12 ms·

UCLA asked faculty to consider declining to review for Elsevier journals

619 points by faitswulff 8y ago

Nullabillity 8y ago
Well overdue. Actually, go further: ban citations from commercial journals, and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative during hiring and promotions. Make it clear that no serious research is published in Elsevier and co. anymore.
- rocqua 8y ago
  Banning citations goes wayyyy to far. The journals are bad, but the science published in them is not. To ban citations would require either plagarizing or leaving swathes of subjects untouched.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    After a cut-off date.
    - lol768 8y ago
      Does this date refer to the time of the publishing of the cited work, or the time at which the citation itself was made?
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        The former I would imagine.
    - rocqua 8y ago
      We currently cite ArxiV, we cite books out of print, we cite websites, heck we cite 'Mein Kampf' when discussing facism. We cite anything that was used as a source. Banning citations means either changing the above practice, or banning certain sources from being used by academics. That is sacrificing science for the sake of ideology. We ought to consider sources for their inherent quality, not whether we like their publisher.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        I get what you're trying to say here, but this is not about work that has already been done, it is about work that still will be done and to avoid the sharecropping that will inevitably be the result from those citations. By giving ample warning it would be clear that those venues are toxic and that there is a good chance that your work would be better served by seeking an alternative venue for publication.
        kd0amg 8y ago
        And then when someone does publish work in that venue, are others doing related research supposed to refuse to acknowledge related published work? That's a pretty serious ethics breach in itself.
  - derefr 8y ago
    I think the idea is that these journals should be secondary sources, rather than primary sources, for papers. Sure, your paper is in Nature, and that's neat and all and gives it more visibility, but people should be citing the arXiv copy that came out either in parallel to, or before, the for-profit journal copy did. Journals should just be serving as aggregators of content, not hosts of content†. It's the same idea as how public companies' earliest issuance of any potentially-stock-affecting news, has to be through equal-access public channels that investors can subscribe to for equal-timeliness reaction to news (rather than, y'know, Elon Musk's Twitter feed, where Twitter gets to control who sees what when.) People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. Not being able to doesn't just discourage reading papers, it discourages ad-hoc peer review—the precise point of having journals in the first place. (Specifically, it discourages the part of ad-hoc peer-review where you check a paper's citations to see if the claims you find hard to believe, but which are cited, are actually backed up by something you can believe in the cited paper.) When the citation is to a closed-access journal, you have to happen to coincidentally have a subscription to that journal in order to be able to find out what the citation really says. If the citation's source journal is both for-profit and obscure, then you probably don't have that subscription—so the given citation could have been entirely made-up, and you'll never know. † Journals being aggregators of content also implies that a paper should be able to be published in as many journals as want to carry it, because none of them "own" the resulting content anyway. In that sense, scientific papers would be a lot like news-wire releases: something that any distributor can pay for the right to print a copy of.
    - rocqua 8y ago
      Hmmm, the 'journal are aggregators' model sounds really interesting. It essentially captures the concept that the value of journals is 'legitimizing' papers. > People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. I really like that, but what about citing books? It seems like sources that are paid for should still be used. We shouldn't hamstring science / scientists. Similarly, we shouldn't just pass of ideas from payed sources as our own ideas. Instead I would propose the slightly weaker rule: 'Where available, cite the free version' This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions. I see another issue though. Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    > To ban citations would require either plagarizing That sounds fine to me. The only people harmed would be the for profit journals.
    - rocqua 8y ago
      No, very much no. Plagiarism is not about copyright it is about credit. Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. In the academic world, people building on your work is essentially how you get evaluated. If people build of your work without saying so, they are doing two bad things. - They get recognition for things they did not come up with - The person who did come up with the thing does not get that recognition Consider the argument between Newton and Leibniz about who invented calculus first. That wasn't about copyright, it was purely about credit and plagiarism.
      - Nullabillity 8y ago
        Yes, and that's the point! If commercial journals are categorically no longer cited then people whose performance reviews rely on citations will switch to other outlets.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        > Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. Indeed they would be hurt. If your research is only in the paid for journals, then you would get screwed. I just don't think this is a bad thing. The only people harmed would be the journal and the scientist who chose to lock up his research behind a paywall. It sounds like a win to me to screw over people who lock up their research.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative It's a good start, but hand-me-down science in open-access journals is no better than putting it into Elsevier. Hindawi instead of Elsevier probably isn't even cheaper! Money is too tight to hand it to a sketchy publisher.
