Scientific Community to Elsevier: Drop Dead | Hacker News Reader

Scientific Community to Elsevier: Drop Dead

cscs.umich.edu

106 pointschrismealy14 comments

To be fair, authors publishing with Elsevier retain many rights, including the right to publish post-review personal version of his paper on his personal and institutional web-site for dissemination of scholarly work (non-commercial purposes).

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights

So whoever is calling for boycott of Elseview, should also inform authors -- especially grad students who can't afford boycotting journals -- about these facts. Use your rights and make the knowledge free.

That's not a good thing, it's just a cumbersome pressure release-valve to try and stop real change happening.

The public version should be automatic, automated and centralised and available for commercial purposes too. Relying on busy academics to do web admin busywork is crazy.

It is going to be tough for grad students, post docs and non-tenured scientists to join the boycott if Elsevier publishes the top journals in their field. Getting a job is hard enough, and impact factor matters for getting a job.

What I would like to see is societies that have their journals published by Elsevier remove their endorsement of those journals and start new journals not published by Elsevier.

In my particular field I would love to see The Geochemical Society no longer endorse the Elsevier-published Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (arguably the premier geochemistry journal) and start a rebel open access, or at least reasonably priced journal.

If you are a member of a society that publishes a journal with Elsevier, contact your society's president as suggest they stop publishing with Elsevier.

That's happened in a few fields. Three CS examples I know of are, 1) the association endorsing the Journal of Logic Programming (Elsevier) withdrew endorsement in 2000, and the editorial board resigned en masse to form Theory and Practice of Logic Programming; 2) the editorial board of Machine Learning (Kluwer) resigned in 2001, moving to the newly created Journal of Machine Learning Research; and 3) the Journal of Algorithms (Elsevier) board resigned in 2003 to form Transactions on Algorithms. Donald Knuth wrote a lengthy letter that spurred that last one (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf).

I think there were a few others in that era that slip my mind. Not sure why the pace slowed down after that flurry of activity, though. Possibly effort has gone towards more institutional initiatives like PLoS, rather than the "editor revolt" style of initiative that was semi-popular in the early 2000s.

Physics and the social sciences (incl. law) seem to have partly sidestepped the access problem in practice by making centralized pre-print repositories (arXiv for physics, SSRN for social sciences) de-facto standard places to deposit preprints. Not sure why that hasn't developed in other fields, or what could be done to encourage it.

Has Elsevier made any response to all of these calls for boycott? Are they even aware of it?

And are the other publishers looking at their business models so they can become less bad than they are now?

I am tempted to say these boycotts are (as of yet) having no effect at all.

Having bought the idea up a couple of times, I believe the majority of academics (even in computing subjects) don't know they "should" be boycotting, and most have no intention of joining in when it is discussed with them.

I wonder if most of the noise you hear is from people attached to the 'free' journals, who obviously have an interest in getting people away from Elsevier.

This will have an effect, but slowly.

Editors of Elsevier journals will send papers off for review, and get a growing number of "Sorry, I don't review papers for Elsevier journals." If you tell people that you are an editor for a nonprofit journal, everyone will agree that's a good thing, but telling people you edit for Elsevier will not have the same effect. Editorial jobs will become a drag. Morale will drop. People will quit. Journals will have to recruit lesser-known editors (and no one wants to submit good papers to journals with a bunch of B-list editors).

Meanwhile, people like Tim Gowers -- who is spearheading this movement, and who is also one of the most prolific mathematicians in the world -- will find other homes for their work. Wherever Gowers, Terry Tao, etc. publish, junior scientists would be very happy to follow. That is how the prestigious journals got that way in the first place.

"The company has been criticised not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices. For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier as an example of a publisher of journals which might be "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value" and which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing".[6] Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University and Duke University."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

Academics revolt by committee from experience. It takes a while.

Only after a review of peers, paid for by the journals too.

I think the exact point is that the journals don't pay for peer review.

Elsevier responding to pressure is not unprecedented; doctors protesting to the Lancet ultimately forced the parent company to sell off a defence trade show that was part of their exhibitions business (although divesting divisions of their trade businesses is something of a hobby for Reed Elsevier anyway). That had a difference though: they were pressurising Elsevier to take specific courses of action.

In this case, it appears to be more of a "we won't work for you because we don't respect your ethics" stance. Which is fine, but they'll have to continue reading and citing articles in Elsevier journals in their work to be respected as academics.

Ultimately, the value of copyrights giving Elsevier exclusive control over access to thousands of existing "must cite" articles in searchable format means it would continue to be a profitable entity if it stopped publishing new material of comparable quality or any new material at all. It's a drop in profits I'm sure the Elsevier board would rather avoid, but the boycott doesn't seem to be offering them any more attractive alternatives.

Could review papers can be written which become proxies for those articles? (They would presumably include some updates, so they add some value).

I really don't like Elsevier, but the alternatives do not really exist.

Most open Access aggregators are of dubious quality and don't provide an interface for peer-reviewing. Even worst, the harvesting standard (OAI) is implemented in so many different ways and no two sites/platform implement it in a consistent way. Scopus also extract references, citations, addresses, etc. which are necessary to compute influence and impact.

Microsoft Academic and Google Scholar are starting to look as an alternative, but I'm wouldn't be surprised if they licensed their data from Elsevier&Thomson.

Until these services are duplicated in the Open Access community, Elsevier will still be needed.

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