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Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier
- IshKebab 10y agoWithout reading the article, I presume his reason is that they are as close to pure evil as a scientific publishing company can get.
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoYou should read the article :) It's very well written and I found it quite informative. I knew nothing about Elsevier other than that I have used some of their textbooks when I was in school. They were very expensive. The only thing in the whole article that I feel qualified to comment on was his assertion that Trader Joe's mistreats their employees. It must be a regional thing, because the TJ's around here are excellent places to work (anecdotally and based on my long chats with employees, as a frequent shopper).
- tetrep 10y ago> ...his assertion that Trader Joe's mistreats their employees. He's not asserting that, he's using it as a hypothetical example: "If I were to boycott, say, Trader Joe’s, on the grounds that it mistreats its employees (for the record, I don’t think it does)..."
- blisterpeanuts 10y agoAh, you're correct. I misread it. Tired eyes....
- zem 10y agotim gowers's blog is very informative on the subject: https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/elsevier/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/elsevier/ this one is a good starting point: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
- DiabloD3 10y agoYup, and he also quit reviewing for them too.
- tdb7893 10y agoYes, essentially they systematically try to hamper open access to articles while also extracting as much money as possible from the scientific community. As a corporation all of this makes sense because they want to make money, but that is why boycotting is a good response as it will give them a profit motive to stop trying to hamper science.
- socmag 10y agoThat said, Elsevier really do take some risks to publish rather good publications. I've met with them in the past and they are very keen on technical authors. That was eight years ago, maybe things have changed but they still represent a certain quality in my mind. Them with Addison Wesley in the early 90's. Sorry to hear there are some issues though. Hopefully they will read the thread and make any necessary adjustments, the owners were very nice people.
- j-pb 10y agoCould you elaborate on the risks you think they take? To me taking publications that academia produces, getting them reviewed for free by academia, only to host a couple kilobyte file behind a 25$ paywall seems like a pretty risk free strategy. The only risk they take is being so outrageously greedy that people will get fed up at some point and stop working with them anymore.
- socmag 10y agoBeing published by Elsevier has some "cachet". Maybe they capitalize on that, I'm not sure. Although I had the possibility of publishing with them I turned it down, only because at the time I was way too busy and already had a deal running with Charles River. But mostly because... way too busy. I guess it depends what you want from a book deal. Any book deals I have been approached for have never been for financial gain. More like, let's get this stuff out in a dignified way. Elsevier seemed to fit the bill. Is like I would go to Taschen for Art stuff. Revenue would not be the driving factor. Again, not saying I agree with some policies.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoIn academic book publishing, I tend to agree. These are low profit enterprises. Few copies get sold in all honesty. However, they are major leeches when it comes to journals.
- KingMob 10y agoMaybe they have the cachet of "reasonable competence", but what has cachet are the journals themselves. Books are way less relevant than papers, and their publishers are even less relevant. E.g., nobody cares who publishes Science or Nature.
- overcast 10y agoFor the rest of us, what is the TLDR of what Elsevier is?
- StyloBill 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier Wasn't that hard, was it?
- ska 10y agoThe snark isn't doing you any favors.
- the_duke 10y agoI think the snark is more than sufficiently justified in this case.
- scott_s 10y agoAs a rule, no. Snark is not civil, and the HN guidelines ask us to be civl: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kobeya 10y agoThus clutter of the grandparent comment wasn't helpful either.
- lordnacho 10y agoWhat exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem? Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?
- ska 10y agoIt's a collective action problem. Some of most prolific publishers are early career academics who need to make tenure, and tenure committees are looking for easy metrics (like "impact factor"). Choosing to publish in a less prestigious journal because it is better behaved can have real negative consequences if you are in a minority.
- pdonis 10y ago> It's a collective action problem. Yes, and one that, while I agree it's not easily solvable by academia, should be easily solvable by governments, who fund practically all of the research that gets published in Elsevier's journals (and those of all the other major publishers). So my real question is not why academia hasn't solved this problem (some fields, such as math and physics, basically have, with arxiv.org), but why governments haven't.
