5 ms·

Open Access and the Power of Editorial Boards: Why Elsevier Plays Hardball

40 points by tokenadult 11y ago

idiot900 11y ago
Publication cost should be considered on an equal footing with all the other costs necessary to run a lab. Reagents and buffers need to be paid for out of grants, why not publication costs?
- dougmccune 11y ago
  One often overlooked aspect is what about all the areas of study that aren't well funded by grant money? The social sciences and humanities don't have the luxury of an abundance of funding. There's an argument that since currently funding for subscribing to HSS journals comes from the university library there is clearly money there for HSS, and that somehow we just need to redirect the subscription cost toward publication costs. But that's not an easy nut to crack, and it's also not clear why the library should even be involved in the publishing process in that way.
- sswaner 11y ago
  Labs typically don't pay for journal subscriptions. University libraries and academic departments subscribe as a benefit to the collective university community. A per-article subscription/purchase model would be more appropriate if we consider that the cost of peer-provided knowledge is a hard cost similar to reagents and buffers. But I personally agree with Open Access advocates, cost should be as close to free as reasonably possible.
  - URSpider94 11y ago
    That wasn't true when I was a grad student. My lab had an individual (paper) subscription to a couple of critical journals in our field. Many individuals subscribe to "Nature", which is arguably the most prestigious general sciences journal out there. The landscape may have changed in the intervening years, with blanket institutional subscriptions making paper subscriptions irrelevant. I also suspect that, much like with albums and music, nobody actually reads a journal cover to cover these days, instead they are consuming the papers they want in a random-access fashion as a collection of PDF's.
poelzi 11y ago
The whole reputation dependency is highly problematic. It puts people in spotlight that produce a lot of papers which get some spotlight, but serious scientists that put a lot of time and thought into one paper and only produce a dozen in their lifetime get under in the flood of papers we have now. Everybody in science knows that the quality of papers has degraded over the last 10 years, just the amount went up enormously. I dream and hopefully get this project into development that takes a different route. First, instead of letting 1-2 people decide if a paper is ok, everybody can test and classify it. Math or logic errors are obvious once, but also a dependency tree is required. Which methods are used, which tools etc. Each user will then have the possibility to follow others and accept their view, which means, their trust in a particular method as well as trusting in methods itself. To give an example: One may trust in classical logic, but not mathematical logic (yes, there is a huge difference). When a paper uses a statistical method that requires mathematical logic, this paper does not have a truth value for you, but maybe for someone else who believes in it. Or you don't accept method xy, or a specific apparatus. You may also say: you accept all papers that got reviewed by at 10 people somewhere in your web of trust. http://vixra.org/why http://vixra.org/why censorship in science does happen and it helps nothing. Every great scientific change in thinking sounded nuts or at least strange in the beginning and very often reviewers are not open minded and don't let math and logic rule but their feeling. Since I found a physical model that requires only classical logic not a mathematical one, I'm not so sure if I should accept anything that requires mathematical logic at all (outside of a purely mathematical space). It's nearly impossible to go through all the details in a paper and found their chain of proves to check what requirements a paper has.
jrapdx3 11y ago
Back in 2002 the advent of online/open-access publication gave an appealing alternative to established journals. As I was among the "pioneers" in publishing on open-access, my bias in favor of it is strong. The traditional publishers no doubt see open access as a threat to their dominance and economic survival. However in the era of increasing public and government demands it seems inevitable that open access is going to continue to grow. It's important to understand the implications of open access re: nature of funding. The model is inverted, with costs of publishing falling on the author (or institutional backer) rather than the reader. Traditionally, the cost burden was on the subscriber, with open access it falls on the creator of the content. Perhaps that's not more "fair" a distribution of burden, but there's value in ability to share research widely. Scientific knowledge is only as meaningful as the degree to which it is available to anyone who wants to learn about it.
- latj 11y ago
  >It's important to understand the implications of open access re: nature of funding. The model is inverted, with costs of publishing falling on the author (or institutional backer) rather than the reader. Traditionally, the cost burden was on the subscriber, with open access it falls on the creator of the content. Which costs are you referring to? Are the editors paid? If not the only transfer in costs seems to be hosting a website for downloading static documents?
  - Laforet 11y ago
    Reviewers are generally not reimbursed but full time editors probably are, there are also day-to-day operation and administration duties to be carried out by salaried workers. Depending on the type of journal they will also have to maintain a brick-and -mortar office, print physical copies and post to subscribers, etc. Suffice to say there is a substantial overhead. Previously submission by the researcher and subsequent publicaiton is effectively free; the real cost is paid by subscribers such as university libraries as well as commercial entities. Under the open-access model the researcher pays the publisher directly for each submission and this can vary from hundreds to thousands of dollars. PLoS one currently charges US$1495 for each publication. https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ The exact burden depends on the subject, STEM may be better funded, but this is still not a sum that one can just shrug off. Often grant money also come with strict stipulations on exactly what expenses can be paid with them - publication fee is usually not provided.
pepperhigh 11y ago
See also the story of Machine Learning editors, who quit to found JMLR in 2001 for the same reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re... http://sigir.org/files/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html http://sigir.org/files/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html

