7 ms·

I am an academic at a UC who publishes in Elsevier journals. I support this. I don't want copyright for anything I work on. I also work in a field where patent/

• driverdan 7y ago
  > I have had to publish in journals that are not open access Why is that?
  • kurthr 7y ago
    It's your job... publish or perish. It was especially true more than 5 years ago. Most academics have been working 20years or more.
  • xiii1408 7y ago
    Career progress in academia is mostly based on publications in top-tier journals in your field. If those journals aren't open access, you're required to publish in closed access journals if you want to (1) get a Ph.D., (2) get tenure, etc.
    • natechols 7y ago
      Correction: you do not need to publish in closed access journals to get a PhD. However, getting a tenure-track faculty position in the life sciences at a major US university is almost impossible without publishing in Science, Nature, or Cell (an Elsevier journal), none of which is open-access (without paying an exorbitant fee).
      • anticensor 7y ago
        PLOS is a top-tier indexed refereed open-access journal.
        • natechols 7y ago
          If by "top-tier" you mean "sufficient to impress the hiring committees at Stanford or Harvard", sorry, no. Personally, having no interest in faculty jobs to begin with, I'd vastly prefer to deal with PLOS than Elsevier, but good luck persuading the average biosciences postdoc to choose it over the Holy Triad of prestige journals.
          • anticensor 7y ago
            Top tier in terms of review practices and reproducibility. If you mean Elsevier, Wiley, Springer by "Holy Triad", you can convince them to publish almost anything as a scientific article if you pay enough and format correctly. PLOS is applied medical sciences only, for now. We need more of PLOS-like journals. Do you have no academics in your academic hiring committee?
            • natechols 7y ago
              I meant Science/Nature/Cell (the exact titles may differ in other fields, but that's how we roll in the life sciences), and no, you can't simply buy your way into these, they are already raking in money from their subscribers anyway. What is extremely common, unfortunately, is scientists exaggerating the meaning and importance of their results to make their manuscript appeal to journal editors, and everyone in the field has their own personal s##t list of high-profile articles that never should have been published, let alone in a prestige journal. Hell, many of the people on hiring committees will agree with me! And yet the hiring practices remain largely the same, year after year. EDIT: just to be clear, the hiring committees I'm talking about tend to be nearly 100% academics (at least the ones I've seen). University faculty don't let the bean counters make important decisions like this.
            • UncleMeat 7y ago
    • new2628 7y ago
      With all respect, this attitude from the researchers side is exactly what maintains the system and what Elsevier and co take advantage of. Signed: a professor who never published with Elsevier.
      • Vinnl 7y ago
        Well, most of those who did not have that attitude are not in academia any more, so expecting that is not really going to help. It's the ones who cause that (i.e. use journal name as a quality indicator when looking for people to hire) that should be looked towards.
    • a3_nm 7y ago
      Even if you already have a PhD and tenure, many academic papers are collaborations, and so if the top relevant journals aren't open-access then you need to publish there if one of your co-authors needs a PhD, tenure, etc. Given that much research involves at least one PhD student, it's very hard to move out of the system. (My personal policy has been to avoid submitting to closed-access venues, but accept it if my coauthors needed it. However, I don't do reviews for these venues.)
    • codedokode 7y ago
      Is not it better then to publish preprints to some open repositories and reference those repositories in scientific works. And use journals only for career, but never for research. This way they will gradually lose their role.
    • natch 7y ago
      If this is true, then one way to look at it is that making career progress in academia is ethically untenable, for the time being. I know many people who have chosen not to be in academia, and they are doing fine. Comparing myself with family and friend with PhDs and tenure, and being in academia (them, not me), I am doing fine without any of those. In statements of the form "if you want to get x, you have to do y", when y is something morally repugnant, then that should lead to questioning whether filling your want for x is the only way to be happy. I recently had a commenter disagree over my criticism of a company that locked in their customers and then gouged them. The commenter said something along the lines of "well, the people wanted to make more money, so it's OK that they did what they did" (where what they did happened to be very bad for users). No, it's not OK. A personal desire for some end does not make any means whatsoever OK. But I'm making a general statement there, not criticizing you. I realize this is simply how it's done now in academia, and if you're embedded in that, you mostly get a pass for the time being, but I do admire those who stand up and work against it.
  • icelancer 7y ago
    Because academia is a run by a bunch of cronyist elitists who care about impact factor more than they care about science.
    • kingludite 7y ago
      There was a window in time, more than a million internet years ago, when all of the good code was written by a bunch of 13 year olds. Assembly was used but machine code was the superior weapon of choice. Something like: These are the opcodes, we calculate things in hex, deal with it you noob. They were always there of course but the academics came in ever larger numbers and tried to forge something prestigious out of the field. These unsophisticated developers who didn't learn how to code started uttering all kinds of authoritatively sounding nonsense. While the 13 year olds bragged about their kung fu being better than yours the professors kept talking about how hard and labor intense everything was. Clear noob talk with a cherry on top. Tears from laughter.... I remember one kid saying: So it has to run on millions of computers and run for millions of cycles but we should sacrifice performance for ease of development? Because those poor developers bla bla bla? There was real elitism among the 13 year olds, no one cared for something that kind of worked, the prestige was all in squeezing out more performance. During academic construction the man behind the curtain was clearly visible. He wrote everything in basic because machine code was ohh so much to hard. His own words. A long story short: The ferengi alliance hired countless mercenaries and defeated the borg. Today you cant even send an sms message or distribute a text document without paying tribute to the grand nagus one way or another.