apo 8y ago
If UCLA were serious it would simply walk from the negotiation. THAT would send a message to all parties. It might actually spur some action on the part of faculty to get off their collective backsides and consider how every day they perpetuate an unsustainable system of scientific communication. This letter and others like it are moves by third-rate negotiators. Faculty who make publication and review decisions simply don't care about the cost of subscriptions enough. If they did, Elsevier would be on the ropes, not calling the shots. The letter UCLA sent out will receive widespread acclaim by a vocal minority, and go ignored by everyone else.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > This letter and others like it are moves by third-rate negotiators They're perfectly fine negotiators. They just aren't negotiating for open access, but using the threat of defection to extract better terms from Elsevier. That is both rational and achieves, in part and indirectly, one of the open access movement's aims: to reduce the power of journals like Elsevier.
  - apo 8y ago
    The problem is that this tactic actually empowers Elsevier. Without a credible threat to the status quo, nobody at UCLA or any other university has any reason to change what they're doing. It's hard to imagine anyone at Elsevier falling for this bluff. They probably came in with a 40% increase knowing they'd only get 20%. After the letter, they drop the increase to 20%, then everyone claims victory and goes home. But each round in which the OA card is played makes the bluff that much less credible.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > this tactic actually empowers Elsevier Power and profits are closely entangled. UCLA is extracting better pricing from Elsevier's weakened position as result of open-access competition. > it's hard to imagine anyone at Elsevier falling for this bluff What makes you think it was a bluff? When one threatens defection, one doesn't want to defect. That's why the defection is initially threatened, not acted upon.
yeukhon 8y ago
Without school’s library access to articles, I wouldn’t be able to complete my paper this semester. I did find and cite articles from Open Access so I am all for ditching paywall publications.
jknz 8y ago
These discussions on the evilness of Elsevier and others usually have two components that sometimes get mixed: 1. Output of publicly funded research should be open access; 2. How research is done (how peer-review works, how editors are chosen, how grants, tenure and other awards are awarded, etc) should be modernized. Goal 2 is not well defined and some ideas for goal 2 are contradictory, it often leads to endless discussions with many "ifs". Goal 1, however, is very clearly defined and I believe the community should focus on solving goal 1, because goal 2 is still not well defined and doing anything about it will meet massive inertia. Here is a proposal that tries to achieve goal 1 without trying to change anything about the structure of academia and its inertia. There should be a free or ultra-low-cost platform (typically operated as arXiv) that would let any team of editors of non-open access journal duplicate the journal by a few clicks. With a few clicks, current editors of pay-walled journals should be able to create a copy-cat open-access journal, transferring all editors, all associate editors, to the new platform -- no change in humans, only a change in the platform and the name of the journal (for instance, prefix the original journal name with "open"). The change should be effortless for all academics involved in the former pay-walled journal. Once the editors of the former pay-walled journal. The next step is to use the pressure of the involved academics to make sure that no other academics in their field join the former pay-walled journal as editors, associate editors or referees. If we want academics to move away from paywalled journals, duplicating these successful journals should be as easy as creating a blogpost, without changing the humans involved. Edit: By the way, the platform used by Elsevier to manage journals and peer-reviews is terrible from a UX perspective. It would not be hard to do better and some teams of Editors/Associat Editors may welcome a more usable alternative.
- buboard 8y ago
  but why would the (paid) editors do that and quit their job ? Also i think you have a copyright transfer problem
  - jknz 8y ago
    In many fields (related to math and computer science) editors are paid by universities and their editorial work is unpaid.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jancsika 8y ago
