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Elseiver 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 acknow

by govg 9y ago

Elseiver 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 ago
More 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 ago
  Though 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 ago
  It'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...

by govg 9y ago

ahartmetz 9y ago

More 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 ago
Though 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 ago
It'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...