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Ask HN: What Is Going on with Elsevier?

1 points by bernulli ↗ HN
Over the last view months my experience with article publication through Elsevier has been horrible: the proof, after paper acceptance, used to be just 2 hrs of me reading carefully what they have in their system, now it's months (!) of going back and forth, with Elsevier going out of its way to change equations, shuffle figures, etc. Submitted manuscripts are returned to the author after several weeks because certain required statements (data policy) are supposedly not there, when they absolutely are. I was never a fan, but have never had any issues like that before.

Anyone know what's going on? Did they outsource some more over the last year? Are they in their final throes?

3 comments

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rolph
elsevier is working with materials they dont own. however when substantial changes are made and accepted it could be argued that is a publishing partnership.

you dont need elsevier anyway, all you need is to create awareness of your work among your peers.

bernulli
> elsevier is working with materials they dont own. however when substantial changes are made and accepted it could be argued that is a publishing partnership.

I don't know what you are trying to say and how that addresses the question.

> you dont need elsevier anyway, all you need is to create awareness of your work among your peers.

Unfortunately, that's not how it works in most scientific career paths.

rolph
elsevier wants whatever financial benefits they can squeeze out. when someone copy pastes someone elses work and starts charging a fee for use that is beyond plaigarism. when someone submits a work and collectively elsevier edits that work, and originator ~agrees~ to the revisions, this is called collaboration and implies partnership in a derived work, thus elsevier goes from something they dont own, to forcing collaborative ownership of something that is not thiers. this is how you leverage works that are meant to be freely shared, into being something to commoditize for private gain, in exchange for allowing you to publish on thier platform. this is not how a career path through science works.

it seems my path of molecular biology genetics and virology are not most career paths, and have not needed elsevier for dissemination of manuscript and prepublication. I remember it being quite a concern when elsevier started gobbling up everything, and we had to go back to email or paper in hand until the mailing list was sorted out. nowadays out of security concerns i have to SSL directly with oversight.