MIT recently cut all of their relationships with Elsevier journals. Researchers are still allowed to publish in Elsevier, but when they do, even they won't have access to their own articles without going through a paywall.
The widespread emergence of nonprofit open access journals is promising. I am hoping that in twenty years, Elsevier will be a thing if the past.
Practically, then, how do researchers access Elsevier articles? I work in big pharma, and if there's an article I don't have access to, I just request it through our information services office, and it is emailed to me almost instantly. Presumably, that is charged to my department. Is there a similar system in place at MIT? Does it come out of research budgets now?
For now, if you do not want to join some sort of samizdat group, you can request them from the institution that did the research. Sci-hub allows professors to avoid the hassle of having to manage requests for their articles in this age without secretaries.
Before MIT I was briefly set to sign a contract with Elsevier. So glad
I pulled out in time. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but they were pure
corporate poison.
I met another author some years later who published a technical book
with them. It went to press full of typesetting errors and
mistakes. He found evidence in files that the proofreading had been
outsourced to India. They wanted to charge him to fix the mess they'd
made.
When it comes to scientific research, Elsevier are trying to build a
monopoly. They convinced me of the necessity of SciHub. I always tell
students to have nothing to do with them.
"Academics write articles for Elsevier journals for free and hand over copyright; other academics review and edit these papers for free; and Elsevier then sells these papers back to academics."
-- This is not accurate. Elsevier journals also charge huge amount of fees (around or over $1000 depends on the journals) from academics for submitting and/or publishing their manuscripts.
--edit: changed submitting to submitting and/or publishing
It depends on the field. Accounting and finance journals have significant submission fees. For example, the Journal of Financial Economics, an Elsevier journal, charges $750 for the initial submission and then lower fees for each resubmissions ($500 for the first resubmission, $250 for the second)
Looks like you can first volunteer to work as a reviewer of manuscripts for the journal, to earn rights for reduced submission fees, or completely free submissions.
Maybe the Economics community has problems to find reviewers, the journal is resorting to that trick to find some balance between submitted manuscripts and available reviewers.
> -- This is not accurate. Elsevier journals also charge huge amount of fees (around or over $1000 depends on the journals) from academics for submitting and/or publishing their manuscripts.
This is not an accurate description. Non-open journals journals have started to offer the option that you can pay that, maybe $1000 (varies a lot), publication fee if you want the journal to publish your article as open access. But this is optional.
It's amazing to me that the big research universities haven't banded together to make a competing open-access system of journals.
It would require no more work on the side of the academics -- they are already doing all the work for Elsevier -- and the administrative costs of hiring editors would almost certainly be equal to the fees they currently send to Elsevier.
The fact that they haven't makes me think that, with the exception of independent universities such as MIT, Elsevier's lobbyists are able to lean on the political people at the top of most large universities.
Simple proposal then… we the academic paper consuming community need to start considering Elsevier journals as not prestigious. If you’re involved in any academic hiring then you are absolutely ducking responsible for perpetuating their power if you don’t push back however you can on the assumption that these journals are somehow more prestigious based entirely on their past history.
It won’t happen overnight but unless we change the assumption that these journals are special then we will never truly take back the power from Elsevier.
What perpetuates the prestigous-journal practice are review and hiring committees, often swayed by journals themselves through various means, which hold the true power.
Changing institutions, particularly academic ones, is difficult. Far more often, splinter groups are formed.
Schism at Balognia resulted in Padua. Schism at Oxford resulted in Cambridge. I believe there may have been a similar dynamic between Harvard and Yale. Arguably the same might be said of Harvard's failure to cultivate an engineering curriculum, and hence M.I.T.
Though it might be interesting to look at academic disciplines and institutions and identify which are most controlled by journals. I suspect business, medicine, and law would be near the top of such a list.
Why? Probably because it would cost them time and money to hire staff. Would this be cheaper than Elsevier? Perhaps but maybe not.
