6 ms·

A couple of silly questions: 1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started? 2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time

A couple of silly questions: 1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started? 2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time? 3. How did the industry evolve? 3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve? 3c. What was the business model then and what is it now? Who are the clients (universities, I presume)? How do they pay for this (taxpayer money? If so, that's a huge clue). Who is the decision-maker regarding these purchases? 4. How is it possible that they still exist? If they don't provide value anymore, then what is it? Are people habitual creatures? Are they pressuring universities? Did they somehow get a vendor lock-in effect (can people get out)? I'm simply trying to get why it became what it became and why it isn't dying in the slightest despite researchers trying to organize themselves a bit for open access.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
CJefferson 7y ago
They do still provide significant value, although it is weakening. When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal, it gives me a sign it is trustworthy. When I'm asked to submit something to an Elsevier journal, it gives me confidence the journal is trustworthy. I, as I guess someone with an academic email address, give dozens of invitations to read, submit to, and help edit, journals every week. I have no choice other than to send the majority of these directly to trash. Slowly, open source trustworthy journals are appearing, but they need to gain trust and that takes time. We need something like a Web of trust for academic work, but it would be a major undertaking to set up. Also, who is going to pay for all the work of setting up and running these new journals? And don't assume there are zero costs, just because academics do tend to work for free.
- _jal 7y ago
  > When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal, it gives me a sign it is trustworthy You might want to reconsider that. https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-published-6-fake-journals-44160 https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-publishe...
  - CJefferson 7y ago
    By "sign", I know it isn't perfect. However, 99% of the journals which email me are junk, so we need some method. And I don't just want to read papers by my friends, as that way I end up in a bubble.
    - Nemo_bis 7y ago
      That's also questionable. For instance, journals with higher impact factor tend to contain more articles which can be considered bad by objective measures. "Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.0029...
- omaranto 7y ago
  > When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal I like the Freudian slip in "punished"!
gravypod 7y ago
> 1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started? Someone had a lot of money and knew many academics in a few fields. They asked some to review papers and others to send them papers. > 2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time? They derived value from peer review, prestige, and collecting all pieces. Peer review is important for any journal to supply and is a useful step to put your own work through to make sure you are accurately conveying your ideas. Prestige gets you funding and degrees. Some colleges don't let you get a master's or PhD if you don't have N publications from a X impact factor journal. Before the internet your college library was your source of information. The librarian has many things to do (not now, we are talking pre-internet) and rather than find every single individual in a field and poll then for papers they go to a publisher and ask for a copy of all of the publications the journal gets. > 3. How did the industry evolve? Depending on the field not much to very much. > 3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve? Now that the internet is a thing collecting, indexing, and distributing data is "free". The barriers to entry are still prestige and peer review. > 3c. What was the business model then and what is it now? Who are the clients (universities, I presume)? How do they pay for this (taxpayer money? If so, that's a huge clue). Who is the decision-maker regarding these purchases? The business model is two steps. Librarians: you pay me an obscene amount of money each year and I'll organize a bunch of relevant papers for you. Researcher: we only accept "the best" so if you get to publish in my journal you are "the best". Purchasing subscriptions to these journals is likely still done by a librarian but i say "done" for a reason. There is no decision. You must have these journal subscriptions. More info below. > 4. How is it possible that they still exist? If they don't provide value anymore, then what is it? Are people habitual creatures? Are they pressuring universities? Did they somehow get a vendor lock-in effect (can people get out)? The lock-in is that, while they suck, researchers will only hire people with a specific number of publications in a specific impact factor journal. These journals are usually evil but it's "the one I read" so to get in front of some very important people you need to have published in some of these places. If you do the same quality work and publish it in a smaller, open access, journal that is great but it won't necessarily move your career as forward as publishing it in an important journal will.
jdietrich 7y ago
Strange as it is to imagine, scientific journals used to be printed on paper. Elsevier was founded in 1880 as a book publisher, then a magazine publisher before expanding into scientific publishing. Subscribing to a scientific journal was not fundamentally different to subscribing to any other kind of magazine; university libraries paid a fee to receive a printed document every month, containing a collection of articles related to that field. The internet should have changed this model, but the publishers had amassed a secondary form of value - prestige. Scientists don't only want to share their research with their peers, but share that research in a prestigious publication. Getting a paper published in Nature or the BMJ has a meaningful impact on the author's career. The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free, but nobody thus far has found an adequate substitute for the prestige of a highly respected journal. Universities keep paying to subscribe to prestigious journals because they publish some of the most interesting and significant research; academics keep sending their best work to the most prestigious journals because it's valuable to their career prospects. This problem can probably only be solved through coordinated action by academics.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  "meaningful impact" in the second paragraph is an understatement ...
- flatline 7y ago
  > The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to this. Yes it is trivial to put something online. But library sciences exist for a reason, so if you want a nice collection of things online with some sensible structure it becomes less trivial. Worse yet if you want some way of ranking in importance the things in your collection, it requires a lot of manual intervention. I think your solution is ultimately correct, but the peer review process is harder to solve than the technical one, and there is still a cost of some sort to implement and maintain the technical one.
  - canjobear 7y ago
    Many fields do peer review just fine without help from academic publishers. All academic publishers contribute to the process is an early-2000s web interface.
chaosite 7y ago
