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Elsevier does provide a service.* They manage paper submissions, format papers, sometimes edit them, publish them, etc. Without Elsevier (or other traditional p
by delib 9y ago
Elsevier 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).