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I wish scientists would start growing a spine and stop citing Elsevier journals. That's the only thing that will break the vicious cycle of everybody publishing
by HotHotLava 6y ago
I wish scientists would start growing a spine and stop citing Elsevier journals. That's the only thing that will break the vicious cycle of everybody publishing there because it gets a lot of citations, despite nobody actually reading in the journal. Put up a link to the pdf on the authors home page as reference, if it is essential to the paper, or leave it out completely if it isn't.
- gautamdivgi 6y agoI don't agree with what Elsevier and Springer are doing but asking scientists to rectify the problem is the wrong thing. The decision needs to be legislated. No scientist or grad student is going to put their careers or PhD at risk for this. I wouldn't. fwiw - when I was a grad student I had access to these journals through my university library.
- breck 6y ago> No scientist or grad student is going to put their careers or PhD at risk for this. I would and I urge everyone to do so too. History will look back on this period and see which side of the line people stood on. #LiberateIdeas
- Someone 6y agoThings are changing (slowly). See https://www.coalition-s.org/ https://www.coalition-s.org/. That has decent support from Europe, but not from the large US funders (https://www.coalition-s.org/organisations/ https://www.coalition-s.org/organisations/)
- jsilence 6y agoFortunately a lot of EU funded research projects require that any paper stemming from a project has to be published under Open Access.
- gautamdivgi 6y agoYes, but Elsevier and Springer open access publishing is prohibitively expensive. That's what needs to change via legislation.
- zozbot234 6y ago> Yes, but Elsevier and Springer open access publishing is prohibitively expensive. Pretty much everything is prohibitively expensive when it comes to Elzevier and Springer, or so it seems. But that's enough reason to avoid them altogether as publishers, open access or not.
- gautamdivgi 6y agoThat's the point, you cannot. Most high impact journals are with Elsevier or Springer. As a researcher you need papers in high impact factor journals. As a researcher you also don't want to spend precious grant money on open access. As a researcher you also want to be on review committee of said journals because it enhances your resume. What a lot of folks saying let's not use these journals don't understand is its not easy to get away from them. There's too much invested in a feedback loop that you will have very limited success with just individual researchers. You need to advocate for legislation. fwiw - I'm also not sure why IEEE and ACM get a free pass either.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoI don't know why people are so surprised that scientific publishing costs money — good journals and conferences are more than a webpage to post content.
- 6y ago
- breck 6y agoAgreed. First time I published a paper as first author my first reference I put the SciHub url and got flak for that. My only regret is going soft after that. I should have made 100% of my citations include the SciHub url.
- southerntofu 6y agoIt's never too late to stand up to your ideals. I say that without any judgement of your past/future attitude in this matter: the decision is yours.
- rsfern 6y agoPublish a preprint with Sci-hub links then? It doesn’t seem worth it to have to fight and lose during proofing over what amounts to a DOI anyways
- matheusmoreira 6y agoThe only thing these journals are good for is peer review. It seems reviewers don't even get paid for that valuable work. They should just start reviewing independently of the journal.
- rsfern 6y agoWell there is pubpeer — https://pubpeer.com/static/about https://pubpeer.com/static/about I’m not sure how we get away from the current review system without a coordinated effort involving the prominent scholars in whatever field. The editors are often senior peers, and there’s sort of an expectation that you review others work, and that they will review your work
- bocklund 6y agoThink of it from the scientist’s perspective. You can’t ignore the work in journals who have business models and policies you do not agree with. Pretending research doesn’t exist slows progress and it is anti-science to put your head in the sand because you don’t agree with the location that knowledge was published in. If you did read the papers in journals you don’t agree with, built on their ideas and didn’t cite them, then you just committed plagiarism and obscured the scientific record. The “link to the PDF of the author’s homepage” trick doesn’t work because eventually that page will go away, as we have seen over and over in the age of the web. Part of the value journals add is promising to archive the work _forever_. They don’t promise it will be free forever (or at all) - which is what needs to change. The answer isn’t to “not cite”, but to not publish there in the first place. That takes systemic change. Change of both the incentives: “how do I get promomoted?” or, fundamentally: “how do I make an impact and measure it?”. Citations are the de facto standard right now. It will change when we can measure impact (and get more promotions, grants, etc.) in a way that doesn’t favor the richest journals getting richer.
- bluenose69 6y agoI cite articles and books that I think will help my readers understand the issues under discussion. As much as I hate some publishers, I'd do a disservice to my readers if I failed to tell them about something that could help them in their work. Limiting the scope of journals to which I submit articles makes sense. Limiting the scope of journals I cite does not.