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German research institutions boycott Elsevier
- captn3m0 10y agoWhile this may be a major hiccup for researchers in Germany, I have to applaud this. Are the terms of the offered deal public?
- wofo 10y agoIt is refreshing to see the scientific community stand against Elsevier. Great news!
- baldfat 10y agoYes these Journals without the Internet would just sit in boxes in Libraries (They still do this with print journals) WHY is it cost more to have OLD Journals then they did when they were first published. It is such an anti-Education, anti-Science corporate plan based on selfish Win for them and loss for Science and ideas.
- hannob 10y agoThe thing is, scientists have a much more powerful tool to stop bad publishers: Don't give them your texts. And maybe even more important: Don't demand from your applicants that they have published in high impact journals from the very same publishers that make your life hard. That might really change things. Everyone has been complaining about Elsevier for years now. They still have publications and they still seem to have no problem to fill them. That's the problem.
- nkkollaw 10y agoYou could give me an ELI5? Why are they bad..?
- mSparks 10y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
- drdrey 10y agoThis post has a lot of details about it: http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-review-for-or-publish-with-elsevier-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-r...
- nkkollaw 10y agoThanks.
- tdb7893 10y agoThis recent post talks about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161538
- nkkollaw 10y agoThanks.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mSparks 10y agowhile this isnt in any way a scientific observation, it does feel that the quality of elsevier publications has been falling recently. it seems it was 2013 the last time they were shouting about rising impact factors. losing all of germany will certainly hit the various if hard.
- conistonwater 10y agoNo, but they do, demonstrably, have trouble running them without community's support, for example: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=28545 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=28545 I don't think they disappear, or anything, but I think the idea that they would get away scot-free is dead wrong.
- mattkrause 10y agoI would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free. However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants. Unless the big names in academia--and the search committees they sit on--publicly and credibly commit to this, you're essentially asking people (many of whom are on short-term contracts making $40,000 a year) to take an enormous career risk.
- Fomite 10y agoThis. The biggest and most meaningful way to do this would be for people sitting on search committees and tenure/promotion committees to say publicly that candidates wouldn't be punished for deliberately publishing in OA journals.
- JorgeGT 10y agoNobody punishes you for publishing in OA journals, what matters is the IF and JCR rank of the journal, not if it's OA or not.
- mattkrause 10y agoIf you find an OA journal with cachet matching Nature or Science, I would be happy to submit stuff there. As far as I know, there's nothing even particularly close. In other words, I doubt anyone is explicitly penalized for submitting to PLoS Biology instead of Journal of Neuroscience. However, there is an implicit penalty for not submitting to Nature/Science/Cell. [As an aside, I really hate the obsession with IF and all these other "quantitative" measures of research quality. They're all incredibly ad-hoc, someone easily game-able, and yet otherwise-smart people take them so seriously.]
- throwaway729 10y agoYes, they are pointless and arbitrary metrics. Competition for positions in academia has gotten so bad that it doesn't matter. Like Google rejecting perfectly good candidates just because they can, but in Academia even south central Kansastucky state university has enough excellent applicants that arbitrary metrics do more good than harm.
- blockchain-aes 10y agoFunders are the key to a long overdue change of the academic merit system. Here is a proposal: Towards Open Science: The Case for a Decentralized Autonomous Academic Endorsement System http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.60054 http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.60054
- cknight 10y agoCheers! Gonna read this. My SO (scientist) and I were just recently discussing the idea of funders as an alternative, but not to any level as detailed as this proposal.
- blockchain-aes 10y agoGreat - feedback welcome!
- hyperpallium 10y agoThe second one is the hard one, because prestige is the very thing they have. Something like PageRank (itself a citation-weighting scheme) should do it, based not on the coarse-grained prestige of editor-gatekeeper publishers, but the fine-grained prestige of researcher-authors and the work itself.
- dr_coffee 10y agoThe Eigenfactor is a metric for ranking journals that uses an algorithm similar to PageRank http://www.eigenfactor.org/index.php http://www.eigenfactor.org/index.php and is one of the many metrics competing to replace IF
- a3_nm 10y agoDon't forget that you can also decline to review for them: it should also be quite effective, and it should be quite risk-free in terms of career.
- hkmurakami 10y agoCould leading institutions come together and create journals of their own, run by representatives from the institutions?
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoIndividuals will never achieve something like that.
- return0 10y agohttps://sci-hub.ac/ https://sci-hub.ac/ is always there for you [edit: thanks]
- lvs 10y agoIf you're going to use that service, I recommend using the TLS link https://sci-hub.ac https://sci-hub.ac
- d0mine 10y agoAlso, the .ac domain has the expected owner.
