Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

https://universonline.nl/2015/07/02/dutch-universities-start-their-elsevier-boycott-plan

by Someone • 11 years ago

542 126 11 years ago

azdle• 11 years ago

If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would think that all the other pieces would be much more replaceable than the actual papers themselves.

candu• 11 years ago

Because removing a single editor-in-chief is much more damaging to the publisher than removing a single author?

Someone3• 11 years ago

The goal seems to be to reach an agreement, not to get embroiled forever. First, show your teeth. Biting can come later.

Also, that biting would be costly, especially for less established scientists. Not publishing in high-ranking journals can be bad for a career.

detaro• 11 years ago

Because it also has the highest impact on your scientists. Asking somebody to stop publishing in the major journals of his field is not going to get as much understanding as the weaker measures. You don't want all your potential PhD students running for the hills because they fear they won't get good publications...

badlogic• 11 years ago

It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value.

That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish). On the other hand i had high ranking university staff tell me "they love how they can just burn €6M in 2 year EU project with zero outcome without consequences". Reviewers of such projects only need to have the right political color and zero domain knowledge.

It's sad really and i'm happy i don't have to work in such an environment amnymore.

_dark_matter_• 11 years ago

Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)

Someone3• 11 years ago

Zürich, Switzerland, isn't in the EU :-)

anigbrowl3• 11 years ago

Well, the administrators have outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers and pay for this service indirectly through journal fees, so from an accounting point of view it makes total sense.

If not publication, what metric should funding agencies use to decide who gets grants? Of course they could hire senior scientists in the field to evaluate grant roposals, but that would mean hiring lots and lots of scientists across all the fields in which they disburse grants; those jobs would be sinecures and from the point of view of the grant applicant it would still be about 'who you know,' just a referee at a grant-issuing agency instead of an editor/reviewer at a journal.

I don't disagree with you about the problem, but I'm not clear on how you would address it. Making the journals less profitable by refusing to pay silly subscription prices to read publicly-funded research would be a good thing for universities, and maybe for scientific publishing, but it's not going to fix the disconnect between people who control the public purse strings and which scientists will get the grants they want.

sago4• 11 years ago

outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers

Except that, by and large, those reviewers aren't being paid. So the 'outsourcing' argument isn't quite it. If it were there would be no problem with open access.

It is more about brand. They're outsourcing the need to determine quality by buying into a brand. That brand is kept afloat by unpaid labour on all sides, yet charges heftily for its brand. It is an understandable model, but not a very pleasant one. Unless you're an Elsevier shareholder, getting paid for your brand IP.

dougmccune12• 11 years ago

I'll take a little of the publisher bait (I sit on the board of a "dinosaur paywall publisher"). I'd like to question the popular thinking that publishers do not add anything of value.

There has never been a time in history when it has been easier to publish your research output in any number of other places than a paywall journal. You can post it on your own blog. You want a DOI? You can post it on The Winnower. You need it in a journal with an impact factor (even though you hate impact factor)? Submit it to PLOS One or PeerJ.

By publishing with a paywall journal you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. You can argue all day about whether that prestige is earned or not, but it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige, it's the tenure committees and faculty. Everyone is "against" the journal impact factor until it comes time to apply for tenure, at which point your tenure committee weighs it so highly that you can't avoid pandering to it. So you publish in the highest impact factor journal.

We're all hoping to change this system. Publishers don't like being held hostage by Thomson Reuters (who controls impact factor) and having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor. In a lot of ways we'd all love to move to academia-accepted alternative metrics. I would love a system that allows third parties to provide editorial review of the importance of a paper, and allow that to be separated from the journal. As a publisher that's what we're really trying to do, provide a way to judge the importance of a paper before you can get all the citation data coming in over the years. I would love to figure out a different way of doing so. But changing that means changing deep-rooted behavior throughout all of academia. And that is HARD.

tsurantino2• 11 years ago

Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige".

Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is because they validate someone's work (citations, vetting, peer approval). Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access, if the research that goes through that vetting process is publicly funded?

Fomite3• 11 years ago

Beyond that, journals can help financially support their attendant society if they're a society journal, and while it gets dismissed, having a copy editor and a layout person improves papers.

viraptor• 11 years ago

having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor

I'm confused by this bit. Isn't impact factor just a complex indicator of the amount of citations, so really an indicator of the quality of the journal? Why is it "worrying about impact factor", rather than "worrying about publication quality"?

This reminds me of the pleasing the shareholders vs. trying to run a successful company disconnect.

return04• 11 years ago

These publishers added value back in the days when they actually enabled communication via printing. They should have been abandoned the day after WWW was invented. The "established" publishers literally suck the blood of academia and taxpayer money nowadays. First, they appropriate other people's work in all stages (writing, review, corrections, illustations etc etc.). Then they stymie the development of open-access journals by keeping every good scientist busy reviewing their papers for free (coddling them, showering them with "prestige"). Then they keep the copyrights of work they didn't pay for, they make it impossible for data scientists to collect the experimental data, they hide the papers behind paywalls and they don't even add a comment section where readers can post legitimate q&a's, comments etc. And on top of that they require to be paid for all this free work. If that is not insane, i don't know what is.

The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought.

Lastly, consider this. My institution can only afford to pay subscriptions to the most widely read journals, so I find myself using some obscure russian proxy to download them illegally. Apparently there is a need for that, and there are entire websites dedicated to that. This is outrageous.

The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all they need is a kick in the butt.

elektromekatron3• 11 years ago

you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige.

If that is what your field is betting on, then it is utterly doomed. Ephemera such as prestige is mobile.

jhallenworld• 11 years ago

I would say that the real value of your work could be measured with something like pagerank: basically if your work is eventually cited, it's prestigious.