1. They were old-school publishing houses, that had a connection to some prominent academic or an academic society that decided they needed to start a journal. 2. The value proposition was that they were the only way to publish research. Libraries subscribed to them (or bought issues), and reading journals in a library was the major way academics learned of new research in their field, unless they learned of the research in a conference. 3. The Internet. 3b. The barriers to entry used to be needing to have access to a publishing house capable of duplicating issues, and having your journal be in major libraries (which is usually related to being related to a major academic or a academic society). The barrier to entry today is due to papers published being a major benchmark using which the productivity of an academic is measured. Older, well-known journals that accept only a few papers are known as having a larger "impact-factor", which means that publishing in them is worth more to an academic. 3c. The business model is always selling subscriptions to libraries, mostly university libraries (but also regular ones and research outfits in industry). Once they don't actually print anything their costs are mostly administrative, so they're basically printing money. The decision maker are librarians, usually, but they get set a budget by whoever owns the library. 4. Because they own the major benchmark used to evaluate an academic career. If you are an academic and want to further your career (i.e., get a job, get tenure, get a grant), you have to publish in one of those journals. If you're another academic and you then want to read that research, you then have to have your library subscribed to that journal (or look it up and Sci-Hub).
- rmetzler 7y ago
  > 3c. The business model is always selling subscriptions to libraries, mostly university libraries (but also regular ones and research outfits in industry) The main criticism I read about Elsevier is that universities can’t subscribe to just the most important Elsevier publications but have to subscribe to a big package while the content producers aren’t paid by Elsevier but work at the universities. This only works, because Elsevier is a monopoly and this is the reason why science hub is a thing.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > 2. The value proposition was that they were the only way to publish research. Was this ever actually the case? Researchers have always published on their own in one way or another. What these journals added was an established peer review mechanism.
imgabe 7y ago
Academia runs heavily on prestige. The journals are valuable because they are prestigious and it is more beneficial to an academic's career to publish in a more prestigious journal than a less prestigious one. Because the academics who publish in those journals get jobs at prestigious universities, every university needs to keep those journals in those libraries, because that's where all the highest profile researchers are publishing their articles. Anyone who wants to join that group also needs to compete to publish in those journals. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
notahacker 7y ago
1. Once upon a time there was no internet and not even any computers. Turning academics' scribblings into neatly printed compilations of articles sent out to academic libraries across the world on a regular basis necessarily involved a publisher that could handle that sort of thing. 2. Over time, their journals' proposition evolved to be less "distributor of print" and more "curator of the most respected content". As universities started scrutinising how good their academics were at getting articles published and journals they published in started being ranked by "impact factor", the value proposition of curated content got stronger 3. Computers made it relatively easy for academics to produce print-ready articles themselves. The internet made it straightforward for academics to distribute articles as neatly formatted PDFs and share their early drafts with peers for review without involving any publisher. But also, academics and students started expecting to be able to search through decades of articles online rather than hunt for a single paper copy of each on in library, which opened up a nice little opportunity to sell renewable subscriptions for digital access to the archives. 3b. The barriers to entry used to be not having the facility to print and distribute and sell to libraries as well as the fact your new journal isn't Nature. Now it's just the latter. And also the fact you're simply not allowed to republish the decades worth of content they own, which includes a lot of must-cite texts 3c. The business model was getting academics to submit and review content for free which was then resold to universities staffed by people who expected [their students] to be able to read it as part of their research and expected the library to pick up the tab. Still is, just publishing new content is easier for everybody, and since the journal sub offers digital access to the archives and not just 12 bits of paper for the library they can ask for more eye-watering sums of money. 4. Regardless of whether open access journals ultimately inherit the prestige of the existing ones, academic publishers will continue own the copyright of decades worth of texts which academics and students are expected to have read to properly understand their field, and so university libraries will continue to be expected to subscribe to them. The lockin effect is that you can't do serious academic research without reading papers which they own. Which is also why they're not very keen on people pirating their content.
pessimizer 7y ago
> 1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started? I think people are answering this question as if it were about scientific publishers in general. They were just respected magazines, often published by scientific membership societies. Elsevier specifically was a publisher that just gobbled as many of them that it could up until it got to a monopoly or near-monopoly position by specialization (meaning that it could own every important journal is some professions, and most of them in others.) Then it jacked up the prices infinitely, and their competitors took the signal and jacked up their prices too. Now, some major universities are defecting, which is actually a signal that the pricing is just about perfect for the market. It's just the same old boring operations of capitalism. This is exactly how pharma, or the music business works.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Some history: "Peer review" is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away? https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is-younger-than-you-think.html https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is... Peer review : the end of an error? https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-error-peer-review/ https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-erro... Peer review: Troubled from the start https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-start-1.19763 https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-st... Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery — Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/news/why-the-national-institutes-of-health-should-replace-peer-review-with-a-lottery https://psmag.com/news/why-the-national-institutes-of-health...
buboard 7y ago
> 3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve? It 's a chicken and egg problem: Authors don't publish to new journals because they are not reputable yet and journals can't become reputable because authors don't publish to them. I don't know the theory of chicken and egg problems but i think they are solved when either a) a brand new discipline emerges therefore the first bidders win by default or b) some extraordinary action is taken