- CamperBob2 10y agoLately, sci-hub has been sending me straight to the paywall I'm trying to avoid. I think the lawyers got to them.
- bainsfather 10y agoStill works fine for me, for e.g. Nature articles. Is it some particular journal(s) that you cannot access?
- TheArcane 10y agoWhat's the difference? The links look identical.
- return0 10y agoi edited :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Someone 10y agoNo, they don't boycott; they play hardball in negotiations: "The DEAL project, headed by HRK (German Rectors' Conference) President Prof Hippler, is negotiating a nationwide license agreement for the entire electronic Elsevier journal portfolio with Elsevier. [...] In order to improve their negotiating power, about 60 major German research institutions including Göttingen University cancelled their contracts with Elsevier as early as October 2016."
- Vinnl 10y agoBy boycotting?
- carbocation 10y agoPeople want to publish in high-impact journals. Aside from name recognition (Nature, Science, New England Journal, etc), impact factor and similar metrics drive where people want to publish. If you really want to strike at a particular journal or family of journals, you could work to convince academics not to cite articles in those journals. Since all these metrics are some variant of (inward citations)/(publications), usually over a 2-5 year window, this would have a tremendous effect.
- IanCal 10y agoI'm not a great fan of journals, but I really dislike the idea of forbidding people from building on the work of others.
- Fomite 10y agoYeah, I'm not going to back messing up using evidence in scientific papers to strike back at a journal publisher.
- carbocation 10y agoBy restricting access to the material whose copyright is owned by a journal publisher, this is what Germany is doing, to a degree.
- robotresearcher 10y agoIt's the publisher who restricts access by charging a fee and taking a profit, not the university for choosing not to pay it. The author and reviewers gave their work for free. Journals should charge enough to cover costs and be sustainable, and no more.
- carbocation 10y agoI'm fine with that characterization, too. I'm just saying that any barrier to access will shift the degree to which articles get cited away from what they (perhaps) "should" be based on their scientific value.
- thomasDE 10y agoGerman researcher here. There are multiple problems with the offer from VG Wort (which is the German association "representing" authors and publishers). One is that they raised the license fee. Another one is that they want to replace the current "flatrate" (where a university pays a fixed sum for the right to copy books or parts of books for education) with a individual billing concept. That means, lecturers have to report to administration for EACH part of a book or paper that they distribute. This model is not feasible as the administrative costs exceed the royalties which have to be payed for the copyright. For this reasons, multiple virtual learning environments (which are used to distribute books and papers) in Germany might go offline in 2017 because the copyright situation is currently unclear. More information (in German): https://netzpolitik.org/2016/deutsche-universitaeten-2017-im-digitalen-ausnahmezustand-kaempfen-oder-kapitulieren/ https://netzpolitik.org/2016/deutsche-universitaeten-2017-im...
- lorenzhs 10y agoYes, but isn't the VG-Wort §52a UrhG thing a different issue? It's creating a whole lot of uncertainty right now, no doubt about that, but the article is about universities failing to reach an agreement with Elsevier. What you're talking about is a terrible new deal between VG Wort and the Kultusministerkonferenz about licensing for publication of any kind of protected material for education and research.
- thomasDE 10y agoI think you are right. Thanks for correcting me. I thought the Elsevier thing was part of the deal with VG Wort as most mails which are currently going around in my university seem to combine both issues.
- kriro 10y agoWe got a university wide mail yesterday that nothing will change for us due to §52a because of the "settlement" with VG-Wort. I entered mild rage mode because it was written as "great news, everything is awesome" while my personal interpretation was WTF are you doing settling this...more like negotiating with terrorists. Oh well, this boycott is very welcome. I'd also like to see a consortium that aggressively sues these publishers for breaking copyright. There's many cases of OA licensed material being illegally reused by closed journals etc. but usually it's just "please stop"...ok. At the same time the publishers bring down the law with full force for the most trivial stuff.
- anton_tarasenko 10y agoProfessors don't care about high prices. Universities pay for subscriptions. The pricing is political in Europe where education is funded by the public. US universities pass high prices over to students. Students pay with debt since good universities have oversupply of applicants anyway. Elsevier had been buying academic journals for decades. A typical scheme is like Cell's story. A professor establishes a journal under a big university's publishing arm. Then the professor thinks how to make money. Elsevier makes an offer and the professor accepts it. The journal becomes the property of Elsevier and the editors keep reviewing papers for free because it's good for their CVs. Looking at older HN posts[1], Elsevier becomes another Comcast. That said, boycotts have not reversed the Group's profit trend. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=elsevier&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=elsevier&sort=byPopularity&pre...