- rcthompson 10y agoProbably because publishers like Elesvier lobby heavily against the government doing anything about it.
- grigjd3 10y agoEffectively, this is a safe move for tenured professors, but not a safe move for anyone else, which represents the vast majority of active publications these days.
- a3_nm 10y agoYeah, but sadly, many tenured academics are not making any such moves either... There is definitely a "pyramid scheme" problem where the need to publish in unethical venues survives because of the needs of non-tenured academics, but it's not the entire story. Add to this the fact that most reviews are probably performed by tenured academics, so if all of them refused to review for unethical venues, it would have a lot of impact. I don't think unethical venues would survive if only non-tenured researchers published there.
- Oatseller 10y agoElsevier was also recently awarded an "Online peer review and method" patent which earned the August, 2016 "Stupid Patent of the Month" from the EFF [0]. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-elsevier-patents-online-peer-review https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-el...
- grigjd3 10y agoWhile I very much abhor the practices of Elsevier, one has to be really careful how one acts to push back. Even without getting into the result that not interacting with Elsevier has on careers in the biomedical sciences, it's easy to fall into traps with other publishing firms. For instance, PlosOne is a pay-to-publish "alternative". However, the motivations here are backwards. PlosOne makes money for each accepted publication and thus limits their motivation to do serious peer review. I'm not saying that means PlosOne articles are necessarily bad, the very nature of their publishing model suggests something could be wrong - and it's pretty hard to get recognition for publications through them. I personally prefer when the professional organizations, like APS, handle their own mainstream of publishing. The Phys Rev journals have a strong motivation to promote the best research, because it speaks well of the industry overall, but because they are beholden to their membership, they are less likely to promote the kind of unethical practices used by Elsevier.
- bumblebeard 10y ago> Even without getting into the result that not interacting with Elsevier has on careers in the biomedical sciences... The author of the article addresses this concern in the "What you can do" section. He says he's noticed no ill effects from avoiding Elsevier journals and that most people are likely to have the same experience. As for PLOS ONE's business model, it's possible that it sets up some perverse incentives, but fortunately there are choices other than PLOS ONE if this model bothers you. If it really is impossible for you to avoid publishing in an Elsevier journal, that's fine, but anybody who can avoid it should for the reasons presented in this article.
- dkarapetyan 10y agoThe scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me. What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publishing in so many scientific disciplines?
- godzillabrennus 10y agoThat would assume universities exist to perform logical value in society.
- dkarapetyan 10y agoUniversities do exist to add value to society through education and dissemination of information. Seems like a pretty clear charter if you ask me.
- bcook 10y agoDon't some universities exist to make money?
- auxym 10y agoUniversities are generally non-profit. For profit ones exist but are generally regarded as scammy. Of course, one could argue that universities exist to grant generous salaries to highly ranked administrators, who are mostly politicians.
- Retra 10y agoIt doesn't matter 'why' something exists, what matters is what those things that do exist are actually useful for. Screw drivers exist to turn screws, but you are perfectly justified to use them for whatever you need should you find one in your hand.
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- datavirtue 10y agoI ordered the first one on the list last week for my son and I to read. Great minds think alike.
- nacc 10y agoI always wonder why some disciplines are more open than others [0]. As someone in biology: the state of publication is very sad. We have to pay thousands to _submit_ a manuscript, and then: - get rejected right away, or - the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or - we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets rejected, or - The editor does some proof-reading and publish the paper behide a paywall. I lose all the rights and I may need to ask the journal for permission to use part of it in my thesis, otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing. Sometimes when I read preprints in computer science/physics/bioinformatics etc. I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family, and we biologists are locked in a prisoner's dilemma because we can't communicate. Then we fight each other and the publication companies are selling tickets for others to watch. [0]: http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-models-fund-open-access-journals/ http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-...