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

CJefferson 7y ago

They do still provide significant value, although it is weakening. When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal, it gives me a sign it is trustworthy. When I'm asked to submit something to an Elsevier journal, it gives me confidence the journal is trustworthy. I, as I guess someone with an academic email address, give dozens of invitations to read, submit to, and help edit, journals every week. I have no choice other than to send the majority of these directly to trash. Slowly, open source trustworthy journals are appearing, but they need to gain trust and that takes time. We need something like a Web of trust for academic work, but it would be a major undertaking to set up. Also, who is going to pay for all the work of setting up and running these new journals? And don't assume there are zero costs, just because academics do tend to work for free.

_jal 7y ago
> When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal, it gives me a sign it is trustworthy You might want to reconsider that. https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-published-6-fake-journals-44160 https://www.the-scientist.com/the-nutshell/elsevier-publishe...
- CJefferson 7y ago
  By "sign", I know it isn't perfect. However, 99% of the journals which email me are junk, so we need some method. And I don't just want to read papers by my friends, as that way I end up in a bubble.
  - Nemo_bis 7y ago
    That's also questionable. For instance, journals with higher impact factor tend to contain more articles which can be considered bad by objective measures. "Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.0029...
omaranto 7y ago
> When I see an article punished in an Elsevier journal I like the Freudian slip in "punished"!