I'm probably missing some finer points, but I just cannot make sense of the problem here. Editors of $prestigous_journal are the most prestigious professors in their field themselves, no? So let's say $prestigious_journal is one of the journals that the university students/faculty get access to from Elsevier. University pays Elsevier, university gets access. Fine. Now, suppose the editors of $prestigious_journal care about open access. But given the current arrangement with Elsevier they cannot become an open access journal tomorrow. Is that the problem? If so, the obvious next chess move I see is this: Editors of $prestigious_journal resign from $prestigious_journal today. Tomorrow, they start $prestigious_journal1 (modulo some new name-choosing scheme) and post a website or whatever. Granted I'm biased-- is the problem that the editors don't know how to publish content on a website? If so, then the obvious chess move is to use whatever turnkey open source journal publishing system exists. What is it, and why hasn't every prestigious journal already changed its name and started publishing there? The argument cannot be, "Well, no one would know where to find the new journal." They are the most prestigious editors-- their field will know immediately where they went. Everyone else will follow from there. The only sticking point I can see is that $prestigious_editors can't take their previously published work with them to redistribute over their new website. But they still get career credit for their previous publications, and they/students/faculty can still access that through Elsevier. And all their new publications can be accessed and redistributed under a liberal license by all, for a publishing fee approaching zero dollars. We have a rich history of big software projects making much more disruptive changes in a single day. E.g., Mambo became Joomla. The fact that prestigious journal editors haven't done likewise in droves leads me to believe they are saying one thing about open access in public and saying something much more important by doing very little to change the status quo.
- azeotropic 8y ago
  No, your premise is mistaken. The most prestigious journals (Nature and Science) are professionally edited. Editors may have PhDs in the field they edit, but are not professors.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
    Science and Nature are outliers. The overwhelming majority of scientific papers are in specific journals (as opposed to these generalistic journals) and editors are almost always professors. By the way, the Science editorial board can be seen here, under "Board of Reviewing Editors". They are professors as well: https://www.sciencemag.org/about/editors-and-editorial-boards https://www.sciencemag.org/about/editors-and-editorial-board...
smhost 8y ago
> Some, however, expressed concern about the impact on junior faculty members, who must publish to advance their careers. Elsevier’s journals signal prestige in the academic job market. > many existing journals have an established brand, community, and track record — all helpful markers for junior scholars in the tenure process. it seems odd to me that academic prestige isn't controlled by the universities. you'd think that that's something they can create on their own.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  How would you define “the university?” A central all powerful administrator? Even in a department, a faculty member is necessarily judged more by their peers on the outside unless a specialty happens to be concentrated.
  - smhost 8y ago
    by "the universities", i meant the rituals and ceremonies performed by academics in general. isn't prestige really just a social construct? the universities literally contain all the individual high-status academics, the privileged social circles, and all the peers required for evaluation of merit. they have all the capital, is what i'm talking about.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Yes, universities are social constructs, so there is no monolithic construct to change.
      - smhost 8y ago
        that seems like a bit of a non sequitur, because monoliths can be constructed. like how game companies create prestige among a disorganized community by sponsoring official tournaments, for example. and you don't necessarily need to deal with a monolith, you just need a popular consensus, which it sounds like there already exists. so my confusion is how did the universities lose the ability to decide their own self-worth. how did this get outsourced.
tomkat0789 8y ago
How did the situation in Germany et al work out? Didn't researchers there start this movement? Google News searches have disappointing me. IIRC, Finland straight up told their scientists to use SciHub.
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kevinventullo 8y ago
I think this is great, but another way UCLA could put its money where its mouth is would be to publicly commit to giving higher weight to OA vs Elsevier publications when making hiring/tenure decisions. That is, a potential hire should not be penalized because they opted not to submit their paper to an Elsevier journal.
- Fede_V 8y ago
  This is a great suggestion and I hope UCLA follows this.
- lgessler 8y ago
  Aren't hiring decisions usually handled by the department? This seems like it would be hard to implement because the pool of people who are going to make hiring decisions over a span of several years would basically be every professor in the school. I mean the admin could send an email saying "don't penalize OA pubs over Elsevier pubs" but (1) that's a hard rule to follow even if you're trying in earnest, (2) you have to expect a great chunk of hiring committee members aren't going to follow this directive, and it'd be impossible to tell whether they did.
- labster 8y ago
  Came here to post this, and saw you already did. Until the incentives actually align against Elsevier, asking faculty to play nice isn't going to work. Tenure is hard enough; just because they say "publish or perish" doesn't mean the "perish" part is optional.
- hueving 8y ago
  This has much a much smaller effect than you think (at least in the departments I'm familiar with) because very little attention is paid to venue if it's research older than a few months, in which case citations and your ability to sell the research is taken much more seriously. Your (unspoken) job as a tenure track professor is to raise money via grants and get students excited to do research and apply to join your group. A professor bringing in 4x the NSF grant money of a professor getting published in top journals/conferences is always going to get the higher priority. That's the reality of academia. I've worked with professors considered to be the top of their departments who were completely incompetent but they were amazing at grant writing and selling their work. They brought in way more money to the school than anyone else so they were rewarded for it. :/
