9 ms·
The 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 you
by hannob 10y ago
The 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.