3 ms·

> 90% of scientists have no choice. 100% of scientists have an option to publish a copy in arxiv or biorxiv. It's not happening. > are directly linked to wher

> 90% of scientists have no choice. 100% of scientists have an option to publish a copy in arxiv or biorxiv. It's not happening. > are directly linked to where you publish And therein lies the problem, which, if solved, will make open access redundant. I have never seen a conference with a panel "how to change funding criteria". Publishers like elsevier act as a trusted "third party" that validates scientists, and are trusted precisely because they are a third party (i.e. they are perceived as immune to academic politics). Whatever solution is to be found, it will probably have to include such a third party, but in the form of a reviewer who gives grades, not one who withholds the world's scientific output for its own gain. It might be a simple third-party ratings system , like how ratings agencies rate banks. It is a discussion that should have started years earlier.

13415 8y ago
> 100% of scientists have an option to publish a copy in arxiv or biorxiv. It's not happening. This is not about publishing, this is about peer-reviewed publishing. Putting something on an open Internet archive does not count as a publication you could put on your CV. Were I work, for example, our publications are analyzed with bibliometric tools based on a point system, and our funding and tenure directly depends on that. Putting something in an archive or on a web page: 0 points. Not peer-reviewed: 0 points. Peer-reviewed but not indexed by Scopus: 5 points (probably should be 0 though). Indexed by Scopus and peer-reviewed: 10 points. The third party rating system you suggest makes no sense and could not possibly work. You have to understand that it's not Elsevier who do the peer-reviewing, but your own colleagues who do anonymous peer-reviews and are, of course, not paid for that. No mandated 3rd-party authority could possibly determine and warrant the quality of scientific publications. After all, where would the assessors come from? From the pool of our colleagues, of course. Elsevier and Kluwer themselves do basically nothing. They provide some final editing in India. They don't run the journals, don't compose the editorial boards, don't control the reviews, and have nothing to do with the content of publications. What they have is the prestige of the journals they took over or bought from the 70s until now. For the top journals, which are the only journals that count, this prestige includes a vast pool of reviewers and a famous editorial board, as well as many decades of highly acclaimed publications. You cannot just replace that with a open access journal, it takes 30-50 years of good editorial work for that journal to get the same reputation. That's the problem.
- internet_user 8y ago
  "Peer-reviewed but not indexed by Scopus: 5 points (probably should be 0 though)." Why 0?
  - dragandj 8y ago
    Because it's usually only "peer reviewed".
  - 13415 8y ago
    Scopus is a huge index (unlike Web of Science), so you won't find any good journals that are not Scopus indexed.
- buboard 8y ago
  you can get peer reviewed and also submit your preprint in biorxiv. It's disappointing that it's not happening on a broad scale however.
janoc 8y ago
I am sorry but you are completely incorrect here. If you publish to Arxiv you can't publish in a journal that actually gets you the "points" you need to advance your career or secure your funding. The only exceptions are domains like mathematics or theoretical physics where publishing pre-prints and sometimes full papers on Arxiv is the norm. Most research fields are not like that. One of the first things most journals will ask you to do is an exclusive copyright assignment as a condition of publication. The only thing you can do afterwards is to publish the paper on your own website (and often not even that, at least not the version that the journal has a copyright on) and use it privately e.g. for teaching or further research. Nothing more. So there is no way to publish the same text both in e.g. Elsevier's journal and on Arxiv without risking getting sued. And few people have the time (unpaid, of course) to write a second version of the same paper only for the sake of uploading it to Arxiv. The part about the rating systems - this hasn't been created neither by scientists (who work mostly on reputation) nor publishers. This pressure to score, evaluate, grade research output is a purely governmental thing - bureaucrats and politicians wanting a simple number they can compare and use to decide on who gets and who doesn't get funded, who can and who can't apply for tenure and so on. Elsevier and others (Scopus, for ex.) only filled the demand by providing easy to use statistics, such as impact factors, citation numbers and so on based on their databases. Oh and they have very good lobbyists and e.g. in Germany Elsevier was put in charge of all this data tracking for the German government ... However, none of this requires any of the publishers - all publications are recorded by the universities anyway, citation numbers are quite easy to estimate even by googling (Google Scholar does that, without any access to the proprietary databases). And getting stuff like impact factors (which are a largely arbitrary metrics comparing cited vs all published articles in a certain journal) is in the interest of publishers because otherwise their journals will be irrelevant.
- buboard 8y ago
  > if you publish to Arxiv you can't publish in a journal that actually gets you the "points" Wrong . Most journals allow publishing of preprints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...