Let's assume they could do it for less. How would they handle the schools that didn't want to contribute? If they charge, well, we're back to where we are now with some big (non-profit) corporation controlling access. But if they don't charge and give it all away, well, why should anyone pony up?
I believe there is not that much pressure on universities because most PhD groups have private Dropboxes with SciHub copies of Elsevier articles anyway.
Also, there's always that one guy that everyone knows that you can just email obscure paper requests to and he'll send you a PDF almost immediately. And of course you never ask how that works. But it works.
As such, there's little to lose if a university cancels their official Elsevier subscriptions. Their student's won't mind. And I believe that is why universities haven't banded together.
> That is the downside of piracy... by taking the pain out of unfair monopolies, it takes off the pressure to overturn or compete with them.
Shadow libraries are a competition to the official ways to access the papers.
Just like in any market, the various offerings have advantages and disadvantages.
- Advantage of, say, Elsevier website: is legal
- Disadvantage of, say, Elsevier website: accessing costs money (even if your university pays)
- Advantage of, say, sci-hub: is free
- Disadvantage of, say, sci-hub: accessing is somewhere between legal grayzone and illegal, depending on jurisdiction
As in any market, by your choices, you decide which offering you prefer:
- If you decide to get the paper from Elseviert (even if you can access it "for free", because your university pays), you vote for "Elesvier's business practices are perfectly fine."
- If you decide to get the paper from sci-hub, you vote for "what sci-hub does is less evil than what Elsevier does."
Choose the market offering that fits your alignment.
I agree with you, you're absolutely correct. At this point, libraries and/or publishing divisions of major universities could easily collectively manage journals on an open access basis, with funding being supplied through academic societal membership dues. Journals do provide resources, like professional copyediting, submission and review portals, but my guess is this could be obtained through a more collaborative open-access mechanism, probably supplemented with some professional positions (e.g., someone in a department of communications or the university communications or library working as a professional editor).
Having said that, I absolutely do not believe the current structure has anything to do with journal lobbyists leaning on university political figures. I say this as someone who has served at an editor at multiple established journals in my field, who is on the editorial boards of a number of journals (incidentally, I know Eiko, the author of the blog post being discussed). Journals do put pressures on libraries, who have been in a sort of catch-22 with this stuff (this being a large topic for another thread maybe), but I don't think that's the major problem.
The major problem is the incentive structure around authoring papers and publishing. Contrary to what many might assume, publish or perish is not really the name of the game at big universities anymore — it's getting indirect grant funds. Papers in high IF journals matter, but it's secondary to grant funding, in the sense that papers are necessary to justify grant funding, which is what universities want.
The result of this is that the bottom is dropping out of publishing as a primary incentive at universities. There's just no (or little) incentive for faculty to take on editorial duties or do reviewing or anything. I've had colleagues who were involved in academic publishing, editing and reviewing, and were scolded by department heads who asked them "what kind of funds is this bringing in to the department?" Sometimes this comes with a position for a grad student or two to act as administrative assistants, but that's about it.
Major outlets like Nature often have professional editors (that is, editors who don't have academic positions elsewhere), which reflects this trend. It doesn't have to be this way, and the bulk of journals are run by academic editorial boards, but I think as you get into very high IF journals, you see things change.
The issue is this: if you tried to establish what you're talking about, if a large number of chief librarians at a large number of, say, US universities got together and said "we're going to run our own journals", I think university administrations at many universities would see this as a cost sink and nothing else.
I'm not sure exactly what the best way of explaining this is, but for many universities at the moment, papers and bibliometrics are kind of this superficial formality to justify the money that they require to produce (in terms of grants). That is, you don't get grants to publish an important finding, or to publish in Nature, you publish in Nature as a way of obtaining a grant, to bring in money. The goals, at least administratively, have shifted over time from create good ideas -> publish good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like someone with good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like good ideas in order to get grants -> get grants.
