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Comment by seatac76 | Hacker News Reader

Question: What is Elsevier’s value proposition? Could that be replicated by on open source offering?

Network effect. "Everyone" subscribed to Elsevier, so if you wanted your papers to get visibility and citations, you tried to get it published in their journals.

They are a relic of a bygone era. They made sense when journals were physical publications in the library. Elsevier was the one-stop-shop for all of the major academic journals. But with the internet, they make less sense and kept their position through inertia and rent seeking behavior.

I think the issue is more than that though, because if the physical aspect were only the barrier, they should have disappeared by the time the Internet came along.

I think (and this is only my honest, outsider perspective) that the issue is, and always was, about trust. As in: who is this dude publishing this paper about high-energy particle physics? I don't know him, so I don't trust him. But I do know about Science, and Nature, and other Journals, so I'm gonna use them. That's why Elsevier and Springer and other publishers continued to exist.

Problem is, science isn't about trust. It's about knowledge, and more importantly, truth. But how do get the truth? Well, there's witnesses, and evidence, and Reproducibility™ of statements to produce facts. Y'know, science itself. If we could somehow resolve the reproducibility crisis of science, I think we would be one step closer to ending the parasitic mono-duo-oligo-whateverpoly of these publishers. Because then it would not be about who I trust to move forward the science enterprise. Instead it would be about facts themselves, and about confirming, via evidence and reproducibility of these facts, that would promote a piece of statement into knowledge. And that is how science should always have been, since the very beginning.

But the reproduction of experiments is a problem in itself, that might be the cause of the 'relying-on-trust' issue. Since not all experiments are a simple ./build-and-run.sh script, and some involve a lot of money (think anything in medicine, physics, geology, oceanography, and the list goes on to ∞), it ends up being about someone that is reputable and reliable that had money and did the experiment and published in some journal that I know.

A certain trust is necessary even to invest the effort to understand a paper.

Curation is, theoretically, a value-add that doesn't magically disappear with the internet. "This paper is not utter garbage" is a nice signal, if it's true.

Anybody can curate. Curating a work doesn't require an exclusive copyright to publish that work. Michelin curates restaurants without charging their guests for admission.

You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. It could become very prestigious for researchers to be mentioned in your newsletter, and your own reputation will hinge on the quality of the papers you link to (and the ones you leave out). Even so, this service still doesn't require that you host or own copyright to those works!

Nor does this arrangement require that any one work be found on only one single curator's shortlist and no others.

> You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find.

That's something worth signing up for.

I agree! I don't think these actions need to be bundled together. I'm mainly just saying that curation is helpful, IMO.

There are prestigious open-access journals that are curated in exactly the same way Elsevier ones are. Curation is completely orthogonal to whether a paper is owned by the publisher cartels.

More importantly, prestige journals gateway career advancement, and in some cases, degree attainment, within numerous disciplines. This is covered extensively by advocates including Tim Gowers (maths) and Bjoern Brembs, both of whom blog heavily:

<https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/Elsevier/>

<https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/open-access/>

More so for some fields than others: physics, chemistry, and biology are making significant use of pre-publication and open-publication options (e.g.., arXiv, PLOS, PUBMED, BioMED). Medicine apparently less so (closed-access publishers include the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Nature). For social sciences open-access/prepub options include SSRN, RePEc, and EconStore, but much research remains in closed-access journals.

Law is almost exclusively closed-access, which is problematic in all manner of ways.

The own the prestigious journal names, you can trivially do what they do, but you lack the prestige.

Like Tetrahedron Letters, or the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry?

No, like Lancet or Cell.

The bundle pricing is a problem, as is consolidation in the publishing market. The fact that that there are so few publishers nowadays really doesn't help with pricing. Another example why antitrust enforcement is needed.

For institutions, it’s that Elsevier gives access to some of the papers their researchers need. The question is then how Elsevier got the papers and I think there’s a bunch of parts to it.

Firstly, it can be by providing a good service. Before the war, most papers were published by learned societies and such societies tended to not be very good publishers – they would be slow with long backlogs and unable to publish the volume of papers scientists wanted published at the time. By providing a faster service they could get papers.

