4 ms·

I agree with the sentiment but I do think the service journals provide was once worthwhile, before the web, as disseminaters of academic knowledge. Universities

I agree with the sentiment but I do think the service journals provide was once worthwhile, before the web, as disseminaters of academic knowledge. Universities paid a subscription fee for physical copies of journals, allowing their employees to keep up to date with what was happening in the world of science. Once the web took off the proposition was no longer good value, as scientists could bypass publishers. It just took two decades for academia to change the habit of a century.

AstralStorm 8y ago
The proposition is still ok value if not too expensive - collated and vetted research reviews are highly valuable. Such as some journals and annals. However, preventing anyone else from creating them or running their own analysis via exclusivity and access pricing is just selfish and stifling.
mirimir 8y ago
There's more to it than that. Elsevier etc are just bleeding out the academic publishing business. Just like Alden Global Capital has been bleeding out The Denver Post and many other newspapers.
dmitriz 8y ago
Added value: "The Lancet finds itself connected to... global arms trade: a trade that inflicts physical and social harm in the poorest and least stable regions. Since 2003, The Lancet's owner and publisher, Reed Elsevier, has organised some of the world's largest arms" https://t.co/rIbch7S6dy https://t.co/rIbch7S6dy
- MrGunn 8y ago
  Dmitri, I feel like you're being deceptive here. RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade, and in fact Lancet led the movement to divest! https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.w... There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous.
  - dmitriz 8y ago
    > I feel like you're being deceptive here Giving precise quote with full source link for everyone interested is deceptive? How so? > RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade Yes, the article is dated 2005. It was clearly a major issue for the journal's reputation at the time, that went through the trouble to write it. The guardian article is from 2008, so 3 years after. Does 2008 being 10 years ago erase that part of the history? This very subject was brought in this tweet: https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1062402097172414464 https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1062402097172414464 > If anyone doubts the value provided by academic publishers, they should read this story of the inner workings of @TheLancet, one of @ElsevierConnect 's leading journals http://bit.ly/relx-lancet http://bit.ly/relx-lancet, the link celebrating 200 years of history of the journal! Either Elsevier takes credit for 200 years of The Lancet, including the last 20 years, or we need to erase all the history up until 10 years ago? :) Wasn't that tweet perhaps deceptive? > There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous. It was a quote, no added critics on my part. If you note "suggestions for publishers" under the following link, that can hardly be intepreted as criticising :) https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/100#suggestions-for-publishers-allow-fairness-and-flexibility https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/100#s...
MrGunn 8y ago
This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for review in the first place, manage the review process so that you don't have nasty, unhelpful reviews or personal vendettas getting exercised, manage ethical concerns, deal with authorship disputes, etc, and that's just the review piece of things. There's a whole information infrastructure behind the scenes making sure that once something is published that it can be found, indexed, searched for, aggregated by author, connected to the data and code and protocols and other entities that it mentions... I mean, I've been at this for 8 years and there's still so much I don't know. All that just to make the point that the value proposition is still very much there, though I'll agree publishers could do more to make this apparent.
- njarboe 8y ago
  Aren't most editors unpaid volunteers? There are paid type setters and web people, etc., but the editors who are knowledgeable in the field are not paid except for maybe top 10 journals like Science and Nature.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    Yes, the common belief (and it's mine too) is that the gatekeepers like Elsevier use free or low paid experts to pick the good papers and edit them and keep that expensive fee you pay them. Is this only in CS? In my experience all the work was done by free-to-the-publisher editors and what the editors got was listing they were on that journal.
    - njarboe 8y ago
      Yea, I brought this up because I have published in a few Earth science journals and that was how it worked in that field. The editors look at the papers and are the first level of rejections. The ones they think are decent they send to people they think would be good at reviewing the content. The reviews come back (or not, and they send the paper to someone else to review), the editor reads the reviews and, if the reviewer think the paper should be published, the editor sends the reviews to the author for the author to make changes to the paper as needed. The author returns the paper with the edits and explanations for why some suggestions from the reviewer were not followed. The editor now usually accepts the paper for publication and hands off the author to a typesetter that will help in getting the Word doc or TeX formatted paper into the style that the journal wants. This last person is paid by the journal, but in no way needs a PhD in the field or much knowledge of the material he/she is reading.