The discussions here and elsewhere that have the theme of "papers are easy to publish, why do we need journals" are implicitly recognized at universities now, in that no one administratively really cares about publishing. What they care about is grant income through indirect funds. If administrators could just get indirect funds without publishing, I think many of them wouldn't care. However, grant agencies care about them, and in the current climate, it's all about paper counts, IF, all these appearances of inte...
In Germany at some universities linen bags with the Elsevier logo are handed out to freshmen, and you occasionally see students using them. Admittedly, I think their logo does look nice. Because of this I'd argue that the public opinion of Elsevier is actually rather positive.
While it's silly that academics rely on a commercial company to maintain their commons, the fact that this company knows which articles you open strikes me as completely normal. Any library does that.
That they know which IPs you used? Any server you contact knows that. That they have your account number on file after they paid you? What were your expectations here.
If I go into a library, I can open and look at any number of books without the library recording it. Of course if I check it out they’ll know, but that’s primarily to ensure you return it (and secondarily so they can see what books to buy in the future).
As research slowly migrates to independent open-access journals and conferences, I wonder if there is an opportunity to coordinate (and incentivize) the peer review process in a decentralized manner.
Maybe a digital currency that's created by reproducing (or disproving) existing papers (weighted by lack of reproduction) and with which the author of a submitted manuscript "pays" reviewers and editors, which they in turn use to submit their own papers?
The coin of science is truth, and history has shown repeatedly that it responds quite poorly when any other goal is incentivised.
That includes "publish or perish" (promotes low-value journal-milling), impact factor (dittos), various forms of degree conferring and/or tenure-gating (journals become gatekeepers to disciplines and careers, and can feed back influence to senior faculty and/or administrators to enshrine that status), and more.
Schopenhauer's essay on authorship is strongly recommended.
Peer review, for all the awe it inspires presently, is quite modern as a significant factor, dating to the 1980s.
Huh, I didn't know that peer review was that recent.
For all of its issues, I still think there would be some value in encouraging people to find issues in papers and publicly note them instead of relying on an oral history of which papers are accurate (hence my suggestion to encourage people to reproduce or disprove papers, while slightly penalizing submitting new research).
Many fields have reproducibility issues, and my experience has been that research groups informally build their own internal lists of (seemingly) inaccurate publications.
It would be naive to believe that even the most devoted individual would opt to starve rather than pivot their work to eat. As it stands, there isn't much an incentive other than "truth" or general political reputation management to document the reproducibility of other work.
Erroneous works make it difficult to find relevant, accurate ones.
There's an interesting sociology and economics of science and academia which could use more attention and ... research. This includes why and how specialisation and focus on narrowly-scoped rather than synoptic, integrative, systemic, or "generalist" study, scholarship, and instruction emerge. The problems are not especially new or specific to our time. Yes, there were in the past scientific generalists who studied or contributed to a large number of fields, but there've also always been those who guarded their own domains, not necessarily scientific, against such approaches. Jealousies between science and religion, law, medicine, and crafts or (technical) arts, for example.
I think that trend is more generally human and speaks to tribalistic tendencies. Those themselves emerge for numerous and complex reasons. Innate complexities of fields, difficulty in judging or assessing new contributions, an inherent conservativism focused on what is rather than what might be, of preserving established order against change, and the like, seem major components.
I'll note that in the computer and technical field, as I age and hopefully experience, I increasingly find myself in the more conservative camp myself, just for the record.
On compensation and reward: it's been observed in education where much has been made of metrics focusing on individual teachers and students that those indicators seem to hold very little validity. The strongest evidence of this is for teachers working at multiple institutions, either simultaneously or transferring within a given year. Looking at those datasets, there's no correlation between performance between the two.
I'd argue similarly that attemtping to reward or penalise researchers based on individual performance or papers is ... a false metricism. That true assessments of value are difficult (and that most metrics used --- papers published and patents issued, for example) are meaningless. There's little agreement even on what, say, the ten most significant inventions of all time have been. (And were any of those developed in the past 100 years?)
