patterns, at some significant personal cost or risk"

I do not advocate individual change as a tool to rely on to solve problems, so this is a straw man. That would disregard other effective and efficient ways to approach problems. I also don't think it's about "personal ethical edification". That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has. Often that is avoided by the statement I'm criticizing.

> My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has

How is that not essentially zero, in most political circumstances and for non-extraordinary individuals? That's my point.

[EDIT] and further:

> That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

I think I'm giving it a pretty fair shake by acknowledging there's any laudable purpose to actions of personal behavioral choice on large political problems. There is, but it has little to do with effecting change, if that's the part that's important.

We are one in many. That means we just share the influence. Many issues are not binary, and often the individual contribution to a problem can be canceled out completely by individual change. The influence may be small compared to the sum of all, but still the responsibility for the individual contribution lays completely with the individual. The comparison must be between the individual cost and the individual contribution to the problem and it's solution, not falsely to the complete problem on the scale of the society.

Even when the problem is binary, the argumentative position becomes much stronger by individual change. For example, if Europe became fully carbon neutral, it's stance would be much more powerful when it comes to these questions compared to if it continued to build new coal power plants and told other countries to stop doing that.

Very true, this is precisely the problem. Editors don't leave E's journals' boards because it might hurt their vitae. Referees don't decline to work for E's journals (for free) because it might hurt their relations with editors. And authors often don't have much choice where to send their articles and might hurt their career by picking out-of-stream venues.

> Humans are wired to neclect small changes when they come at a personal cost to them, so they think "it won't change if I stop doing it, so I won't stop doing it". This thinking is arrogant and the cause why many changes in society don't happen, although many people recognize that there is a problem.

To me it sounds like you just described a coordination problem. Can you clarify why you don't think it is?

> If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them?

They own the high IF journals, which scientists need to publish to in order to get cred'.

It's a chicken and egg problem, scientists can't move to OA journals until these provide the high IF they need to get cred' but OA journals can't get high IF without high impact articles being published in them, which requires paying Elsevier huge fees so you can publish in both.

> If Elsevier is so terrible, and everybody hates them, how is it possible that it's so hard to move away from them?

Because researchers either publish or perish, only the work posted in established journals counts, and the likes of Elsevier controls those journals.

"Their entire business depends on the people who hate them"

Just like telcos, banks, internet behemoths and every other company that finds or builds a suitable set of barriers to entry.

Because publishing papers creates personal property for the authors, and the fees are not paid by them. So there is an incentive to leave the system alone. Resistance is building, slowly.

In a lot of fields, most academics just don't care

I'd highly recommend watching this documentary called Paywall [1] which explains the unhealthy dynamic between academia and publishing. TL;DR - academic prestige and career progression depends on being published in highly rated journals.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM_nWsdbNvQ

Tragedy of the Commons.

Another fun fact about Elsevier: In their contract with university libraries they exclude the right of fair use as described in the US copyright law. That means one can download papers, but technically mustn't use the data found in them without consent. This is just ridiculous.

Isn't that illegal? Or at least, doesn't that cancel the copyright as it explicitly breaches the copyright contract with the demos.

I was wondering too. The librarian that told me about it, is a copyright expert and was outraged. However, it seems like there was not much they could do. I am guessing the fact that this is happening at an Ivy league university means that lawyers are not useful in this matter. They also said that only Elsevier does that.

> I hope their CEO becomes homeless.

Not having experienced homelessness myself, this still isn't something I would wish in anyone.

Oh I would, and that he may go completely broke too, and die miserable, alone, and in pain. These people's greed has caused enormous harm and cost uncountable lives. That's what keeping this knowledge to yourself does, otherwise our doctors would still be doing bloodletting and sacrificing small animals. And in a certain way, we still are. Which doctor has the money to access all those journals? Lost of clues to a cure for lots of diseases are probably buried somewhere in expensive journals.

But noo, please for the love of money withhold the doctor that information, let him pay thousands of dollars for it, so that he will not read any of it, and let his patients suffer and die. Like they did when we were still doing bloodletting.

I'm not arguing that what Elsevier is doing is good, but I do think desiring terrible things for others however "bad" we may perceive them to be is ultimately not productive.