Second it can be by offering a service at all. If you have a Springer journal and an Elsevier journal for some field, they can both get papers because researchers need to publish to advance their careers and one journal will not be big enough for all the papers in that field

Third can be from being a preferred choice by being prestigious, which can matter even without impact factor arithmetic – hiring committees made of peers can still know which journals in the field are more prestigious / harder to be published in, and take that into account when hiring. It’s not totally clear to me how to become prestigious. One way is by inertia – if you were prestigious before you probably still are. Something some publishers (Pergamon Press, but maybe others too?) did was owning and dining prominent scientists to get them to sign exclusive contracts to edit new journals. Perhaps this association via the editorial board could improve the journal’s prestige or otherwise get desirable papers in.

It does seem true to me that scientific publishers used to provide a pretty valuable service, and I think if one were in a government looking at all the government money going to the journals via universities, one might be able to feel that the improvement to the rate of scientific exchange was worth it.

It feels that today, a lot of that value comes from various kinds of inertia/lock-in: Elsevier has the papers and scientists must publish in Elsevier journals to advance their careers, which maintains the prestige of those journals and means the publisher continues to have the papers.

It already is: arxiv.org.

Different roles. I could have agreed if you said, say, PLOS. arXiv is a preprint repository, Elsevier publishes peer-reviewed journals.

The preprints on arxiv are read, and responded to, by plenty of peers. The question was what value Elsevier adds; I think the primary value added is just making papers available to anyone who wants to read them. Arxiv does that. (What's more, it does it for everyone, not just academics--as a taxpayer I can go on arxiv and read research that my tax money paid for. I can't do that with Elsevier published journals.) Publication in journals at this point is mainly resume padding and status signaling, not an actual value add.

PLOS is open-access, as a taxpayer you can read world-class peer-reviewed (more stringent than Elsevier journals in fact) articles in your preferred field's preferred issue.

Are there any articles on PLOS that I can't find on arxiv.org?

It's not about having access to more articles, it's about the guarantee of peer-review of whatever you read on PLOS. On Arxiv you could be reading the ramblings of a random person on the internet with zero relevance to the real world.

> On Arxiv you could be reading the ramblings of a random person on the internet with zero relevance to the real world.

The current model for traditional publishing vets each paper that is published; arxive vets each author[1] once, and then their papers can be published.

So, sure, you could be reading the ramblings of a random person, but it is quite unlikely.

I think what is more valuable is looking at the citations to the work you are reading; unless you are reading something very very new, if it is valuable at all it would be cited.

[1] When I last looked at publishing (maybe a decade ago?), arxive was vetting authors, not individual papers.

I wish arxiv.org would have a big "Booooo" banner for papers without code.

I don't think it's always necessary if the paper makes it really clear how things were done. And just because the code is available, it doesn't mean that it is actually reproducible or comprehensible.

Papers without code are sorta by definition not reproducible or comprehensible though. And yet somehow it's not part of the peer reviewing process.

Editing, typesetting and curating are expensive. Yes, authors can do this and they contribute quite a bit, but it's not enough to support the high quality documents produced by Elsevier.

Yes, tex-savvy authors can do a pretty good job but it's just not the same. That's one reason authors choose to pay the page charges.

Curating is also surprisingly important. Sure, you can often get some author to send you a free PDF from something written 10-20 years ago. But it's also not uncommon for the author to be very unresponsive. Maybe they left academia. Maybe they're lazy. Who knows? But I know that I can't count on getting a free PDF from any author.

Do you know how expensive open access publications are? I guarantee that editing, typesetting and curating could easily be performed for fraction of that price (and it's easy to prove it - just check how much Elsevier makes each year!). Also keep in mind that most of editors - which are responsible for curating - are not paid at all... And if you mean "curating" as in providing access to pdfs, then there is arxiv which does just that - for free.

You don't need to convince me. Convince all of the authors out there.

They have the power to send their work wherever they want. Really. They do.

The fact that they continue to choose the publishers after all of these years suggests to me that the publishers are doing something that the authors want.

And btw, who do you think would do this work for a fraction of the cost? Are you going to pay them? What if they unionize and demand a fair share of the grant money?

I feel like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy she had the power all along.

In my experience, the average Elsevier paper has worse typesetting than the average LaTeX document. At least in CS journals. The lines are too long, the font is too dense, and mathematical expressions look wrong. Springer, ACM, and IEEE are a bit better, but LIPIcs conference proceedings (where the author is responsible for typesetting) beat them all.

https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publishing/series/details/LIPIcs

Curation is not access. Curation is editorial, in terms of having a journal issue contain a selection of available new works and not every single thing posted.

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