Cultivating a research cadre, or sets of cadres, ensuring that they are supported, testing where appropriate against measurable criteria, but allowing for a high level of fuzzing and uncertainty in those metrics, and looking more to aggregate performance of teams, institutions, disciplines, and the like, might be a better approach. Markets work poorly here. Institutions and patronage in its various forms (including national support) seem far better suited.
And yes, revisiting and testing of recent and older results should be a constant part of that process.
Like the author said, a lot of smoke but not much fire. The data they have is the data you provided to them. If you don't want them to have your bank number, don't give it to them.
You can say a lot of bad things about Elsevier, but I don't see much issues from this post?
As a former patent buster (ok, that's bit of hyperbole, but I did bust patents):
It's rare that I would know I want an entire article, until I skim it. I would skim literally 100s of articles just to find one that might be useful. Only then would I actually want to read it carefully. There's no amount of cost that's justified until then.
Fortunately, you can almost always the author's work for free somewhere else.
"Quality isn't, and often cannot, be known in advance."
"The idea of "too small to matter" of a micropayment is at odds with "deciding if it's worthwhile"."
"Content is frequently available elsewhere. Gate / turnstile jumping is far too easy."
"Virtually all payment systems create a data trail of what content you're accessing -- it's an Orwellian wet dream of identifying who is reading, watching, or listening to what." Especially that, for legal searches
After reading about Elsevier's behavior, the word "colonialism" lept to mind. I'd like to hear from academics about why their colleges seem to do nothing to put a stop to these tactics.
57 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThe way we learn about the world is to be exposed to "narrow" sub-culture groups in various countries.
Main link was down for me - exhausted resources.
The widespread emergence of nonprofit open access journals is promising. I am hoping that in twenty years, Elsevier will be a thing if the past.
I met another author some years later who published a technical book with them. It went to press full of typesetting errors and mistakes. He found evidence in files that the proofreading had been outsourced to India. They wanted to charge him to fix the mess they'd made.
When it comes to scientific research, Elsevier are trying to build a monopoly. They convinced me of the necessity of SciHub. I always tell students to have nothing to do with them.
https://youtu.be/fhIdbRp6xeg
-- This is not accurate. Elsevier journals also charge huge amount of fees (around or over $1000 depends on the journals) from academics for submitting and/or publishing their manuscripts.
--edit: changed submitting to submitting and/or publishing
Yes, and Elsevier has open access journals with APCs (article publishing costs).
https://www.elsevier.com/journals/journal-of-financial-econo...
Maybe the Economics community has problems to find reviewers, the journal is resorting to that trick to find some balance between submitted manuscripts and available reviewers.
https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing
The document can be downloaded using the link below https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals/journal-pricing/...
(Also, journals charge for things like color images, etc).
This is not an accurate description. Non-open journals journals have started to offer the option that you can pay that, maybe $1000 (varies a lot), publication fee if you want the journal to publish your article as open access. But this is optional.
It would require no more work on the side of the academics -- they are already doing all the work for Elsevier -- and the administrative costs of hiring editors would almost certainly be equal to the fees they currently send to Elsevier.
The fact that they haven't makes me think that, with the exception of independent universities such as MIT, Elsevier's lobbyists are able to lean on the political people at the top of most large universities.
Elsevier journals are "prestigious".
Open journals exist. Some academics still choose to publish in closed journals.
It won’t happen overnight but unless we change the assumption that these journals are special then we will never truly take back the power from Elsevier.
https://satibal.com/cat-mouse-and-bell-story/
What perpetuates the prestigous-journal practice are review and hiring committees, often swayed by journals themselves through various means, which hold the true power.
Changing institutions, particularly academic ones, is difficult. Far more often, splinter groups are formed.
