5 ms·

It's amazing to me that the big research universities haven't banded together to make a competing open-access system of journals. It would require no more work

• Nemo_bis 4y ago
  They did. https://doaj.org/ https://doaj.org/
• gowld 4y ago
  Impact Factor metrics gaming for tenure. Elsevier journals are "prestigious". Open journals exist. Some academics still choose to publish in closed journals.
  • techdragon 4y ago
    Simple proposal then… we the academic paper consuming community need to start considering Elsevier journals as not prestigious. If you’re involved in any academic hiring then you are absolutely ducking responsible for perpetuating their power if you don’t push back however you can on the assumption that these journals are somehow more prestigious based entirely on their past history. It won’t happen overnight but unless we change the assumption that these journals are special then we will never truly take back the power from Elsevier.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      But who should bell the cat? https://satibal.com/cat-mouse-and-bell-story/ https://satibal.com/cat-mouse-and-bell-story/ What perpetuates the prestigous-journal practice are review and hiring committees, often swayed by journals themselves through various means, which hold the true power. Changing institutions, particularly academic ones, is difficult. Far more often, splinter groups are formed. Schism at Balognia resulted in Padua. Schism at Oxford resulted in Cambridge. I believe there may have been a similar dynamic between Harvard and Yale. Arguably the same might be said of Harvard's failure to cultivate an engineering curriculum, and hence M.I.T. Though it might be interesting to look at academic disciplines and institutions and identify which are most controlled by journals. I suspect business, medicine, and law would be near the top of such a list.
• rkalla 4y ago
  Your last sentence nailed it - they feed some of that money back into Uni so it's a win-win.
• chrisma0 4y ago
  German universities tried banding together to negotiate better contracts in a project called DEAL: https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/ https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/ It has made some headway, but the work is ongoing
• xhkkffbf 4y ago
  Why? Probably because it would cost them time and money to hire staff. Would this be cheaper than Elsevier? Perhaps but maybe not. Let's assume they could do it for less. How would they handle the schools that didn't want to contribute? If they charge, well, we're back to where we are now with some big (non-profit) corporation controlling access. But if they don't charge and give it all away, well, why should anyone pony up?
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  I believe there is not that much pressure on universities because most PhD groups have private Dropboxes with SciHub copies of Elsevier articles anyway. Also, there's always that one guy that everyone knows that you can just email obscure paper requests to and he'll send you a PDF almost immediately. And of course you never ask how that works. But it works. As such, there's little to lose if a university cancels their official Elsevier subscriptions. Their student's won't mind. And I believe that is why universities haven't banded together.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    That is the downside of piracy... by taking the pain out of unfair monopolies, it takes off the pressure to overturn or compete with them.
    • q-big 4y ago
      > That is the downside of piracy... by taking the pain out of unfair monopolies, it takes off the pressure to overturn or compete with them. Shadow libraries are a competition to the official ways to access the papers. Just like in any market, the various offerings have advantages and disadvantages. - Advantage of, say, Elsevier website: is legal - Disadvantage of, say, Elsevier website: accessing costs money (even if your university pays) - Advantage of, say, sci-hub: is free - Disadvantage of, say, sci-hub: accessing is somewhere between legal grayzone and illegal, depending on jurisdiction As in any market, by your choices, you decide which offering you prefer: - If you decide to get the paper from Elseviert (even if you can access it "for free", because your university pays), you vote for "Elesvier's business practices are perfectly fine." - If you decide to get the paper from sci-hub, you vote for "what sci-hub does is less evil than what Elsevier does." Choose the market offering that fits your alignment.
• 0987yftcytfgt9 4y ago
  I agree with you, you're absolutely correct. At this point, libraries and/or publishing divisions of major universities could easily collectively manage journals on an open access basis, with funding being supplied through academic societal membership dues. Journals do provide resources, like professional copyediting, submission and review portals, but my guess is this could be obtained through a more collaborative open-access mechanism, probably supplemented with some professional positions (e.g., someone in a department of communications or the university communications or library working as a professional editor). Having said that, I absolutely do not believe the current structure has anything to do with journal lobbyists leaning on university political figures. I say this as someone who has served at an editor at multiple established journals in my field, who is on the editorial boards of a number of journals (incidentally, I know Eiko, the author of the blog post being discussed). Journals do put pressures on libraries, who have been in a sort of catch-22 with this stuff (this being a large topic for another thread maybe), but I don't think that's the major problem. The major problem is the incentive structure around authoring papers and publishing. Contrary to what many might assume, publish or perish is not really the name of the game at big universities anymore — it's getting indirect grant funds. Papers in high IF journals matter, but it's secondary to grant funding, in the sense that papers are necessary to justify grant funding, which is what universities want. The result of this is that the bottom is dropping out of publishing as a primary incentive at universities. There's just no (or little) incentive for faculty to take on editorial duties or do reviewing or anything. I've had colleagues who were involved in academic publishing, editing and reviewing, and were scolded by department heads who asked them "what kind of funds is this bringing in to the department?" Sometimes this comes with a position for a grad student or two to act as administrative assistants, but that's about it. Major outlets like Nature often have professional editors (that is, editors who don't have academic positions elsewhere), which reflects this trend. It doesn't have to be this way, and the bulk of journals are run by academic editorial boards, but I think as you get into very high IF journals, you see things change. The issue is this: if you tried to establish what you're talking about, if a large number of chief librarians at a large number of, say, US universities got together and said "we're going to run our own journals", I think university administrations at many universities would see this as a cost sink and nothing else. I'm not sure exactly what the best way of explaining this is, but for many universities at the moment, papers and bibliometrics are kind of this superficial formality to justify the money that they require to produce (in terms of grants). That is, you don't get grants to publish an important finding, or to publish in Nature, you publish in Nature as a way of obtaining a grant, to bring in money. The goals, at least administratively, have shifted over time from create good ideas -> publish good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like someone with good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like good ideas in order to get grants -> get grants. The discussions here and elsewhere that have the theme of "papers are easy to publish, why do we need journals" are implicitly recognized at universities now, in that no one administratively really cares about publishing. What they care about is grant income through indirect funds. If administrators could just get indirect funds without publishing, I think many of them wouldn't care. However, grant agencies care about them, and in the current climate, it's all about paper counts, IF, all these appearances of intellectual greatness -- all of that is the basis of grants and promotion. Without it, how would you be able to tell anything? So basically the costs get offloaded onto journals, who essentially become credentialing organizations. There's a lot to say about this, but the bottom is eroding out of academic publishing at the moment. Everyone wants the imprimatur of citation counts, publication counts, IFs, h factors, etc. but doesn't want to do the reviewing or pay for it. You can say that's good, and maybe it is -- I think academic publishing is not open access enough, and OA models have their own problems -- but the alternative everyone is hurtling toward is a system where it's all about the amount of federal money research brings in. This is all tangential to what Eiko is talking about at some level, but I think coming from Eiko maybe not.
• crimsoneer 4y ago
  Octopus (https://science-octopus.org https://science-octopus.org) is supposedly out in beta in a few months and I'm hoping will do just this.