4 ms·

If scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month. As it is, until Open Access journals become

If scientific careers didn't depend on publishing papers in high impact journals, this could happen within a month. As it is, until Open Access journals become high impact journals, we're kind of between a rock and hard place

mcv 7y ago
If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. That's irrelevant. Researchers are forced to publish in high-impact journals to preserve their career, and any newly created journal has zero impact. Furthermore, some countries/universities enforce a journal whitelist, and evaluate the eir researchers based on the number of papers published in the pre approved list if publications.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    Those lists are subject to change, though.
  - mcv 7y ago
    So the problem is really with the bureaucrats that force researchers to publish in Elsevier journals. They should reward publication in equally well-reviewed open access journals just as much, if not more so, as publication in Elsevier journals. And because those bureaucrats are often distributing public funds among those researchers, they should also have an interest in the results of that research being accessible to the public, and as many researchers as possible.
- lrem 7y ago
  No, that's not attached to actual reading. Having access to their whole library, I still preferred to Google for preprint PDF. Even better a "research report", which usually is the same content, but before they were forced to remove half a page of text the last day, because the system forced different margins. The problem is that many bureaucracies attach some kind of point value to journals on this list, and a different on that list and so on. It's reforming those that is a problem, especially since according to their metrics, which are defined by counting the papers in journals in the lists, everything works perfectly.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  It's not a matter of "stopping reading". Impact factor metrics are based on number of citations. And if I publish a paper on a new method to do X, I am expected to compare to (and thus cite) previous papers that did X. I cannot just decide not to cite relevant previous work because it is published in an Elsevier journal. Of course, sending papers to OA journals, going the extra mile to cite them, and preferring them to non-OA alternatives when any paper will do (e.g. when you are just providing some examples of applications of X, without being exhaustive, and you can find some in OA and others in non-OA journals) does help.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  The sad thing is academy solved this exact problem centuries ago with the tenure system, but academics are still cowards
  - anticensor 7y ago
    Tenure only exists in upper levels of academic career.
tialaramex 7y ago
It varies a LOT by discipline. There are niches where OA already won and for-profit journals are essentially irrelevant, or even where the entire paper publication mechanism is just a legacy used only for dick-measuring contests and to ration funding - all the real work happens as GitHub PRs, or as mail to a mailing list maintained by some random guy or a Facebook group or something (Warning: Examples somewhat facetious). But there are also niches where the reality is that key people are happy as Elsevier Journal editors, and they function as gatekeepers, and for the foreseeable future the only route forward in those disciplines will be to get published in those high impact Elsevier Journals. Because of this variation, lots of people can't do anything. It's a highly distributed problem. No amount of Computer Science professors however prestigious can change how Social Sciences do journals. And we shouldn't want it any different, even though in this case it kinda sucks.
pedrocr 7y ago
It would also happen within the same month if the EU and/or the US simply made it illegal to publish publicly funded research behind a paywall. All the content would disappear and the "industry" would reorganize. As a citizen the fact that this has still not been done is outrageous. Explaining that to the general population instead of pretending that this is something that's specific to the scientific community could be a way forward. It's simply a scandal that citizens are not allowed to read for free the research they paid to be performed.
- dmitriz 7y ago
  It is already being tried with Plan S. But the problem is to choose the right alternative, of which the alternative pay-to-publish model isn't. https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/86 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/86

mcv 7y ago

If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. But yeah, many scientists are paid by slow-moving bureaucratic machines that probably don't care about the issues involved and just want to see them published in old, well-established big-name journals, and not a new upstart that everybody else suddenly wants to consider more important.

rumanator 7y ago
> If everybody starts reading Open Access journals and stops reading Elsevier, the Open Access journals will have more impact. That's irrelevant. Researchers are forced to publish in high-impact journals to preserve their career, and any newly created journal has zero impact. Furthermore, some countries/universities enforce a journal whitelist, and evaluate the eir researchers based on the number of papers published in the pre approved list if publications.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Those lists are subject to change, though.
- mcv 7y ago
  So the problem is really with the bureaucrats that force researchers to publish in Elsevier journals. They should reward publication in equally well-reviewed open access journals just as much, if not more so, as publication in Elsevier journals. And because those bureaucrats are often distributing public funds among those researchers, they should also have an interest in the results of that research being accessible to the public, and as many researchers as possible.
lrem 7y ago
No, that's not attached to actual reading. Having access to their whole library, I still preferred to Google for preprint PDF. Even better a "research report", which usually is the same content, but before they were forced to remove half a page of text the last day, because the system forced different margins. The problem is that many bureaucracies attach some kind of point value to journals on this list, and a different on that list and so on. It's reforming those that is a problem, especially since according to their metrics, which are defined by counting the papers in journals in the lists, everything works perfectly.
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
It's not a matter of "stopping reading". Impact factor metrics are based on number of citations. And if I publish a paper on a new method to do X, I am expected to compare to (and thus cite) previous papers that did X. I cannot just decide not to cite relevant previous work because it is published in an Elsevier journal. Of course, sending papers to OA journals, going the extra mile to cite them, and preferring them to non-OA alternatives when any paper will do (e.g. when you are just providing some examples of applications of X, without being exhaustive, and you can find some in OA and others in non-OA journals) does help.
lonelappde 7y ago
The sad thing is academy solved this exact problem centuries ago with the tenure system, but academics are still cowards
- anticensor 7y ago
  Tenure only exists in upper levels of academic career.

tialaramex 7y ago

It varies a LOT by discipline. There are niches where OA already won and for-profit journals are essentially irrelevant, or even where the entire paper publication mechanism is just a legacy used only for dick-measuring contests and to ration funding - all the real work happens as GitHub PRs, or as mail to a mailing list maintained by some random guy or a Facebook group or something (Warning: Examples somewhat facetious). But there are also niches where the reality is that key people are happy as Elsevier Journal editors, and they function as gatekeepers, and for the foreseeable future the only route forward in those disciplines will be to get published in those high impact Elsevier Journals. Because of this variation, lots of people can't do anything. It's a highly distributed problem. No amount of Computer Science professors however prestigious can change how Social Sciences do journals. And we shouldn't want it any different, even though in this case it kinda sucks.

pedrocr 7y ago

It would also happen within the same month if the EU and/or the US simply made it illegal to publish publicly funded research behind a paywall. All the content would disappear and the "industry" would reorganize. As a citizen the fact that this has still not been done is outrageous. Explaining that to the general population instead of pretending that this is something that's specific to the scientific community could be a way forward. It's simply a scandal that citizens are not allowed to read for free the research they paid to be performed.

dmitriz 7y ago
It is already being tried with Plan S. But the problem is to choose the right alternative, of which the alternative pay-to-publish model isn't. https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/86 https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/86