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Sorry for the naive question, but why don't the universities collaborate to publish their own open access journals? Don't the ivy leagues have enough prestige t
by pault 9y ago
Sorry for the naive question, but why don't the universities collaborate to publish their own open access journals? Don't the ivy leagues have enough prestige to pull it off? Why is Elsevier needed in the information age?
- rubidium 9y ago"universities collaborate" is likely the reason.
- govg 9y agoElseiver has "prestige". What that means is that some of their journals have become the standard destinations to publish at. It's a vicious cycle, to get acknowledged (and perhaps promoted etc) you need to publish in the locations accepted by the people senior to you, then you get sucked in and apply it to the next batch. It would require a massive collective effort to change it, and in some sense this is exactly that. Note something similar happened in CS where there is a successful free journal now, open access and most people put up papers on Arxiv. This was caused by a similar revolt by major universities.
- ahartmetz 9y agoMore specifically, Elsevier has high impact factor journals. Somebody had the shitty idea to "rate" scientists "objectively" using some naive version of PageRank (rank = impact factor). Scientists, being scientists, aren't stupid and invented the equivalent of SEO, only there is no Google to tweak the algorithm in response to SEO-spam. Spamming publications of just acceptable quality for high impact factor journals is now a winning strategy for getting tenure, grants etc. Happy sciencing.
- FabHK 9y agoThough Elsevier's hold onto the prestige/impact factor is tenuous, as shown by several mass resignations of editorial boards that subsequently established competing journals that effectively "took over". (Journal of Algorithms -> ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Topology -> Journal of Topology, etc.)
- Vinnl 9y agoIt's worse, actually: a large publisher (Thomson Reuters) had the idea to rate journals to help librarians pick which to subscribe to, which evolved to people using that to rate academics as well, which was even less justified. I've written about it in more detail at https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
- xtreme 9y agoUniversities are not a monolith, they are composed of many independent individuals. It is difficult to convince young researchers (PhD students, Post-Docs, Assistant professors) to "gamble" their future by publishing in new journals. It requires some push from the top, e.g. NSF making it mandatory to publish results from their grants in open access journals.
- pault 9y agoSo it's basically one big game of prisoner's dilemma. :)
- Tenobrus 9y agoJust like nearly all parts of human society.
- FabHK 9y agoAnd it's somewhat disheartening to see that even academics (who should be in a position to see what's going on) frequently can't come together to cooperate and be better off.
- KSteffensen 9y agoMy experience with academia is that it's a kindergarden. Everybody has silly personal 20+ year vendettas going on. I'm not at all surprised that academics are unable to co-operate.
- arca_vorago 9y agoIsn't it a reasonable request though to demand of university researchers funded by public dollars to be required to publish freely to the public since the public payed for it? Also they can double publish, it could be more of a "all papers are published here for public archival purposes but you can still submit to the journals you want." sort of thing. The status quo is absolutely unnaceptable.
- whyever 9y agoHeidelberg University in Germany does exactly that.
- josephorjoe 9y agoBecause publishing journals requires a great deal of non-academic work that is not particularly glamorous and which becomes increasingly difficult as you scale operations: scheduling, organizing, communicating, file management, vendor management, budgeting, large scale data conversion (e.g., Microsoft Word --> XML, image conversions), editing, proofing, and correcting articles, not to mention running a fairly content heavy website with appropriate search/browse options, etc. Basically, throwing 1 monthly journal (~1000 pages/year) up on a WordPress site is pretty easy (except for the part about dealing with the authors) and could probably be done by a couple people putting in a few hours a week. Creating a useful web platform for 100s of journals is an entirely different proposition and almost certainly a poor use of universities resources. Now, they could pay someone to do all that work, but that is pretty much what they are negotiating with Elsevier.
- WhitneyLand 9y agoAre you kidding me? Just because something requires work to be done doesn’t make the value of that work worth billions of dollars.
- josephorjoe 9y agoI don't see where I said it was worth any particular amount. I was just answering the question about why universities don't just self publish everything. If Elsevier is overcharging for their services (hint: they are), some startup should go disrupt them or something (hint: the problem will be convincing prestigious authors to publish in your journal rather than Elsevier's).