- mattkrause 10y agoI would be surprised if students are funding the library to any substantial degree. Most research universities charge F&A ("facilities and administration")/indirect costs on sponsored projects. This is essentially a "tax" on grant money that is supposed to cover things like utilities, the library, and so on. While the details vary a bit from place to place (and funder to funder), this is often a pretty sizable amount. Yale, for example, charges a bit under 70%, so if you need $100,000 for a project, you'll need to get the funders to pony up $170,000.
- toothbrush 10y agoIf the F&A is 70%, you'd need to raise $333k to have $100k left for your research budget...
- wocka 10y agoThe other poster made a correct statement. F&A is calculated similarly to a sales tax, for example. If you request a dollar in direct costs, the research establishment gets an additional X% on top of that dollar (X being their negotiated F&A).
- jmcdiesel 10y agoForgive my absolute ignorance on the topic - I genuinely don't understand this environment even though I'm interested, so please don't take this as a stupid or inflammatory questions... Why are these publishers needed? What service do they provide these days? It seems their role is similar to publishers in other media (TV, movie, music, etc) that can and have been replaced due to the distribution ease of the internet. Aside from a distribution platform, what do these publishers provide?
- udp 10y agoThe journals have an "impact factor", an arbitrary metric that determines how noteworthy they are. My impression is that very few journals are actually read directly - most papers are found via Google Scholar and the journal they're in doesn't matter. However, in academia, the "prestige" of the journals you have published to is hugely important. Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish, so the assumption is that if you have publications in a good one you must have done more groundbreaking research. To an academic, this is the kind of thing that affects whether you get grants, whether you get paid more, whether you can get a job elsewhere. Some journals are pretty much talked about in hushed whispers, like "that PhD student got an ___ paper in their first year, they must be some kind of genius". In reality, research tends to be more about who you know, what kind of work you're doing, and whether you're in the right place at the right time.
- ianderf 10y ago> Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish, so the assumption is that if you have publications in a good one you must have done more groundbreaking research. I wonder why nobody created a single peer-reviewed platform for all scientists to use? Elsevier is just piggybacking on other people's work and funds.
- Vinnl 10y agoBecause there are more than a single one :) Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- jimmytidey 10y agoElsevier must be extremely conscious that this can only drive the uptake of SciHub. German academia on the other hand must be aware that SciHub will soften the blow.
- fmax30 10y agoJust three days ago my ML Prof (at TU Munich) told us to boycott Elsevier. Didn't know that this was a nation wide thing.
- cknight 10y agoThis is really cool. I'm no scientist, but it was Uni Göttingen where I was properly introduced to the world of academia, doing programming for a research group there. This was just 2-3 years ago, and Elsevier was a regular discussion point at the lunch table. I'm glad all the talk has translated in to some real action, and so many have gotten on board.
- jgord 10y agoThey should just keep going, and other countries join them - but don't do it as a bargaining tool, actually kill the company. Its basically a scam, and its holding back scientific progress.
- swehner 10y agoI look at titles and abstracts, not at journal names, in my literature searches.
- dmichulke 10y agoBecause that makes sense. Unfortunately that doesn't matter. What matters is where the people who have/distribute the money look at. That last sentence holds in principle everywhere, from company politics to financial markets.
- kumarski 10y agoI run a facebook group with 100+ scientists/geneticists/biologists/microbiologists/molecular biologists/physicists who are founders.... Many of them were excited about this. Germany's making moves in the right direction.
- vivekchandsrc 10y agoWho is going to build "TheFacebook" of academic journals. Journal publishers have become SCAM artist. Opening countless new journals and charging hundreds to thousands of dollars to get into open access articles or charging millions from institutes. This market is ripe for disruption plus scientific data is going to be the next "refined OIL" in the data and AI economy...
- Vinnl 10y agoI wonder if, in a year or two, this will affect the Impact Factor of these journals - i.e. will their articles be cited less often now academics have (theoretically) no access to it? And then a few years later, will this the number of articles submitted drop as well? (Assuming, of course, that no agreement will be reached at all.)
- verytrivial 10y agoHow long could Elsevier survive a German boycott? How long could German academia survive without these journals?
- fogetti 10y agoWell, I have never used Elsevier. I always visit Sci-Hub.
- thecrazyone 10y agoI'm surprised at this being such a painful problem and no one jumping forward to solve it (pardon my ignorance, if such startups exist but are not well known, I wouldn't know it). Why wouldn't blockchain db for receiving and requesting p2p reviews not a good solution? This journal can be open access and still make boat loads of money on allied services, ads and so much more. The best part, most of this can/needs to be automated leading to super low costs of operation. Am I missing something obvious here?