I have experienced homelessness. I hope the CEO becomes homeless and then gets kicked out of any squats when they find out that he used to run Elsevier, and has to live in a cardboard box full of dogs under a bridge, before finally finding enlightenment in his tranformation into a modern Diogenes. He will then wander the world, providing modest educational services for free and be finally happy.

Mathematicians have for a couple of years now started to rely on preprints on ArXiv and this is a successful change in culture.

However, the related problem of research not being read (and the more subjective "not being worth read") is still unsolved to a large extent. My single paper on ArXiv has probably not been read and despite that my MSc reviewer commented that the work is suitable to be published (apart from the MSc) I now have a full time job outside of academia and little incentive to get the paper into a reputable journal by extensive formatting and layout changes or self-lobbying, if you will.

Are you sure people would read the article just if it were published?

Fields of math are small and narrow. Emailing people and posting to forums might be easier and more effective than publishing in a journal.

How can you tell it is not been read?

I guess I can't.

Honest question: if you hate Elsevier, why are you submitting to their journals?

It would be optimal for all researchers to coordinate to move away from Elsevier, but as long as everyone else (or the majority) is publishing in Elsevier the local optimum for each researcher is to continue publishing in Elsevier.

I know a few researchers who have publicly committed to not publish in Elsevier journals, but there's a career cost to doing this, particularly for early career researchers. Outside of a small number of colleagues who will actually read your work, most people (including funding organizations and tenure review boards) will judge your research by how much you publish and where you publish, and Elsevier owns many of the most prestigious journals.

It varies by field, depending on how many journals Elsevier has managed to capture. I consider myself lucky that Elsevier doesn't own any of the major journals in my specialty, so I've so far been able to avoid them without feeling like I was making career sacrifices to do so.

Why do the well established and well known, successful researchers not boycott it? It could start a chain reaction.

In math they did. In other fields, they depend on funding from government agencies who support Elsevier.

I'm a tenured professor, so my own position is not in danger if I boycott the likes of Elsevier (salary bonuses and grant money still would be, but at least I could still get a reasonable paycheck every month and keep a good standard of living). But the overwhelming majority of my publications are coauthored with PhD students or young postdocs who are fighting for stable positions, and their career depends on high-impact publications. If I decided to boycott for-profit journals, I would be throwing them under the bus.

In mathematics, most publications are single-author, and I suspect this (plus less reliance on funding to buy equipment) is an important factor why they are more successful than other disciplines fighting parasitic publishers, as established tenured professors might as well fight the fight. But for most disciplines, the lock-in is really difficult to escape...

I'm in computer science so fortunately almost everything is open access. Do you know how CS ended up like this and whether it could be replicated in other fields? I suspect the close relations to the math community may be part of the origin of it. Perhaps also the the values of hacker culture.

Because "services" by the likes of E are of no value to CS professors designing some of the much more advanced software. But they are sadly focusing on their own journals and not trying to help the other subjects.

It depends on the subarea of CS where you publish, and especially on the country where you are... I'm also in CS and in my country we still need to publish in (predominantly non-OA) journals if we want tenure, grants, etc.

Because ironically, and despite of all the good words, this is not what is typically rewarded by their universities.

I was waiting for the "but". Reaching the final period of your sentence was deeply satisfying.

The rot starts at the top: https://www.elsevier.com/about/management

Am I supposed to magically understand something from that link? If so, I utterly failed. Mind elucidating?

In fact, this was referring to one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20641056

It is hard to say this, but Russia is helping the world fight against Elsevier and all those money funneling institutions... (with scihub, for anyone not knowing that it is a russian 'service')

The creator of Sci-Hub is Alexandra Elbakyan and she is from Kazakhstan. According to Wikipedia [0] she spend 1 year working for a Moscow company, but that's it. I wouldn't classify it as a Russian service. There is a nice russian service for paywalled ebooks and articles called LibGen [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

i would still use it if it was a russian service

At one point in time she banned the whole of Russia from accessing sci-hub after she felt that some Russian scientists had been insulting when they named a parasitic insect after her. Late last year Russia banned isps from accessing sci-hub.

It may or may not be hosted in Russia, but I agree it is not "Russian".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/sci-hub-blocked-in-russi...

> Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.

We have been recording their (dis)services here, with everyone warmly welcome to add more:

https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/4

This is poetry. Thank you! And exactly what I'd expect of an oligopoly player.

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