40 points by tokenadult 11y ago

Publication cost should be considered on an equal footing with all the other costs necessary to run a lab. Reagents and buffers need to be paid for out of grants, why not publication costs?

dougmccune 11y ago
One often overlooked aspect is what about all the areas of study that aren't well funded by grant money? The social sciences and humanities don't have the luxury of an abundance of funding. There's an argument that since currently funding for subscribing to HSS journals comes from the university library there is clearly money there for HSS, and that somehow we just need to redirect the subscription cost toward publication costs. But that's not an easy nut to crack, and it's also not clear why the library should even be involved in the publishing process in that way.
sswaner 11y ago
Labs typically don't pay for journal subscriptions. University libraries and academic departments subscribe as a benefit to the collective university community. A per-article subscription/purchase model would be more appropriate if we consider that the cost of peer-provided knowledge is a hard cost similar to reagents and buffers. But I personally agree with Open Access advocates, cost should be as close to free as reasonably possible.
- URSpider94 11y ago
  That wasn't true when I was a grad student. My lab had an individual (paper) subscription to a couple of critical journals in our field. Many individuals subscribe to "Nature", which is arguably the most prestigious general sciences journal out there. The landscape may have changed in the intervening years, with blanket institutional subscriptions making paper subscriptions irrelevant. I also suspect that, much like with albums and music, nobody actually reads a journal cover to cover these days, instead they are consuming the papers they want in a random-access fashion as a collection of PDF's.

poelzi 11y ago

The whole reputation dependency is highly problematic. It puts people in spotlight that produce a lot of papers which get some spotlight, but serious scientists that put a lot of time and thought into one paper and only produce a dozen in their lifetime get under in the flood of papers we have now. Everybody in science knows that the quality of papers has degraded over the last 10 years, just the amount went up enormously. I dream and hopefully get this project into development that takes a different route. First, instead of letting 1-2 people decide if a paper is ok, everybody can test and classify it. Math or logic errors are obvious once, but also a dependency tree is required. Which methods are used, which tools etc. Each user will then have the possibility to follow others and accept their view, which means, their trust in a particular method as well as trusting in methods itself. To give an example: One may trust in classical logic, but not mathematical logic (yes, there is a huge difference). When a paper uses a statistical method that requires mathematical logic, this paper does not have a truth value for you, but maybe for someone else who believes in it. Or you don't accept method xy, or a specific apparatus. You may also say: you accept all papers that got reviewed by at 10 people somewhere in your web of trust. http://vixra.org/why http://vixra.org/why censorship in science does happen and it helps nothing. Every great scientific change in thinking sounded nuts or at least strange in the beginning and very often reviewers are not open minded and don't let math and logic rule but their feeling. Since I found a physical model that requires only classical logic not a mathematical one, I'm not so sure if I should accept anything that requires mathematical logic at all (outside of a purely mathematical space). It's nearly impossible to go through all the details in a paper and found their chain of proves to check what requirements a paper has.

jrapdx3 11y ago

Back in 2002 the advent of online/open-access publication gave an appealing alternative to established journals. As I was among the "pioneers" in publishing on open-access, my bias in favor of it is strong. The traditional publishers no doubt see open access as a threat to their dominance and economic survival. However in the era of increasing public and government demands it seems inevitable that open access is going to continue to grow. It's important to understand the implications of open access re: nature of funding. The model is inverted, with costs of publishing falling on the author (or institutional backer) rather than the reader. Traditionally, the cost burden was on the subscriber, with open access it falls on the creator of the content. Perhaps that's not more "fair" a distribution of burden, but there's value in ability to share research widely. Scientific knowledge is only as meaningful as the degree to which it is available to anyone who wants to learn about it.

latj 11y ago
>It's important to understand the implications of open access re: nature of funding. The model is inverted, with costs of publishing falling on the author (or institutional backer) rather than the reader. Traditionally, the cost burden was on the subscriber, with open access it falls on the creator of the content. Which costs are you referring to? Are the editors paid? If not the only transfer in costs seems to be hosting a website for downloading static documents?
- Laforet 11y ago
  Reviewers are generally not reimbursed but full time editors probably are, there are also day-to-day operation and administration duties to be carried out by salaried workers. Depending on the type of journal they will also have to maintain a brick-and -mortar office, print physical copies and post to subscribers, etc. Suffice to say there is a substantial overhead. Previously submission by the researcher and subsequent publicaiton is effectively free; the real cost is paid by subscribers such as university libraries as well as commercial entities. Under the open-access model the researcher pays the publisher directly for each submission and this can vary from hundreds to thousands of dollars. PLoS one currently charges US$1495 for each publication. https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ The exact burden depends on the subject, STEM may be better funded, but this is still not a sum that one can just shrug off. Often grant money also come with strict stipulations on exactly what expenses can be paid with them - publication fee is usually not provided.

pepperhigh 11y ago

See also the story of Machine Learning editors, who quit to found JMLR in 2001 for the same reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re... http://sigir.org/files/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html http://sigir.org/files/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html