sytelus 8y ago
Elsevier has become the poster child of villain publisher. But here’s the problem: Large number of highly respected journals also charge rediculous amount for access and have refused open access on their properties. This includes Nature, Science and IEEE. Are these institutes ok with these journals? PS: I have no intent to defend Elsevier but it continues to surprise me why these other massively popular journals escape this.
- wbl 8y ago
  IEEE is a society journal and could stand to improve its practices. But it is ostensibly run for benefit of the professional society.
  - sytelus 8y ago
    IEEE charges significant membership fees and still most publications remain closed even to member. Typical rate for merely accessing paper is $33. If author wants to do open access then author gets charged $1500. How a person in poor African country supposed to pay these amounts per paper. A society with a mission of spreading and sharing scientific knowledge should not be doing this.
    - wbl 8y ago
      Start a campaign to run it if you are a member.
    - tedyoung 8y ago
      Can you define "significant membership fees"? I pay less than USD$300 a year for IEEE Computer Society membership in which ~$100 is for the full digital library (and similar for the ACM), so I don't consider that "significant". Sure, I'd rather not pay it, but it's not prohibitively expensive like the other journals are (where it can be thousands of dollars for a single subscription to a single journal).
      - sytelus 8y ago
        $300 is significant membership fees for mere privilege of being called member of some society. I'm a member for few years now and have yet to experience any real value provided by IEEE memberships except to get spammed ruthlessly and get some discount to even more expensive conferences of theirs. Remember, even after paying $300 you don't get access to their closed publications (you just get privilege to pay "discounted" price of $13 per paper). All these tells me this is enormously blotted organization mainly providing vanity and have no real mission. There are tons of non-profits that operate this way with their lavish expenses and highly-compensated officers. If Elsevier was non-profit with nicely compensated "officers" then would you be ok about their ways?
kmonad 8y ago
There are now also more and more established PIs who do not publish in the "usual suspects" journals any longer. That's all well and good for them. However, it does not work out for the grad students and postdocs. The way to remove the advantage high impact journals still leverage could instead indeed be achieved by not reviewing for them if you are an eminent figure in your field. If these journals cannot claim to publish "the best science" and highest quality any longer, then what's left? This seems the right, and maybe the only real way that single established researchers can directly work towards a (r)evolution of the publishing system. What that would become remains to be seen, of course.
sn41 8y ago
This is great news. I hope other universities follow suit.
burtonator 8y ago
What percentage of Elsevier documents are published there exclusively but otherwise public domain or freely license. I think part of the problem is discovery. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Polar is an app that people use for PDF and document annotation (supports web content too). I'm shipping cloud support early next week. Anyway, one of the features that's going to come out soon is social document discovery. I'd like to use your friends to discover what PDFs to read and this would bypass the paywall problem.
betterunix2 8y ago
This is tame; if UCLA really wanted to scare Elsevier they would refuse to pay for subscriptions. Researchers would still find a way to access the papers they want to read after a bit of short-term pain and the school could do something more useful with the money.
aurizon 8y ago
I think Sci-Hub should compile a set of hard drives that contain the full contents of various journals from day 1 (or some other start date). With 10 terabyte drives being around $400, I wonder how many years of, say Nature or Science could fit? Google say that 10TB would hold 750 million pages. If a journal is 200 pages per issue or about 10,000 per year it looks like it would hold 75,000 years. So the past 40 years or a few hundred journals would fit. SCI-HUB could make a number of journal drives based on Physics, Geology, Biology etc of, say 1 TB size. SCI-HUB could become self financing with these drives. a new one every year could be 1TB, make and sell a few hundred of the large starting drive of 10TB or ?? and the annual ones could be 1 TB. Send them to the stars. The Genii would really be out of the bottle...
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aurizon 8y ago
With regard to my earlier comment aboutcreating a number of10TB (or 1TB etc) that contained as much of the printed journals, scanned to these drives, with a built in browse and search facility built in to be shipped out to many any places to bypass ISP limits. Updates could be added as needed. To be sure specialization will create a cohort of these drives. A math person wants math journals, biology wants bio journals etc, so every small colleg or university in India or Africa can have this facility on their local web.
sytelus 8y ago
At least for various fields of CS I would really like big tech to come together and start a non-profit organization that manages journals and conferences with 100% open access. The big barrier in leaving Elsevier is having equally reputable alternatives which can consume the outgoing flow.

