6 ms·

As a Frenchman, this is a real disgrace. I just don't get it. These editors offer no real added value (paper formatting and a website is not worth 172 Million

As a Frenchman, this is a real disgrace. I just don't get it. These editors offer no real added value (paper formatting and a website is not worth 172 Million a year), and we do nothing about it?

hk__2 12y ago
> These editors offer no real added value Peer reviewing maybe?
- Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
  Done by scientists that don't see a dime in the process.
  - yrochat 12y ago
    Of course they see a dime: they receive public money. Elsevier are such geniuses: public money paid papers need to be paid a second time, and still, they remain unavailable for the public who has paid for it (twice). Rich geniuses.
    - p4bl0 12y ago
      Al-Khwarizmi was not talking about the publisher but about the scientists actually doing the peer-reviewing work: they don't see a dime from the publisher for this work (which is normal because it is part of their job as scientist to peer-review, what is abnormal is that the result of this work is given for free to private companies who put it behind paywalls).
      - yrochat 12y ago
        I wasn't implying that the publishers but the reviewers were getting public money for that. Having spent around 12 hours between Sunday and Monday to write a single review for a journal paper, I must say that I am pretty surprised that this system has been working until now… The scientists are united in making their reviews, while someone on top is getting so much money for it (this catches up with your argument). I can't help myself considering us as naive people.
        p4bl0 12y ago
        I see. Naive I don't know, not interested by money, certainly. Otherwise we would be following much more lucrative career paths, which are well, basically anything else than public research. That said, I've encountered many scientists who simply never thought about it before we discussed it, and who now think the situation is absolutely crazy, as anyone would. The questions are: What can they do about it? Do they have the time to do it? How can they do it without hurting themselves? Indeed, it's hard enough to get a position as it is, refusing to publish in prestigious journal owned by asshole publishers won't help young scientists. Older scientists often work with young ones, and they can't tell them "no we won't publish in the asshole-owned prestigious journal because it's the right thing to do", it wouldn't be fair. The reality is that the solution can't really come only from individuals, it has to be a legal battle, not only for future publications (which is the easiest part), but also for all the past ones. The entire Elsevier "Freedom Collection" for example should be seized by governments (UN?) and made available for free to anyone on the internet and in public libraries worldwide. But in this "free-market" economy, this is not something people seems to be ready to ear, let alone understand.
        masklinn 12y ago
        > Indeed, it's hard enough to get a position as it is, refusing to publish in prestigious journal owned by asshole publishers won't help young scientists It seems to vary strongly by field though, some fields seem much more bullish on "open access" than others.
        Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
        I think the solution has to come from public funding agencies (i.e. from governments). If my country's government says that from 2015 onwards, only publications that can be freely accessed count towards public grant requests, tenure and positions in public institutions, etc.; in a year no one would be published in the asshole-owned journals. Instead, my government has policies that actively incentivize publishing in said journals (basically ISI JCR journal papers are what counts for everything).
        im2w1l 12y ago
    - masklinn 12y ago
      > Of course they see a dime: they receive public money. Scientists receive money for the work they do, but that money is generally in the form of grants for their own sciencing, I've never heard of "review grants".
- orian 12y ago
  But instead of building more decentralized, open and independent network they are strengthening a private company which already has strong position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
- masklinn 12y ago
  The "peer" part of "peer review" means it's other scientists in the field doing the reviewing. The editor only acts as matchmaker/anonymisation filter, and maybe does the most trivial part of reviews (typos, layout, that sort of thing).
  - emotionalcode 12y ago
    What if you can't trust the other scientists to review the work of their peers fairly?
    - redacted 12y ago
      Why, then you simply get an incredibly negative review, or one with impossible requirements, or some other nebulous reason why your work should not be published in that journal. Source: currently working in academia in a full-time research position
      - emotionalcode 12y ago
        No, I mean, that there is some probability that someone intelligent within the system is manipulating the infrastructure of the peer review system for an advantage. I don't understand why I was downvoted for asking a question. I just meant to imply that there must exist some middle infrastructure, and I do not believe that it is a trivial problem to solve. Source: I studied computer security systems that attempted to automate the flow of information to maintain security level thresholds on information types. When code 'touches' other code, meaning that it uses code with information at one security level to reason about code with information at another security level, unless you are particularly careful in the structure and organization of the code, information can leak out, structures can be manipulated, rules can be broken. I am not saying scientists are unethical, I am saying they are human and prone to emotional reaction occasionally before objectivity (unless they are perfect). Combining information inference, intelligence, and an understanding of the flaws of an automated system; they are capable of 'accidentally' tweaking those things in their favor. It's not in the interest of science when this happens, and it requires a substantial amount of real intelligence to moderate. It's basically 'accidental bias'.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  As other pointed out, the peer reviewing is not done by the publishers. It is done by other scientists and coordinated by the editorial board of the journal, which most of the time consists in more scientists who are not paid by the publishers either. However, I don't see any point in downvoting you as it seem people did, what you ask is a very common misconception that benefits to publishers and is thus amplified by them.