Schism at Balognia resulted in Padua. Schism at Oxford resulted in Cambridge. I believe there may have been a similar dynamic between Harvard and Yale. Arguably the same might be said of Harvard's failure to cultivate an engineering curriculum, and hence M.I.T.
Though it might be interesting to look at academic disciplines and institutions and identify which are most controlled by journals. I suspect business, medicine, and law would be near the top of such a list.
It has made some headway, but the work is ongoing
Let's assume they could do it for less. How would they handle the schools that didn't want to contribute? If they charge, well, we're back to where we are now with some big (non-profit) corporation controlling access. But if they don't charge and give it all away, well, why should anyone pony up?
Also, there's always that one guy that everyone knows that you can just email obscure paper requests to and he'll send you a PDF almost immediately. And of course you never ask how that works. But it works.
As such, there's little to lose if a university cancels their official Elsevier subscriptions. Their student's won't mind. And I believe that is why universities haven't banded together.
Shadow libraries are a competition to the official ways to access the papers.
Just like in any market, the various offerings have advantages and disadvantages.
- Advantage of, say, Elsevier website: is legal
- Disadvantage of, say, Elsevier website: accessing costs money (even if your university pays)
- Advantage of, say, sci-hub: is free
- Disadvantage of, say, sci-hub: accessing is somewhere between legal grayzone and illegal, depending on jurisdiction
As in any market, by your choices, you decide which offering you prefer:
- If you decide to get the paper from Elseviert (even if you can access it "for free", because your university pays), you vote for "Elesvier's business practices are perfectly fine."
- If you decide to get the paper from sci-hub, you vote for "what sci-hub does is less evil than what Elsevier does."
Choose the market offering that fits your alignment.
Having said that, I absolutely do not believe the current structure has anything to do with journal lobbyists leaning on university political figures. I say this as someone who has served at an editor at multiple established journals in my field, who is on the editorial boards of a number of journals (incidentally, I know Eiko, the author of the blog post being discussed). Journals do put pressures on libraries, who have been in a sort of catch-22 with this stuff (this being a large topic for another thread maybe), but I don't think that's the major problem.
The major problem is the incentive structure around authoring papers and publishing. Contrary to what many might assume, publish or perish is not really the name of the game at big universities anymore — it's getting indirect grant funds. Papers in high IF journals matter, but it's secondary to grant funding, in the sense that papers are necessary to justify grant funding, which is what universities want.
The result of this is that the bottom is dropping out of publishing as a primary incentive at universities. There's just no (or little) incentive for faculty to take on editorial duties or do reviewing or anything. I've had colleagues who were involved in academic publishing, editing and reviewing, and were scolded by department heads who asked them "what kind of funds is this bringing in to the department?" Sometimes this comes with a position for a grad student or two to act as administrative assistants, but that's about it.
Major outlets like Nature often have professional editors (that is, editors who don't have academic positions elsewhere), which reflects this trend. It doesn't have to be this way, and the bulk of journals are run by academic editorial boards, but I think as you get into very high IF journals, you see things change.
The issue is this: if you tried to establish what you're talking about, if a large number of chief librarians at a large number of, say, US universities got together and said "we're going to run our own journals", I think university administrations at many universities would see this as a cost sink and nothing else.
I'm not sure exactly what the best way of explaining this is, but for many universities at the moment, papers and bibliometrics are kind of this superficial formality to justify the money that they require to produce (in terms of grants). That is, you don't get grants to publish an important finding, or to publish in Nature, you publish in Nature as a way of obtaining a grant, to bring in money. The goals, at least administratively, have shifted over time from create good ideas -> publish good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like someone with good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like good ideas in order to get grants -> get grants.
The discussions here and elsewhere that have the theme of "papers are easy to publish, why do we need journals" are implicitly recognized at universities now, in that no one administratively really cares about publishing. What they care about is grant income through indirect funds. If administrators could just get indirect funds without publishing, I think many of them wouldn't care. However, grant agencies care about them, and in the current climate, it's all about paper counts, IF, all these appearances of inte...