619 points by faitswulff 8y ago

Well overdue. Actually, go further: ban citations from commercial journals, and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative during hiring and promotions. Make it clear that no serious research is published in Elsevier and co. anymore.

rocqua 8y ago
Banning citations goes wayyyy to far. The journals are bad, but the science published in them is not. To ban citations would require either plagarizing or leaving swathes of subjects untouched.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  After a cut-off date.
  - lol768 8y ago
    Does this date refer to the time of the publishing of the cited work, or the time at which the citation itself was made?
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      The former I would imagine.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    We currently cite ArxiV, we cite books out of print, we cite websites, heck we cite 'Mein Kampf' when discussing facism. We cite anything that was used as a source. Banning citations means either changing the above practice, or banning certain sources from being used by academics. That is sacrificing science for the sake of ideology. We ought to consider sources for their inherent quality, not whether we like their publisher.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      I get what you're trying to say here, but this is not about work that has already been done, it is about work that still will be done and to avoid the sharecropping that will inevitably be the result from those citations. By giving ample warning it would be clear that those venues are toxic and that there is a good chance that your work would be better served by seeking an alternative venue for publication.
      - kd0amg 8y ago
        And then when someone does publish work in that venue, are others doing related research supposed to refuse to acknowledge related published work? That's a pretty serious ethics breach in itself.
- derefr 8y ago
  I think the idea is that these journals should be secondary sources, rather than primary sources, for papers. Sure, your paper is in Nature, and that's neat and all and gives it more visibility, but people should be citing the arXiv copy that came out either in parallel to, or before, the for-profit journal copy did. Journals should just be serving as aggregators of content, not hosts of content†. It's the same idea as how public companies' earliest issuance of any potentially-stock-affecting news, has to be through equal-access public channels that investors can subscribe to for equal-timeliness reaction to news (rather than, y'know, Elon Musk's Twitter feed, where Twitter gets to control who sees what when.) People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. Not being able to doesn't just discourage reading papers, it discourages ad-hoc peer review—the precise point of having journals in the first place. (Specifically, it discourages the part of ad-hoc peer-review where you check a paper's citations to see if the claims you find hard to believe, but which are cited, are actually backed up by something you can believe in the cited paper.) When the citation is to a closed-access journal, you have to happen to coincidentally have a subscription to that journal in order to be able to find out what the citation really says. If the citation's source journal is both for-profit and obscure, then you probably don't have that subscription—so the given citation could have been entirely made-up, and you'll never know. † Journals being aggregators of content also implies that a paper should be able to be published in as many journals as want to carry it, because none of them "own" the resulting content anyway. In that sense, scientific papers would be a lot like news-wire releases: something that any distributor can pay for the right to print a copy of.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    Hmmm, the 'journal are aggregators' model sounds really interesting. It essentially captures the concept that the value of journals is 'legitimizing' papers. > People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. I really like that, but what about citing books? It seems like sources that are paid for should still be used. We shouldn't hamstring science / scientists. Similarly, we shouldn't just pass of ideas from payed sources as our own ideas. Instead I would propose the slightly weaker rule: 'Where available, cite the free version' This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions. I see another issue though. Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.
- stale2002 8y ago
  > To ban citations would require either plagarizing That sounds fine to me. The only people harmed would be the for profit journals.
  - rocqua 8y ago
    No, very much no. Plagiarism is not about copyright it is about credit. Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. In the academic world, people building on your work is essentially how you get evaluated. If people build of your work without saying so, they are doing two bad things. - They get recognition for things they did not come up with - The person who did come up with the thing does not get that recognition Consider the argument between Newton and Leibniz about who invented calculus first. That wasn't about copyright, it was purely about credit and plagiarism.
    - Nullabillity 8y ago
      Yes, and that's the point! If commercial journals are categorically no longer cited then people whose performance reviews rely on citations will switch to other outlets.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      > Plagiarism hurts the scientist being plagiarized because their work is being passed of as someone else's work. Indeed they would be hurt. If your research is only in the paid for journals, then you would get screwed. I just don't think this is a bad thing. The only people harmed would be the journal and the scientist who chose to lock up his research behind a paywall. It sounds like a win to me to screw over people who lock up their research.
HarryHirsch 8y ago
and make authorship in them after a cut-off date a negative It's a good start, but hand-me-down science in open-access journals is no better than putting it into Elsevier. Hindawi instead of Elsevier probably isn't even cheaper! Money is too tight to hand it to a sketchy publisher.