13415 8y ago

> 100% of scientists have an option to publish a copy in arxiv or biorxiv. It's not happening. This is not about publishing, this is about peer-reviewed publishing. Putting something on an open Internet archive does not count as a publication you could put on your CV. Were I work, for example, our publications are analyzed with bibliometric tools based on a point system, and our funding and tenure directly depends on that. Putting something in an archive or on a web page: 0 points. Not peer-reviewed: 0 points. Peer-reviewed but not indexed by Scopus: 5 points (probably should be 0 though). Indexed by Scopus and peer-reviewed: 10 points. The third party rating system you suggest makes no sense and could not possibly work. You have to understand that it's not Elsevier who do the peer-reviewing, but your own colleagues who do anonymous peer-reviews and are, of course, not paid for that. No mandated 3rd-party authority could possibly determine and warrant the quality of scientific publications. After all, where would the assessors come from? From the pool of our colleagues, of course. Elsevier and Kluwer themselves do basically nothing. They provide some final editing in India. They don't run the journals, don't compose the editorial boards, don't control the reviews, and have nothing to do with the content of publications. What they have is the prestige of the journals they took over or bought from the 70s until now. For the top journals, which are the only journals that count, this prestige includes a vast pool of reviewers and a famous editorial board, as well as many decades of highly acclaimed publications. You cannot just replace that with a open access journal, it takes 30-50 years of good editorial work for that journal to get the same reputation. That's the problem.

internet_user 8y ago
"Peer-reviewed but not indexed by Scopus: 5 points (probably should be 0 though)." Why 0?
- dragandj 8y ago
  Because it's usually only "peer reviewed".
- 13415 8y ago
  Scopus is a huge index (unlike Web of Science), so you won't find any good journals that are not Scopus indexed.
buboard 8y ago
you can get peer reviewed and also submit your preprint in biorxiv. It's disappointing that it's not happening on a broad scale however.

janoc 8y ago

I am sorry but you are completely incorrect here. If you publish to Arxiv you can't publish in a journal that actually gets you the "points" you need to advance your career or secure your funding. The only exceptions are domains like mathematics or theoretical physics where publishing pre-prints and sometimes full papers on Arxiv is the norm. Most research fields are not like that. One of the first things most journals will ask you to do is an exclusive copyright assignment as a condition of publication. The only thing you can do afterwards is to publish the paper on your own website (and often not even that, at least not the version that the journal has a copyright on) and use it privately e.g. for teaching or further research. Nothing more. So there is no way to publish the same text both in e.g. Elsevier's journal and on Arxiv without risking getting sued. And few people have the time (unpaid, of course) to write a second version of the same paper only for the sake of uploading it to Arxiv. The part about the rating systems - this hasn't been created neither by scientists (who work mostly on reputation) nor publishers. This pressure to score, evaluate, grade research output is a purely governmental thing - bureaucrats and politicians wanting a simple number they can compare and use to decide on who gets and who doesn't get funded, who can and who can't apply for tenure and so on. Elsevier and others (Scopus, for ex.) only filled the demand by providing easy to use statistics, such as impact factors, citation numbers and so on based on their databases. Oh and they have very good lobbyists and e.g. in Germany Elsevier was put in charge of all this data tracking for the German government ... However, none of this requires any of the publishers - all publications are recorded by the universities anyway, citation numbers are quite easy to estimate even by googling (Google Scholar does that, without any access to the proprietary databases). And getting stuff like impact factors (which are a largely arbitrary metrics comparing cited vs all published articles in a certain journal) is in the interest of publishers because otherwise their journals will be irrelevant.

buboard 8y ago
> if you publish to Arxiv you can't publish in a journal that actually gets you the "points" Wrong . Most journals allow publishing of preprints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...