gravypod 7y ago

> 1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started? Someone had a lot of money and knew many academics in a few fields. They asked some to review papers and others to send them papers. > 2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time? They derived value from peer review, prestige, and collecting all pieces. Peer review is important for any journal to supply and is a useful step to put your own work through to make sure you are accurately conveying your ideas. Prestige gets you funding and degrees. Some colleges don't let you get a master's or PhD if you don't have N publications from a X impact factor journal. Before the internet your college library was your source of information. The librarian has many things to do (not now, we are talking pre-internet) and rather than find every single individual in a field and poll then for papers they go to a publisher and ask for a copy of all of the publications the journal gets. > 3. How did the industry evolve? Depending on the field not much to very much. > 3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve? Now that the internet is a thing collecting, indexing, and distributing data is "free". The barriers to entry are still prestige and peer review. > 3c. What was the business model then and what is it now? Who are the clients (universities, I presume)? How do they pay for this (taxpayer money? If so, that's a huge clue). Who is the decision-maker regarding these purchases? The business model is two steps. Librarians: you pay me an obscene amount of money each year and I'll organize a bunch of relevant papers for you. Researcher: we only accept "the best" so if you get to publish in my journal you are "the best". Purchasing subscriptions to these journals is likely still done by a librarian but i say "done" for a reason. There is no decision. You must have these journal subscriptions. More info below. > 4. How is it possible that they still exist? If they don't provide value anymore, then what is it? Are people habitual creatures? Are they pressuring universities? Did they somehow get a vendor lock-in effect (can people get out)? The lock-in is that, while they suck, researchers will only hire people with a specific number of publications in a specific impact factor journal. These journals are usually evil but it's "the one I read" so to get in front of some very important people you need to have published in some of these places. If you do the same quality work and publish it in a smaller, open access, journal that is great but it won't necessarily move your career as forward as publishing it in an important journal will.

jdietrich 7y ago

Strange as it is to imagine, scientific journals used to be printed on paper. Elsevier was founded in 1880 as a book publisher, then a magazine publisher before expanding into scientific publishing. Subscribing to a scientific journal was not fundamentally different to subscribing to any other kind of magazine; university libraries paid a fee to receive a printed document every month, containing a collection of articles related to that field. The internet should have changed this model, but the publishers had amassed a secondary form of value - prestige. Scientists don't only want to share their research with their peers, but share that research in a prestigious publication. Getting a paper published in Nature or the BMJ has a meaningful impact on the author's career. The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free, but nobody thus far has found an adequate substitute for the prestige of a highly respected journal. Universities keep paying to subscribe to prestigious journals because they publish some of the most interesting and significant research; academics keep sending their best work to the most prestigious journals because it's valuable to their career prospects. This problem can probably only be solved through coordinated action by academics.

mistrial9 7y ago
"meaningful impact" in the second paragraph is an understatement ...
flatline 7y ago
> The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to this. Yes it is trivial to put something online. But library sciences exist for a reason, so if you want a nice collection of things online with some sensible structure it becomes less trivial. Worse yet if you want some way of ranking in importance the things in your collection, it requires a lot of manual intervention. I think your solution is ultimately correct, but the peer review process is harder to solve than the technical one, and there is still a cost of some sort to implement and maintain the technical one.
- canjobear 7y ago
  Many fields do peer review just fine without help from academic publishers. All academic publishers contribute to the process is an early-2000s web interface.

chaosite 7y ago

1. They were old-school publishing houses, that had a connection to some prominent academic or an academic society that decided they needed to start a journal. 2. The value proposition was that they were the only way to publish research. Libraries subscribed to them (or bought issues), and reading journals in a library was the major way academics learned of new research in their field, unless they learned of the research in a conference. 3. The Internet. 3b. The barriers to entry used to be needing to have access to a publishing house capable of duplicating issues, and having your journal be in major libraries (which is usually related to being related to a major academic or a academic society). The barrier to entry today is due to papers published being a major benchmark using which the productivity of an academic is measured. Older, well-known journals that accept only a few papers are known as having a larger "impact-factor", which means that publishing in them is worth more to an academic. 3c. The business model is always selling subscriptions to libraries, mostly university libraries (but also regular ones and research outfits in industry). Once they don't actually print anything their costs are mostly administrative, so they're basically printing money. The decision maker are librarians, usually, but they get set a budget by whoever owns the library. 4. Because they own the major benchmark used to evaluate an academic career. If you are an academic and want to further your career (i.e., get a job, get tenure, get a grant), you have to publish in one of those journals. If you're another academic and you then want to read that research, you then have to have your library subscribed to that journal (or look it up and Sci-Hub).