- FabHK 9y agoSo we all agree: Elsevier is a vampire squid wrapped around academia (to borrow Matt Taibbi's memorable phrase), extracting tremendous profits (from tax payers via university library funds) for little value provided. Yeah, they are overcharging, and the problem with individual authors moving to the competition is the prestige/impact factor associated with a journal (ie a prisoners dilemma/coordination problem), and possible solutions are - concerted action of editorial boards to resign and found a competing journal that "inherits" the prestige (as has happened several times, notably Journal of Algorithms prodded by none other than Don Knuth) - concerted action of universities/libraries (as in the article) - government/funding agency intervention to mandate open access publication - etc. I hope Elsevier have overextended themselves by refusing to accept half price, and, having their bluff called, receive even less.
- WhitneyLand 9y agoThe answer is unfortunately a common trope. There’s no reason at all it should be this way. It contradicts the principles and spirit of science. It chaps my hide. But it hasn’t changed, because it’s incredibly hard to fight inertia of a large and long standing system where parties who disproportionately benefit, or stand to lose something, will do everything in their formidable power to stop it, with no regard for what’s best for the world. These are not piss-ant companies involved, most people don’t realize how incredibly profitable the major player is, raking in billions and billions every year. That money is their war chest. Then you have parties involved who don’t really like the system, but don’t [choose one: have the balls to, or, cant afford to foolishly risk damaging their career or livelyhood to] all out buck the system. The path to jobs, promotions, prestige, and other rewards winds through this anachronistic, corporate interest driven system. Also common with good vs. evil wars like this, is there are some stories of heros to be told. Courageous people who have taken a stand, in various ways, and made real progress. Every one of those small wins helps clear the path for the next attack. This gain was particularly delicious - their own arrogance caused them to overestimate their hand. I guess it’s possible it wasn’t arrogance, rather, a strategic bluff, but in either case, they just sat down at the poker table and lost a big pot.
- visarga 9y agoSimpler explanation is that academics fear each other more than they fear closed access. So they won't publish in an open journal for fear their colleagues will get ahead by publishing in a prestigious closed journal. They are all competing for the same research dollar.
- wastewaste 9y agoIs this as pronnounced in Germany?
- JadeNB 9y ago> Simpler explanation is that academics fear each other more than they fear closed access. So they won't publish in an open journal for fear their colleagues will get ahead by publishing in a prestigious closed journal. That first sentence seems a bit like saying that people suffering from starvation fear their fellow men, simply because they are competing for a scarce resource. What I, as an academic, fear, or at least have to respond to, is an incentive system that judges the quality of my publications on the established reputations of the journals in which they appear. It's true that my fellow academics are rivals for promotions and positions, and in this respect I suppose that I fear them in some way; but they suffer as much from the system as I do, and some of the most established use their prestige to fight the good fight (Timothy Gowers being one of the big names on that list), and so I think that the antagonistic sound of saying that I fear them is not accurate in its implication even if it is so in some technical sense.
- delib 9y agoElsevier does provide a service.* They manage paper submissions, format papers, sometimes edit them, publish them, etc. Without Elsevier (or other traditional publishers), this work has to be done elsewhere. It thus may make sense for universities to outsource the publishing to a dedicated company. However, Elsevier has become big enough to dictate the terms of the contract. The German universities are doing a very smart thing in pooling their market power. They don't want anything for free, but they want to pay a reasonable price. * Edit: Of course, they don't do it in a particularly good way.
- revelation 9y agoThey "edit" them in the sense that they pay an Indian outsourcing company to fuck up your formatting, then send you a list of typos that aren't.
- delib 9y agoRight (although this depends on the journal). But these problems are a function of Elsevier's immense market power as well.
- jhbadger 9y agoIt varies a lot by field. I'm a computational biologist and have dealt with both the CS and biology ways of doing things. In CS you send a formatted LaTeX manuscript to the publisher and they basically just print that, but the traditional biology way is just to send a Word document with little formatting at all. It is considered the job of the publisher to turn the Word document into something that actually is formatted.
- FabHK 9y ago> Elsevier does provide a service. Mediocre service, as you say yourself. Furthermore, they earn way above market returns on equity. It's really not a competitive enterprise, but extracting rent (from the tax payer via university library budgets).
- Vinnl 9y agoWell, there are university presses (although the big ones often unfortunately also benefit from the current system, as they also make quite handsome profits), but the biggest challenge is getting academics to publish in them. In fact, that's not just a challenge for journals by universities, but for all initiatives to start open access journals. Why that doesn't happen is quite involved, but I've written about it in more detail at https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...