AstralStorm 8y ago

The proposition is still ok value if not too expensive - collated and vetted research reviews are highly valuable. Such as some journals and annals. However, preventing anyone else from creating them or running their own analysis via exclusivity and access pricing is just selfish and stifling.

mirimir 8y ago

There's more to it than that. Elsevier etc are just bleeding out the academic publishing business. Just like Alden Global Capital has been bleeding out The Denver Post and many other newspapers.

dmitriz 8y ago

Added value: "The Lancet finds itself connected to... global arms trade: a trade that inflicts physical and social harm in the poorest and least stable regions. Since 2003, The Lancet's owner and publisher, Reed Elsevier, has organised some of the world's largest arms" https://t.co/rIbch7S6dy https://t.co/rIbch7S6dy

MrGunn 8y ago
Dmitri, I feel like you're being deceptive here. RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade, and in fact Lancet led the movement to divest! https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.w... There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous.
- dmitriz 8y ago
  > I feel like you're being deceptive here Giving precise quote with full source link for everyone interested is deceptive? How so? > RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade Yes, the article is dated 2005. It was clearly a major issue for the journal's reputation at the time, that went through the trouble to write it. The guardian article is from 2008, so 3 years after. Does 2008 being 10 years ago erase that part of the history? This very subject was brought in this tweet: https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1062402097172414464 https://twitter.com/paul_abrahams/status/1062402097172414464 > If anyone doubts the value provided by academic publishers, they should read this story of the inner workings of @TheLancet, one of @ElsevierConnect 's leading journals http://bit.ly/relx-lancet http://bit.ly/relx-lancet, the link celebrating 200 years of history of the journal! Either Elsevier takes credit for 200 years of The Lancet, including the last 20 years, or we need to erase all the history up until 10 years ago? :) Wasn't that tweet perhaps deceptive? > There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous. It was a quote, no added critics on my part. If you note "suggestions for publishers" under the following link, that can hardly be intepreted as criticising :) https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/100#suggestions-for-publishers-allow-fairness-and-flexibility https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/100#s...

MrGunn 8y ago

This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for review in the first place, manage the review process so that you don't have nasty, unhelpful reviews or personal vendettas getting exercised, manage ethical concerns, deal with authorship disputes, etc, and that's just the review piece of things. There's a whole information infrastructure behind the scenes making sure that once something is published that it can be found, indexed, searched for, aggregated by author, connected to the data and code and protocols and other entities that it mentions... I mean, I've been at this for 8 years and there's still so much I don't know. All that just to make the point that the value proposition is still very much there, though I'll agree publishers could do more to make this apparent.

njarboe 8y ago
Aren't most editors unpaid volunteers? There are paid type setters and web people, etc., but the editors who are knowledgeable in the field are not paid except for maybe top 10 journals like Science and Nature.
- Latteland 8y ago
  Yes, the common belief (and it's mine too) is that the gatekeepers like Elsevier use free or low paid experts to pick the good papers and edit them and keep that expensive fee you pay them. Is this only in CS? In my experience all the work was done by free-to-the-publisher editors and what the editors got was listing they were on that journal.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    Yea, I brought this up because I have published in a few Earth science journals and that was how it worked in that field. The editors look at the papers and are the first level of rejections. The ones they think are decent they send to people they think would be good at reviewing the content. The reviews come back (or not, and they send the paper to someone else to review), the editor reads the reviews and, if the reviewer think the paper should be published, the editor sends the reviews to the author for the author to make changes to the paper as needed. The author returns the paper with the edits and explanations for why some suggestions from the reviewer were not followed. The editor now usually accepts the paper for publication and hands off the author to a typesetter that will help in getting the Word doc or TeX formatted paper into the style that the journal wants. This last person is paid by the journal, but in no way needs a PhD in the field or much knowledge of the material he/she is reading.