fdej 12y ago
As an author, the added value is the name of the journal. The pedigree of the journals you have published in is one of the primary qualities that grant and hiring committees look at. The whole system is obviously a scam, but you have to play the game if you want a career in science.
- spacefight 12y ago
  Or someone starts to stand up, rejects the scam and starts a new, open access policy on a global scale. Yes, easier said than done, I know.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  This is why we have to fight for the right Open Access model. Most publishers offer "Gold Open Access", which is "authors pay" instead of "readers pay", and of course the price is decided by the publisher… This is not what Open Access means, and it doesn't solve the main problems. Diamond Open Access focuses on the real problems. 1- It should be free to publish, free to read, free to reuse. The Diamond Open Access model implies free licenses such as Creative Commons BY for articles and data. 2- Rather than being owned by publishers, the journals have to be owned by their editorial board, which itself has to be a legal entity of some sort. This would avoid problems such as prestige inertia which forces researcher to publish with asshole publishers: if the scientists actually running the journal own it, they could have switched to open access and/or to a different publishers when needed. Apart from that, we of course have to fight against bibliometrics…
  - blumkvist 12y ago
    And where does the money come from?
    - Blahah 12y ago
      Money comes from the same place it always did: funders (usually the public purse). The difference is in the OA model the cost of publishing is included in grants, rather than through libraries and other routes.
mercurial 12y ago
What we are doing is following the fine tradition of public-private deals (see also: French motorways).
p4bl0 12y ago
(It's 172 million for 5 years, not per year.) It's not true that we do nothing about it. What is true is that it is hard to be heard on that subject, and even harder to act practically on it. Since you are French and interested by this subject, I suggest that you read my (rather long) introduction to open access, here: http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html.
jpfr 12y ago
The added value of publishers is more than just the editing. Why do you think a published paper is "worth" more than a pdf on a random website? - Almost nobody in academia is willing to publish in substandard journals only because they are open access. The publishing process is a necessary filter for people to select what is important enough to read. - You _need_ publishers that make a profit and stay healthy over centuries. If Elsevier went bancrupt, they could no longer take care for their archives. And in the long run, we would loose access to several hundred years of research.
- p4bl0 12y ago
  This is bullshit. It's a problem in the first place that these archives are held by a private company. Why do they keep it centuries of it by the way? Because they hold the copyrights of the articles, but isn't that supposed to dissolve at some point in time after the death of the authors? The enormous amount of public money thrown away at publishers by each individual country is more than enough to conserve all the archives of all the published papers, past, present, and future. If Elsevier went bankrupt, and actually even if it does not, we should have them hand over the archives so that they are taken care of by public institutions who will not put barriers around their contents. Also, you imply that "open access publication = substandard publication", which is entirely wrong. There are countless counterexamples.
  - jpfr 12y ago
    I choose my words carefully. Please read them carefully. 1. My argument was never about the quality of open-access journals. Given the choice between a closed journal and a "lesser" open-access journal, most (but not all) authors would still try to publish in the closed one. There are highly regarded open access journals. But they are comparatively few. 2. The publishers already retain the rights of hundreds of years of published papers. They will not give that away to some (governmental or otherwise) science-preservation organisation. So the only way to "safe" these results is to keep the publishers alive. I would like the world to be different. And I would have loved to see aaron swartz "liberating" more paper archives. But that is a different story.
guan 12y ago
The “editors” of an academic journal are usually academics, professors who are employed by universities, and they don’t sit at the offices of Elsevier or another publisher. They assign referees and make final decisions on whether to publish an article. They are sometimes paid, but not always, and usually do their work as a service to the profession. The publisher does copy-editing, typesetting, distribution, and other tasks. They sometimes pay for administrative support for the editors, but that is often paid by the editors’ own universities.
- ufo 12y ago
  And in some fields (like computer science) they don't even do the typesetting - the authors themselves do that with Latex.
  - guan 12y ago
    For journals in the fields that I’m familiar, what often ends up happening is the authors do all the typesetting perfectly with LaTeX. Then they submit a PDF, along with a Word file with all the text. Some contractor of the publisher does the typesetting all over again, using LaTeX!
privong 12y ago
> These editors offer no real added value (paper formatting and a website is not worth 172 Million a year), I believe some of the Elsevier journals have formatting which is mostly done by the authors (via existing LaTeX templates). So they are not even adding that type of value. Copy-editing—which the journals generally provide—does improve things, but probably not 172 M/yr worth.