rmetzler 7y ago
> 3c. The business model is always selling subscriptions to libraries, mostly university libraries (but also regular ones and research outfits in industry) The main criticism I read about Elsevier is that universities can’t subscribe to just the most important Elsevier publications but have to subscribe to a big package while the content producers aren’t paid by Elsevier but work at the universities. This only works, because Elsevier is a monopoly and this is the reason why science hub is a thing.
lazyjones 7y ago
> 2. The value proposition was that they were the only way to publish research. Was this ever actually the case? Researchers have always published on their own in one way or another. What these journals added was an established peer review mechanism.

imgabe 7y ago

Academia runs heavily on prestige. The journals are valuable because they are prestigious and it is more beneficial to an academic's career to publish in a more prestigious journal than a less prestigious one. Because the academics who publish in those journals get jobs at prestigious universities, every university needs to keep those journals in those libraries, because that's where all the highest profile researchers are publishing their articles. Anyone who wants to join that group also needs to compete to publish in those journals. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.

notahacker 7y ago

1. Once upon a time there was no internet and not even any computers. Turning academics' scribblings into neatly printed compilations of articles sent out to academic libraries across the world on a regular basis necessarily involved a publisher that could handle that sort of thing. 2. Over time, their journals' proposition evolved to be less "distributor of print" and more "curator of the most respected content". As universities started scrutinising how good their academics were at getting articles published and journals they published in started being ranked by "impact factor", the value proposition of curated content got stronger 3. Computers made it relatively easy for academics to produce print-ready articles themselves. The internet made it straightforward for academics to distribute articles as neatly formatted PDFs and share their early drafts with peers for review without involving any publisher. But also, academics and students started expecting to be able to search through decades of articles online rather than hunt for a single paper copy of each on in library, which opened up a nice little opportunity to sell renewable subscriptions for digital access to the archives. 3b. The barriers to entry used to be not having the facility to print and distribute and sell to libraries as well as the fact your new journal isn't Nature. Now it's just the latter. And also the fact you're simply not allowed to republish the decades worth of content they own, which includes a lot of must-cite texts 3c. The business model was getting academics to submit and review content for free which was then resold to universities staffed by people who expected [their students] to be able to read it as part of their research and expected the library to pick up the tab. Still is, just publishing new content is easier for everybody, and since the journal sub offers digital access to the archives and not just 12 bits of paper for the library they can ask for more eye-watering sums of money. 4. Regardless of whether open access journals ultimately inherit the prestige of the existing ones, academic publishers will continue own the copyright of decades worth of texts which academics and students are expected to have read to properly understand their field, and so university libraries will continue to be expected to subscribe to them. The lockin effect is that you can't do serious academic research without reading papers which they own. Which is also why they're not very keen on people pirating their content.

pessimizer 7y ago

> 1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started? I think people are answering this question as if it were about scientific publishers in general. They were just respected magazines, often published by scientific membership societies. Elsevier specifically was a publisher that just gobbled as many of them that it could up until it got to a monopoly or near-monopoly position by specialization (meaning that it could own every important journal is some professions, and most of them in others.) Then it jacked up the prices infinitely, and their competitors took the signal and jacked up their prices too. Now, some major universities are defecting, which is actually a signal that the pricing is just about perfect for the market. It's just the same old boring operations of capitalism. This is exactly how pharma, or the music business works.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Some history: "Peer review" is younger than you think. Does that mean it can go away? https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is-younger-than-you-think.html https://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2017/09/peer-review-is... Peer review : the end of an error? https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-error-peer-review/ https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/the-end-of-an-erro... Peer review: Troubled from the start https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-start-1.19763 https://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-st... Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery — Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/news/why-the-national-institutes-of-health-should-replace-peer-review-with-a-lottery https://psmag.com/news/why-the-national-institutes-of-health...

buboard 7y ago

> 3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve? It 's a chicken and egg problem: Authors don't publish to new journals because they are not reputable yet and journals can't become reputable because authors don't publish to them. I don't know the theory of chicken and egg problems but i think they are solved when either a) a brand new discipline emerges therefore the first bidders win by default or b) some extraordinary action is taken