      • salawat 7y ago
        ...I think I actually understood that. Not sure whether I should be happy or not, but such is life Anyway, if my parsing is correct, this poster laments the way that academic publishing was subverted away from doing something unique and covering new ground through actually making substantial scientific breakthroughs in favor of higher visibility and accessibility where the metrics of having published something to be quoted by others became more important than publishing a truly revolutionary piece. This is paralleled by the shift in attitude w.r.t. programming languages. In the days of computing yore, the emphasis was around trying to wrangle the machine into doing what you wanted it to do, and you stayed as close to the metal while doing as possible to keep it fast, because you had to squeeze as much out of what you had as possible. You were comfortable with the software/hardware boundaries being present because that's what it took. As languages developed however, much of the "skill" at the time was chipped away at in the name of abstraction, modularity(many functions getting implemented as libraries), and linguistic/runtime hand holding by things like garbage collecting VM's. This overhead allowed more accessibility in terms of the initial knowledge and kill barrier to entry to be significantly lowered, as the challenge and prestige of wrestling with the machine to get things done performantly slowly gave way to maintaining an encyclopedic knowledge of libraries and frameworks that can be kludge together to give a roughly working facsimile of the desired system. Programming therefore degenerated from somewhat harder scientific endeavor to make breakthroughs in fully utilizing more performant hardware to the max with highly optimized and performant code, to using increased hardware performance as a buffer to allow sloppier, easier to think about abstractions to do the lifting, making software development a glorified popularity contest where frameworks of the week competed for more programmer mindshare for the sake of competing rather than actually doing something in and of themselves. This had the end goal of making terrible (in terms of minimal footprint to run) software easier to write, and easier to hire people to work with. That's what the poster seems to mean by "the Ferengi hired tons of mercenaries and defeated the Borg." The Borg being the 13 year old purist, the Ferengi being those that wanted terrible software that did well enough. Shift this back to academia, and you see the same dynamic. Academics are pushed to publish or perish, so the actual quality of scientific breakthrough has nose dived in favor of throwing as many results out there to be added to someone else's mindshare as possible. The entire network and incentive structure behind it being fiscally motivated by the interest of the closed access journals. Damn. Not the most straightforwardly worded, but I can see where this guy is coming from.
• tingletech 7y ago
  do you put your author's final version in https://escholarship.org https://escholarship.org ? Do you ever use https://oapolicy.universityofcalifornia.edu/ https://oapolicy.universityofcalifornia.edu/ ? (it's only open to senate faculty right now, be we are rolling it out for all ~240k UC employees) Also related https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu (disclosure, I'm the nominal tech lead for these)
  • olliej 7y ago
    Elsevier requires that authors do not do that - they can only provide copies of their papers in response to requests.
    • sitkack 7y ago
      How about we have an autoresponder framework, like MailMain, that can handle mail with messages like [paper-request] bacterial population analysis under exposure to fox news ? And it would respond with the proper paper or papers attached.
      • prepend 7y ago
        Papers have dois so it’s way easier than asking for by name.
      • captncraig 7y ago
        And some kind of index that lists possible "request" locations? Perhaps even with some kind of "hyperlinks". I think we may be onto something big here.
        • sitkack 7y ago
          https://github.com/Zingle/smtp2http https://github.com/Zingle/smtp2http
    • CallOfTheWilde 7y ago
      Does that include HTTP requests? :)
• dproblem 7y ago
  Your university commercialization office will disagree. Check with them. From what I understand, it is illegal to release your code in CC0 or MIT unless you have taken permission from the commercialization office (Some universities allow GPL without explicit permission). Have you checked your contract ? Your work is not yours if it has any value. The value belongs to the university (mostly) - which also means you have no incentive to work on valuable stuff. I think Elsevier is least of UCs problems. It's a distraction from the real ones.
  • gisely 7y ago
    Grad student at Berkeley. The commercialization office only takes an interest if your work is high profile enough and has enough commercialization potential. Plenty of UC researchers release CC0 or MIT license code without issue. Elsevier may be only one of many problems for the UC community, but that doesn’t mean it’s a distraction—- millions have been wasted every year subsidizing their profits. And Elsevier’s rent seeking business model is a problem for more than just the UCs. Hopefully this decision will end up being Elsevier’s death knell.
    • tanakachen 7y ago
      To Elsevier CEO: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It. Elsevier’s model is being disrupted and there is no going back.
    • Pfhreak 7y ago
      Aren't you assuming the risk though? Like, in practice they might not care, but in writing they could care...
      • prepend 7y ago
        Assuming risk is part of the judgement required in science. There’s stuff that requires IRB, then there’s a whole bunch of judgement and risk.
  • sitkack 7y ago
• breck 7y ago
  Awesome, thank you for doing that!