As a Frenchman, this is a real disgrace. I just don't get it. These editors offer no real added value (paper formatting and a website is not worth 172 Million a year), and we do nothing about it?

hk__2 12y ago

> These editors offer no real added value Peer reviewing maybe?

Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
Done by scientists that don't see a dime in the process.
- yrochat 12y ago
  Of course they see a dime: they receive public money. Elsevier are such geniuses: public money paid papers need to be paid a second time, and still, they remain unavailable for the public who has paid for it (twice). Rich geniuses.
  - p4bl0 12y ago
    Al-Khwarizmi was not talking about the publisher but about the scientists actually doing the peer-reviewing work: they don't see a dime from the publisher for this work (which is normal because it is part of their job as scientist to peer-review, what is abnormal is that the result of this work is given for free to private companies who put it behind paywalls).
    - yrochat 12y ago
      I wasn't implying that the publishers but the reviewers were getting public money for that. Having spent around 12 hours between Sunday and Monday to write a single review for a journal paper, I must say that I am pretty surprised that this system has been working until now… The scientists are united in making their reviews, while someone on top is getting so much money for it (this catches up with your argument). I can't help myself considering us as naive people.
      - p4bl0 12y ago
        I see. Naive I don't know, not interested by money, certainly. Otherwise we would be following much more lucrative career paths, which are well, basically anything else than public research. That said, I've encountered many scientists who simply never thought about it before we discussed it, and who now think the situation is absolutely crazy, as anyone would. The questions are: What can they do about it? Do they have the time to do it? How can they do it without hurting themselves? Indeed, it's hard enough to get a position as it is, refusing to publish in prestigious journal owned by asshole publishers won't help young scientists. Older scientists often work with young ones, and they can't tell them "no we won't publish in the asshole-owned prestigious journal because it's the right thing to do", it wouldn't be fair. The reality is that the solution can't really come only from individuals, it has to be a legal battle, not only for future publications (which is the easiest part), but also for all the past ones. The entire Elsevier "Freedom Collection" for example should be seized by governments (UN?) and made available for free to anyone on the internet and in public libraries worldwide. But in this "free-market" economy, this is not something people seems to be ready to ear, let alone understand.
        masklinn 12y ago
        > Indeed, it's hard enough to get a position as it is, refusing to publish in prestigious journal owned by asshole publishers won't help young scientists It seems to vary strongly by field though, some fields seem much more bullish on "open access" than others.
        Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
        I think the solution has to come from public funding agencies (i.e. from governments). If my country's government says that from 2015 onwards, only publications that can be freely accessed count towards public grant requests, tenure and positions in public institutions, etc.; in a year no one would be published in the asshole-owned journals. Instead, my government has policies that actively incentivize publishing in said journals (basically ISI JCR journal papers are what counts for everything).
        im2w1l 12y ago
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > Of course they see a dime: they receive public money. Scientists receive money for the work they do, but that money is generally in the form of grants for their own sciencing, I've never heard of "review grants".
orian 12y ago
But instead of building more decentralized, open and independent network they are strengthening a private company which already has strong position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
masklinn 12y ago
The "peer" part of "peer review" means it's other scientists in the field doing the reviewing. The editor only acts as matchmaker/anonymisation filter, and maybe does the most trivial part of reviews (typos, layout, that sort of thing).
- emotionalcode 12y ago
  What if you can't trust the other scientists to review the work of their peers fairly?
  - redacted 12y ago
    Why, then you simply get an incredibly negative review, or one with impossible requirements, or some other nebulous reason why your work should not be published in that journal. Source: currently working in academia in a full-time research position
    - emotionalcode 12y ago
      No, I mean, that there is some probability that someone intelligent within the system is manipulating the infrastructure of the peer review system for an advantage. I don't understand why I was downvoted for asking a question. I just meant to imply that there must exist some middle infrastructure, and I do not believe that it is a trivial problem to solve. Source: I studied computer security systems that attempted to automate the flow of information to maintain security level thresholds on information types. When code 'touches' other code, meaning that it uses code with information at one security level to reason about code with information at another security level, unless you are particularly careful in the structure and organization of the code, information can leak out, structures can be manipulated, rules can be broken. I am not saying scientists are unethical, I am saying they are human and prone to emotional reaction occasionally before objectivity (unless they are perfect). Combining information inference, intelligence, and an understanding of the flaws of an automated system; they are capable of 'accidentally' tweaking those things in their favor. It's not in the interest of science when this happens, and it requires a substantial amount of real intelligence to moderate. It's basically 'accidental bias'.
p4bl0 12y ago
As other pointed out, the peer reviewing is not done by the publishers. It is done by other scientists and coordinated by the editorial board of the journal, which most of the time consists in more scientists who are not paid by the publishers either. However, I don't see any point in downvoting you as it seem people did, what you ask is a very common misconception that benefits to publishers and is thus amplified by them.