apo 8y ago

If UCLA were serious it would simply walk from the negotiation. THAT would send a message to all parties. It might actually spur some action on the part of faculty to get off their collective backsides and consider how every day they perpetuate an unsustainable system of scientific communication. This letter and others like it are moves by third-rate negotiators. Faculty who make publication and review decisions simply don't care about the cost of subscriptions enough. If they did, Elsevier would be on the ropes, not calling the shots. The letter UCLA sent out will receive widespread acclaim by a vocal minority, and go ignored by everyone else.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> This letter and others like it are moves by third-rate negotiators They're perfectly fine negotiators. They just aren't negotiating for open access, but using the threat of defection to extract better terms from Elsevier. That is both rational and achieves, in part and indirectly, one of the open access movement's aims: to reduce the power of journals like Elsevier.
- apo 8y ago
  The problem is that this tactic actually empowers Elsevier. Without a credible threat to the status quo, nobody at UCLA or any other university has any reason to change what they're doing. It's hard to imagine anyone at Elsevier falling for this bluff. They probably came in with a 40% increase knowing they'd only get 20%. After the letter, they drop the increase to 20%, then everyone claims victory and goes home. But each round in which the OA card is played makes the bluff that much less credible.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > this tactic actually empowers Elsevier Power and profits are closely entangled. UCLA is extracting better pricing from Elsevier's weakened position as result of open-access competition. > it's hard to imagine anyone at Elsevier falling for this bluff What makes you think it was a bluff? When one threatens defection, one doesn't want to defect. That's why the defection is initially threatened, not acted upon.

yeukhon 8y ago

Without school’s library access to articles, I wouldn’t be able to complete my paper this semester. I did find and cite articles from Open Access so I am all for ditching paywall publications.

jknz 8y ago

These discussions on the evilness of Elsevier and others usually have two components that sometimes get mixed: 1. Output of publicly funded research should be open access; 2. How research is done (how peer-review works, how editors are chosen, how grants, tenure and other awards are awarded, etc) should be modernized. Goal 2 is not well defined and some ideas for goal 2 are contradictory, it often leads to endless discussions with many "ifs". Goal 1, however, is very clearly defined and I believe the community should focus on solving goal 1, because goal 2 is still not well defined and doing anything about it will meet massive inertia. Here is a proposal that tries to achieve goal 1 without trying to change anything about the structure of academia and its inertia. There should be a free or ultra-low-cost platform (typically operated as arXiv) that would let any team of editors of non-open access journal duplicate the journal by a few clicks. With a few clicks, current editors of pay-walled journals should be able to create a copy-cat open-access journal, transferring all editors, all associate editors, to the new platform -- no change in humans, only a change in the platform and the name of the journal (for instance, prefix the original journal name with "open"). The change should be effortless for all academics involved in the former pay-walled journal. Once the editors of the former pay-walled journal. The next step is to use the pressure of the involved academics to make sure that no other academics in their field join the former pay-walled journal as editors, associate editors or referees. If we want academics to move away from paywalled journals, duplicating these successful journals should be as easy as creating a blogpost, without changing the humans involved. Edit: By the way, the platform used by Elsevier to manage journals and peer-reviews is terrible from a UX perspective. It would not be hard to do better and some teams of Editors/Associat Editors may welcome a more usable alternative.

buboard 8y ago
but why would the (paid) editors do that and quit their job ? Also i think you have a copyright transfer problem
- jknz 8y ago
  In many fields (related to math and computer science) editors are paid by universities and their editorial work is unpaid.

