4 ms·

You don't have to boycott anything - if a university starts a new journal and their respective academics start publishing with it they would have a public plaus

You don't have to boycott anything - if a university starts a new journal and their respective academics start publishing with it they would have a public plausible deniability on why they're also publishing in this journal. That's a no-loss situation.

matt4077 9y ago
The problem isn't that you're somehow branded a 'rebel' if you refuse to publish with Elsevier journals. It's that, when you're applying somewhere, they'll rank you by SUM(paper_i * impact_factor(journal_i)). That score will suffer, and nobody will care about your reasons. You're also underestimating the independence of researches at a university. They're not employees in the usual sense. In fact, the best method to stop them from publishing at some journal Y would be for the administration to tell them to publish in Y.
- codesnik 9y ago
  that easy? "You should publish only in Elsevier journals!"
- tankenmate 9y ago
  Also, in some counties (the UK is a prime example) the rules governing "impact" is largely dictated and/or influenced by central government. So not only do you need to change just your local institution but a whole country's institutions at a go; a multi-year political fiefdom protecting shambles at best.
  - sleavey 9y ago
    That "impact" scoring system is utterly useless. I hope it doesn't survive the next non-Tory government.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007958]. Their impact factor is now 2.450 vs 1.848. Of course I am sure it's way harder to do this for far more conservative and larger industries. At the same time it may be just the case of starting small.
dragandj 9y ago
You mean a new journal for every scientific field? That's helluva lot of journals. Then, you need to attract people to send the papers there. There are countless local journals that mainly attract local authors now, and those are a joke when they are not outright junk. To publish even a half decent journal, you need to attract researchers from all corners of the world to send you their best work. How?
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Isn't there already a journal for every scientific field, or are you speaking of only a part of the industries?
perilunar 9y ago
Many papers have multiple authors from different universities/institutions. It would be difficult if just one was boycotting the top journals in the field.
rocqua 9y ago
Those academics would still have less-prestigious publications, which is a net-loss for both them and their university. A solution might be dual publishing, but I believe some of the bigger journals require some form of exclusivity.
mjn 9y ago
If done collectively that has worked before. In 2001, almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned [1] in order to lend their support to a new open-access journal, Journal of Machine Learning Research, which quickly supplanted the former as the top journal in the field. It helped that this included a lot of senior people in the field (Stuart Russell, Geoffrey Hinton, Leslie Kaelbling, etc.) who would be the ones judging ML hiring and tenure cases at many universities. [1] Resignation letter: http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html
- Vinnl 9y ago
  That only works if the editorial board "flips", though - unfortunately, universities mostly aren't able to start journals with reputable editorial boards. I'm currently leaning towards finding a way to convince large numbers of boards to flip as the most viable path to proper open access.

matt4077 9y ago

The problem isn't that you're somehow branded a 'rebel' if you refuse to publish with Elsevier journals. It's that, when you're applying somewhere, they'll rank you by SUM(paper_i * impact_factor(journal_i)). That score will suffer, and nobody will care about your reasons. You're also underestimating the independence of researches at a university. They're not employees in the usual sense. In fact, the best method to stop them from publishing at some journal Y would be for the administration to tell them to publish in Y.

codesnik 9y ago
that easy? "You should publish only in Elsevier journals!"
tankenmate 9y ago
Also, in some counties (the UK is a prime example) the rules governing "impact" is largely dictated and/or influenced by central government. So not only do you need to change just your local institution but a whole country's institutions at a go; a multi-year political fiefdom protecting shambles at best.
- sleavey 9y ago
  That "impact" scoring system is utterly useless. I hope it doesn't survive the next non-Tory government.
heavenlyblue 9y ago
See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007958]. Their impact factor is now 2.450 vs 1.848. Of course I am sure it's way harder to do this for far more conservative and larger industries. At the same time it may be just the case of starting small.

dragandj 9y ago

You mean a new journal for every scientific field? That's helluva lot of journals. Then, you need to attract people to send the papers there. There are countless local journals that mainly attract local authors now, and those are a joke when they are not outright junk. To publish even a half decent journal, you need to attract researchers from all corners of the world to send you their best work. How?

heavenlyblue 9y ago
Isn't there already a journal for every scientific field, or are you speaking of only a part of the industries?

perilunar 9y ago

Many papers have multiple authors from different universities/institutions. It would be difficult if just one was boycotting the top journals in the field.

rocqua 9y ago

Those academics would still have less-prestigious publications, which is a net-loss for both them and their university. A solution might be dual publishing, but I believe some of the bigger journals require some form of exclusivity.

mjn 9y ago

If done collectively that has worked before. In 2001, almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned [1] in order to lend their support to a new open-access journal, Journal of Machine Learning Research, which quickly supplanted the former as the top journal in the field. It helped that this included a lot of senior people in the field (Stuart Russell, Geoffrey Hinton, Leslie Kaelbling, etc.) who would be the ones judging ML hiring and tenure cases at many universities. [1] Resignation letter: http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html

Vinnl 9y ago
That only works if the editorial board "flips", though - unfortunately, universities mostly aren't able to start journals with reputable editorial boards. I'm currently leaning towards finding a way to convince large numbers of boards to flip as the most viable path to proper open access.