That they know which IPs you used? Any server you contact knows that. That they have your account number on file after they paid you? What were your expectations here.
Maybe a digital currency that's created by reproducing (or disproving) existing papers (weighted by lack of reproduction) and with which the author of a submitted manuscript "pays" reviewers and editors, which they in turn use to submit their own papers?
That includes "publish or perish" (promotes low-value journal-milling), impact factor (dittos), various forms of degree conferring and/or tenure-gating (journals become gatekeepers to disciplines and careers, and can feed back influence to senior faculty and/or administrators to enshrine that status), and more.
Schopenhauer's essay on authorship is strongly recommended.
Peer review, for all the awe it inspires presently, is quite modern as a significant factor, dating to the 1980s.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer-reviewed+...
For all of its issues, I still think there would be some value in encouraging people to find issues in papers and publicly note them instead of relying on an oral history of which papers are accurate (hence my suggestion to encourage people to reproduce or disprove papers, while slightly penalizing submitting new research). Many fields have reproducibility issues, and my experience has been that research groups informally build their own internal lists of (seemingly) inaccurate publications.
It would be naive to believe that even the most devoted individual would opt to starve rather than pivot their work to eat. As it stands, there isn't much an incentive other than "truth" or general political reputation management to document the reproducibility of other work. Erroneous works make it difficult to find relevant, accurate ones.
I think that trend is more generally human and speaks to tribalistic tendencies. Those themselves emerge for numerous and complex reasons. Innate complexities of fields, difficulty in judging or assessing new contributions, an inherent conservativism focused on what is rather than what might be, of preserving established order against change, and the like, seem major components.
I'll note that in the computer and technical field, as I age and hopefully experience, I increasingly find myself in the more conservative camp myself, just for the record.
On compensation and reward: it's been observed in education where much has been made of metrics focusing on individual teachers and students that those indicators seem to hold very little validity. The strongest evidence of this is for teachers working at multiple institutions, either simultaneously or transferring within a given year. Looking at those datasets, there's no correlation between performance between the two.
I'd argue similarly that attemtping to reward or penalise researchers based on individual performance or papers is ... a false metricism. That true assessments of value are difficult (and that most metrics used --- papers published and patents issued, for example) are meaningless. There's little agreement even on what, say, the ten most significant inventions of all time have been. (And were any of those developed in the past 100 years?)
Cultivating a research cadre, or sets of cadres, ensuring that they are supported, testing where appropriate against measurable criteria, but allowing for a high level of fuzzing and uncertainty in those metrics, and looking more to aggregate performance of teams, institutions, disciplines, and the like, might be a better approach. Markets work poorly here. Institutions and patronage in its various forms (including national support) seem far better suited.
And yes, revisiting and testing of recent and older results should be a constant part of that process.
You can say a lot of bad things about Elsevier, but I don't see much issues from this post?
It's rare that I would know I want an entire article, until I skim it. I would skim literally 100s of articles just to find one that might be useful. Only then would I actually want to read it carefully. There's no amount of cost that's justified until then.
Fortunately, you can almost always the author's work for free somewhere else.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
(I'm agreeing with you.)
"Quality isn't, and often cannot, be known in advance."
"The idea of "too small to matter" of a micropayment is at odds with "deciding if it's worthwhile"."
"Content is frequently available elsewhere. Gate / turnstile jumping is far too easy."
"Virtually all payment systems create a data trail of what content you're accessing -- it's an Orwellian wet dream of identifying who is reading, watching, or listening to what." Especially that, for legal searches
Here is RELX (owner of Elsevier) lobbying spending in the US:
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
I mean, I don't think it's unanticipated that giving your bank details to Elsevier would mean that they know your bank details.
Elsevier are 100% evil but this article has some crazy fear mongering.