deleted 8y ago

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jancsika 8y ago

I'm probably missing some finer points, but I just cannot make sense of the problem here. Editors of $prestigous_journal are the most prestigious professors in their field themselves, no? So let's say $prestigious_journal is one of the journals that the university students/faculty get access to from Elsevier. University pays Elsevier, university gets access. Fine. Now, suppose the editors of $prestigious_journal care about open access. But given the current arrangement with Elsevier they cannot become an open access journal tomorrow. Is that the problem? If so, the obvious next chess move I see is this: Editors of $prestigious_journal resign from $prestigious_journal today. Tomorrow, they start $prestigious_journal1 (modulo some new name-choosing scheme) and post a website or whatever. Granted I'm biased-- is the problem that the editors don't know how to publish content on a website? If so, then the obvious chess move is to use whatever turnkey open source journal publishing system exists. What is it, and why hasn't every prestigious journal already changed its name and started publishing there? The argument cannot be, "Well, no one would know where to find the new journal." They are the most prestigious editors-- their field will know immediately where they went. Everyone else will follow from there. The only sticking point I can see is that $prestigious_editors can't take their previously published work with them to redistribute over their new website. But they still get career credit for their previous publications, and they/students/faculty can still access that through Elsevier. And all their new publications can be accessed and redistributed under a liberal license by all, for a publishing fee approaching zero dollars. We have a rich history of big software projects making much more disruptive changes in a single day. E.g., Mambo became Joomla. The fact that prestigious journal editors haven't done likewise in droves leads me to believe they are saying one thing about open access in public and saying something much more important by doing very little to change the status quo.

azeotropic 8y ago
No, your premise is mistaken. The most prestigious journals (Nature and Science) are professionally edited. Editors may have PhDs in the field they edit, but are not professors.
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
  Science and Nature are outliers. The overwhelming majority of scientific papers are in specific journals (as opposed to these generalistic journals) and editors are almost always professors. By the way, the Science editorial board can be seen here, under "Board of Reviewing Editors". They are professors as well: https://www.sciencemag.org/about/editors-and-editorial-boards https://www.sciencemag.org/about/editors-and-editorial-board...

smhost 8y ago

> Some, however, expressed concern about the impact on junior faculty members, who must publish to advance their careers. Elsevier’s journals signal prestige in the academic job market. > many existing journals have an established brand, community, and track record — all helpful markers for junior scholars in the tenure process. it seems odd to me that academic prestige isn't controlled by the universities. you'd think that that's something they can create on their own.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
How would you define “the university?” A central all powerful administrator? Even in a department, a faculty member is necessarily judged more by their peers on the outside unless a specialty happens to be concentrated.
- smhost 8y ago
  by "the universities", i meant the rituals and ceremonies performed by academics in general. isn't prestige really just a social construct? the universities literally contain all the individual high-status academics, the privileged social circles, and all the peers required for evaluation of merit. they have all the capital, is what i'm talking about.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Yes, universities are social constructs, so there is no monolithic construct to change.
    - smhost 8y ago
      that seems like a bit of a non sequitur, because monoliths can be constructed. like how game companies create prestige among a disorganized community by sponsoring official tournaments, for example. and you don't necessarily need to deal with a monolith, you just need a popular consensus, which it sounds like there already exists. so my confusion is how did the universities lose the ability to decide their own self-worth. how did this get outsourced.

tomkat0789 8y ago

How did the situation in Germany et al work out? Didn't researchers there start this movement? Google News searches have disappointing me. IIRC, Finland straight up told their scientists to use SciHub.

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kevinventullo 8y ago

I think this is great, but another way UCLA could put its money where its mouth is would be to publicly commit to giving higher weight to OA vs Elsevier publications when making hiring/tenure decisions. That is, a potential hire should not be penalized because they opted not to submit their paper to an Elsevier journal.

Fede_V 8y ago
This is a great suggestion and I hope UCLA follows this.
lgessler 8y ago
Aren't hiring decisions usually handled by the department? This seems like it would be hard to implement because the pool of people who are going to make hiring decisions over a span of several years would basically be every professor in the school. I mean the admin could send an email saying "don't penalize OA pubs over Elsevier pubs" but (1) that's a hard rule to follow even if you're trying in earnest, (2) you have to expect a great chunk of hiring committee members aren't going to follow this directive, and it'd be impossible to tell whether they did.
labster 8y ago
Came here to post this, and saw you already did. Until the incentives actually align against Elsevier, asking faculty to play nice isn't going to work. Tenure is hard enough; just because they say "publish or perish" doesn't mean the "perish" part is optional.
hueving 8y ago
This has much a much smaller effect than you think (at least in the departments I'm familiar with) because very little attention is paid to venue if it's research older than a few months, in which case citations and your ability to sell the research is taken much more seriously. Your (unspoken) job as a tenure track professor is to raise money via grants and get students excited to do research and apply to join your group. A professor bringing in 4x the NSF grant money of a professor getting published in top journals/conferences is always going to get the higher priority. That's the reality of academia. I've worked with professors considered to be the top of their departments who were completely incompetent but they were amazing at grant writing and selling their work. They brought in way more money to the school than anyone else so they were rewarded for it. :/

sytelus 8y ago

Elsevier has become the poster child of villain publisher. But here’s the problem: Large number of highly respected journals also charge rediculous amount for access and have refused open access on their properties. This includes Nature, Science and IEEE. Are these institutes ok with these journals? PS: I have no intent to defend Elsevier but it continues to surprise me why these other massively popular journals escape this.