fdej 12y ago

As an author, the added value is the name of the journal. The pedigree of the journals you have published in is one of the primary qualities that grant and hiring committees look at. The whole system is obviously a scam, but you have to play the game if you want a career in science.

spacefight 12y ago
Or someone starts to stand up, rejects the scam and starts a new, open access policy on a global scale. Yes, easier said than done, I know.
p4bl0 12y ago
This is why we have to fight for the right Open Access model. Most publishers offer "Gold Open Access", which is "authors pay" instead of "readers pay", and of course the price is decided by the publisher… This is not what Open Access means, and it doesn't solve the main problems. Diamond Open Access focuses on the real problems. 1- It should be free to publish, free to read, free to reuse. The Diamond Open Access model implies free licenses such as Creative Commons BY for articles and data. 2- Rather than being owned by publishers, the journals have to be owned by their editorial board, which itself has to be a legal entity of some sort. This would avoid problems such as prestige inertia which forces researcher to publish with asshole publishers: if the scientists actually running the journal own it, they could have switched to open access and/or to a different publishers when needed. Apart from that, we of course have to fight against bibliometrics…
- blumkvist 12y ago
  And where does the money come from?
  - Blahah 12y ago
    Money comes from the same place it always did: funders (usually the public purse). The difference is in the OA model the cost of publishing is included in grants, rather than through libraries and other routes.

mercurial 12y ago

What we are doing is following the fine tradition of public-private deals (see also: French motorways).

p4bl0 12y ago

(It's 172 million for 5 years, not per year.) It's not true that we do nothing about it. What is true is that it is hard to be heard on that subject, and even harder to act practically on it. Since you are French and interested by this subject, I suggest that you read my (rather long) introduction to open access, here: http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html.

jpfr 12y ago

The added value of publishers is more than just the editing. Why do you think a published paper is "worth" more than a pdf on a random website? - Almost nobody in academia is willing to publish in substandard journals only because they are open access. The publishing process is a necessary filter for people to select what is important enough to read. - You _need_ publishers that make a profit and stay healthy over centuries. If Elsevier went bancrupt, they could no longer take care for their archives. And in the long run, we would loose access to several hundred years of research.

p4bl0 12y ago
This is bullshit. It's a problem in the first place that these archives are held by a private company. Why do they keep it centuries of it by the way? Because they hold the copyrights of the articles, but isn't that supposed to dissolve at some point in time after the death of the authors? The enormous amount of public money thrown away at publishers by each individual country is more than enough to conserve all the archives of all the published papers, past, present, and future. If Elsevier went bankrupt, and actually even if it does not, we should have them hand over the archives so that they are taken care of by public institutions who will not put barriers around their contents. Also, you imply that "open access publication = substandard publication", which is entirely wrong. There are countless counterexamples.
- jpfr 12y ago
  I choose my words carefully. Please read them carefully. 1. My argument was never about the quality of open-access journals. Given the choice between a closed journal and a "lesser" open-access journal, most (but not all) authors would still try to publish in the closed one. There are highly regarded open access journals. But they are comparatively few. 2. The publishers already retain the rights of hundreds of years of published papers. They will not give that away to some (governmental or otherwise) science-preservation organisation. So the only way to "safe" these results is to keep the publishers alive. I would like the world to be different. And I would have loved to see aaron swartz "liberating" more paper archives. But that is a different story.

guan 12y ago

The “editors” of an academic journal are usually academics, professors who are employed by universities, and they don’t sit at the offices of Elsevier or another publisher. They assign referees and make final decisions on whether to publish an article. They are sometimes paid, but not always, and usually do their work as a service to the profession. The publisher does copy-editing, typesetting, distribution, and other tasks. They sometimes pay for administrative support for the editors, but that is often paid by the editors’ own universities.

ufo 12y ago
And in some fields (like computer science) they don't even do the typesetting - the authors themselves do that with Latex.
- guan 12y ago
  For journals in the fields that I’m familiar, what often ends up happening is the authors do all the typesetting perfectly with LaTeX. Then they submit a PDF, along with a Word file with all the text. Some contractor of the publisher does the typesetting all over again, using LaTeX!

privong 12y ago

> These editors offer no real added value (paper formatting and a website is not worth 172 Million a year), I believe some of the Elsevier journals have formatting which is mostly done by the authors (via existing LaTeX templates). So they are not even adding that type of value. Copy-editing—which the journals generally provide—does improve things, but probably not 172 M/yr worth.