- devoply 10y agoThe whole publication industry seems like a conspiracy that's hiding in plain sight for anyone to see. Yet it seems to be difficult to get rid of... and yet no one quite knows why.
- rspeer 10y agoIt's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them. The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor". The people who boycott the gatekeeping publishers end up with publications with a lower impact factor, so they don't get as far in academia, so they will never end up on tenure review boards, and never get to suggest better criteria for evaluating scientists than their "impact factor". However, in some fields, people are quietly resisting the publishers by disobeying them, posting their own paywalled papers on arXiV or their personal web sites. I have never heard of a publisher suing a scientist over this. Strength in numbers.
- a3_nm 10y ago
- jack1243star 10y agoMy alma mater will drop subscription to Elsevier in 2017, stating that they have been increasing the fee 4% each year.
- a3_nm 10y agoI think this is great news. More unsubscriptions are a good thing because (1.) publishers get less money; (2.) researchers in these universities realize that subscriptions should not be taken for granted, in the frequent case where they have never thought about the issue; (3.) these researchers realize that not having subscriptions isn't such a big deal (you can find most recent papers online anyway, or ask your friends, the authors, use Sci-Hub, etc.); and (4.) researchers who don't publish open-access version of their works realize that they are losing potential readers in other universities (and citations, if they care about this).
- eva1984 10y agoWhat value does Elsevier provide comparing to something like arxiv.org? Just curious.
- remus 10y agoBasically, reputation. Arxiv isn't peer reviewed and thus you get a lot of crap on there (just have a look for proofs of goldbach's conjecture). Because the barrier to entry is low you dont get any kudos for publishing there, and the performance of academics in many institutions is essentially based on the kudos they get for publishing in big journals.
- a3_nm 10y agoFortunately, many fields also have fully open-access journals and conferences which provide the prestige without making your papers hard to access. (In my field, e.g.: the ICDT conference, IJCAI, ICALP, LICS; the LMCS and JAIR journals.) The reason why these haven't completely taken over is because prestige has a lot of inertia, and publisher-run titles retain their prestige (and still attract quality submissions and reviewing). But it's not true that you have to publish with closed-access publishers to get reviews and prestige.
- eva1984 10y agoThanks for clarifying. I guess ML community is different though, even conference cannot keep up the pace of development, journal would be way too slow. But that might not be case for other domains.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y agoThere's a real gem tucked in here, not specific to Elsevier, but about corporate social misbehavior and its apologists in general: > For what it’s worth, I think the “fiduciary responsibility” argument–which seemingly gets trotted out almost any time anyone calls out a publicly traded corporation for acting badly–is utterly laughable. As far as I can tell, the claim it relies on is both unverifiable and unenforceable. In practice, there is rarely any way for anyone to tell whether a particular policy will hurt or help a company’s bottom line, and virtually any action one takes can be justified post-hoc by saying that it was the decision-makers’ informed judgment that it was in the company’s best interest.
- inimino 10y agoYes, this argument as used against any and all ethical claims is a pet peeve of mine. It suggests that money is the highest value and to think otherwise is impossible. It is corrosive to the foundation of shared values on which society depends.
- jimmytidey 10y agoI would argue that currently "academic publishing" is a misnomer. If you write up some work you can easily show it to your colleagues or put it on your blog. You can place it on a pre-print server if you are doing science. In my field (design), and the wider humanities, you can also look to Medium.com, theconversation.com, Twitter, a think tank etc. Once your work is formally published you're rights to show it people have gone. It's quite possible that it will reach a much diminished audience. In my institution many people haves published in journals that the university has not purchased access too; on a strict interpretation of the law those people can no longer show their research to the person who sits next to them. "Publishing" can often mean less people seeing it. "Academic validation" or similar would be a more appropriate. The whole thing is a racket. The public sector has a vampire squid sucking the blood out of it; no single institution has sufficient incentive to sort it out.
- rtatours 10y agortatours
- herbcso 10y agoIs it just me, or does Elsevier sound like something out of Skyrim?