wbl 8y ago
IEEE is a society journal and could stand to improve its practices. But it is ostensibly run for benefit of the professional society.
- sytelus 8y ago
  IEEE charges significant membership fees and still most publications remain closed even to member. Typical rate for merely accessing paper is $33. If author wants to do open access then author gets charged $1500. How a person in poor African country supposed to pay these amounts per paper. A society with a mission of spreading and sharing scientific knowledge should not be doing this.
  - wbl 8y ago
    Start a campaign to run it if you are a member.
  - tedyoung 8y ago
    Can you define "significant membership fees"? I pay less than USD$300 a year for IEEE Computer Society membership in which ~$100 is for the full digital library (and similar for the ACM), so I don't consider that "significant". Sure, I'd rather not pay it, but it's not prohibitively expensive like the other journals are (where it can be thousands of dollars for a single subscription to a single journal).
    - sytelus 8y ago
      $300 is significant membership fees for mere privilege of being called member of some society. I'm a member for few years now and have yet to experience any real value provided by IEEE memberships except to get spammed ruthlessly and get some discount to even more expensive conferences of theirs. Remember, even after paying $300 you don't get access to their closed publications (you just get privilege to pay "discounted" price of $13 per paper). All these tells me this is enormously blotted organization mainly providing vanity and have no real mission. There are tons of non-profits that operate this way with their lavish expenses and highly-compensated officers. If Elsevier was non-profit with nicely compensated "officers" then would you be ok about their ways?

kmonad 8y ago

There are now also more and more established PIs who do not publish in the "usual suspects" journals any longer. That's all well and good for them. However, it does not work out for the grad students and postdocs. The way to remove the advantage high impact journals still leverage could instead indeed be achieved by not reviewing for them if you are an eminent figure in your field. If these journals cannot claim to publish "the best science" and highest quality any longer, then what's left? This seems the right, and maybe the only real way that single established researchers can directly work towards a (r)evolution of the publishing system. What that would become remains to be seen, of course.

sn41 8y ago

This is great news. I hope other universities follow suit.

burtonator 8y ago

What percentage of Elsevier documents are published there exclusively but otherwise public domain or freely license. I think part of the problem is discovery. https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Polar is an app that people use for PDF and document annotation (supports web content too). I'm shipping cloud support early next week. Anyway, one of the features that's going to come out soon is social document discovery. I'd like to use your friends to discover what PDFs to read and this would bypass the paywall problem.

betterunix2 8y ago

This is tame; if UCLA really wanted to scare Elsevier they would refuse to pay for subscriptions. Researchers would still find a way to access the papers they want to read after a bit of short-term pain and the school could do something more useful with the money.

aurizon 8y ago

I think Sci-Hub should compile a set of hard drives that contain the full contents of various journals from day 1 (or some other start date). With 10 terabyte drives being around $400, I wonder how many years of, say Nature or Science could fit? Google say that 10TB would hold 750 million pages. If a journal is 200 pages per issue or about 10,000 per year it looks like it would hold 75,000 years. So the past 40 years or a few hundred journals would fit. SCI-HUB could make a number of journal drives based on Physics, Geology, Biology etc of, say 1 TB size. SCI-HUB could become self financing with these drives. a new one every year could be 1TB, make and sell a few hundred of the large starting drive of 10TB or ?? and the annual ones could be 1 TB. Send them to the stars. The Genii would really be out of the bottle...

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aurizon 8y ago

With regard to my earlier comment aboutcreating a number of10TB (or 1TB etc) that contained as much of the printed journals, scanned to these drives, with a built in browse and search facility built in to be shipped out to many any places to bypass ISP limits. Updates could be added as needed. To be sure specialization will create a cohort of these drives. A math person wants math journals, biology wants bio journals etc, so every small colleg or university in India or Africa can have this facility on their local web.

sytelus 8y ago

At least for various fields of CS I would really like big tech to come together and start a non-profit organization that manages journals and conferences with 100% open access. The big barrier in leaving Elsevier is having equally reputable alternatives which can consume the outgoing flow.