What the journals maybe provide is prestige before your work has been widely cited, plus publicity. Even if the article is on arxiv, more people will take a look if you say it will soon be published in, say, Cell. Maybe they shouldn't even bother publishing- just have a list of articles which they would publish if they actually bothered to do so.

choppaface• 11 years ago

Prestige only has value if the community upholds it with integrity and warrant. The journals are fundamentally looking to protect their business model and their attachment to the community. Thus the journals' prestige becomes significantly diluted (and with warrant).

Publication prestige originated in the publication's crucial role as a discovery mechanism before the Internet. Now there's a much better discovery mechanism, and the community is adapting well to it. If publications had the community in mind foremost, they'd similarly adapt.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

Prestige is a cornerstone of circular reasoning.

rspeer• 11 years ago

I once went to a meeting sponsored by the EU about how to make data resources for computational linguistics more interoperable.

I noted with increasing dismay that everything people were saying aimed to check off requirements that met EU definitions of interoperability without doing anything at all to the data. For example, someone asked to produce XML could just submit something like this:

    <xml>
        <!-- Please download our dataset from http://example.server/example.csv. -->
        <dataset type="text/csv" href="http://example.server/example.csv" />
        <license>unusably restrictive academic license text goes here</license>
    </xml>

And now I kind of understand that was the goal. The people running that meeting weren't trying to be useful, they were trying to create a bureaucracy that would excuse their lack of usefulness.

bovik• 11 years ago

Aren't all serious Math and CS papers free on the arXiv anyway?

Maken2• 11 years ago

Only recent papers and only from publishers which allow it.

ylem2• 11 years ago

It's not math or CS, but some chemistry journals don't allow preprints on the arxiv. Also, for some new results in physics, you don't put them on the arxiv if you're worried about being scooped...

Jugurtha• 11 years ago

And for what! I left Universtiy a year ago. To prepare my dissertation, I had to read hundreds of articles like everyone, and like everyone, I had to sort through all the crap that somehow makes it to IEEE. I expected that peer reviewed articles would be the best there is.

I was working on ECG signals that were acquired in our institute and in a hospital to deal with all sorts of unbearable noises and artefacts. And then there were articles that would be published after testing their algorithms on a synthetic ECG (as if the world is lacking true hearts) with a cute gaussian noise (as if the world is lacking funky electrodes on sweaty hairy dudes), or the least noisy signals of the MIT database (the ones who test their stuff on the first seconds of 100.dat, you know who you are).

What I also found frustrating is that we have to trust the words of the authors about the results.

Cool, the signal is filtered but how long does your program take to deal with the 1.5 million samples? How many lines of code? What was the gear used?

These are all important things to know so that people know if they're improving stuff or not. But the FPGA cluster seldom gets mentioned in the articles.

I didn't expect I had to go through all that crap because I assumed they're frigging on renowed journals (so pre-filtered).

So I spoke to some people about it and it appears there are "international conferences" where you don't even have to attend for them to vouch you attended. You only need to pay.

After hanging out in some of the labs and seeing the mindset of the publishing game and how it's done, my supervisor still calls me so that we can publish something together but the answer is always that I don't have the necessary skills, nor the desire to publish.

I don't want to publish something that'll be a waste of time for other students.

There seem to be some efforts to deal with this racket (I think some companies are doing that)..

anonymousDan• 11 years ago

IEEE is meaningless. You need to look at the top 2-3 venues in your field and submit there. Most of the rest is noise. Except perhaps for work published in 2nd tier venues by people that have other papers in top tier venues, as most likely such work is at least solid if not quite novel enough to get in to a top tier venue.

jrochkind12• 11 years ago

I'm a librarian computer programmer, and somewhat familiar with the 'industry'.

We've definitely inherited something from a pre-digital age, where it took non-trivial capital and staff to actually publish and distribute stuff.

But on the other hand, there are still aspects that make it unclear exactly how to change the 'market'.

Someone else in this thread said what the publishers provide is 'prestige'. I don't think that's exactly it -- the editors and peer-reviewers, which are who provides the prestige, are largely unpaid (or very trivially paid), even at commercial publishers. That's not where the money is going.

It still takes some staff to organize and provide administrative services for the actual prestige-providing volunteer editorial staff. Receive papers, send the out, copy edit them, get them in the right format for publication. I'm not actually sure how much staff, not being on that side of the industry.

But it's also not actually free to publish things online, at least not if you do it right (which some publishers do and some don't). Someone's got to write and maintain the software and deal with the operations, pay for the hardware and network, etc.

The costs are presumably less than for print distribution, but we on HN know they are not non-existent. The barriers for a startup may be lower than they used to be, but you still can't scale to serving millions of customers without any income at all. It costs money to put up something on the web, in this case the something being hundreds of thousands (millions?) of articles, that you keep up forever, with good metadata, etc.

So who will pay for it, and how? Formerly, largely libraries paid for it as customers of publishers, and they paid for it because if they didn't pay their subscription they didn't have access to it. They were customers.

Who's going to fund the endeavor when you will get access to the content whether you pay or not? University libraries, who pay for it now, don't generally have budgets (and the people who set the budgets) which allow them to pay for things just because it's good for society. They are getting their budgets squeezed too. Even though it's the universities who pay the exhorbitant rates to get access to the content produced by people who's salaries they already pay. (the authors, editors, and peer-reviewers), and they would benefit from a 'market' that worked entirely differently -- nobody's yet figured out how to create that market.

Maybe governments will pay. Perhaps via university systems in other wealthy countries where, unlike the U.S., universities are almost all public and part of a centralized organization. It sounds like that's what the Dutch are trying to do. People are trying to figure it out. In the U.S., government grants are starting to maybe include line items to pay for publication, but we're still figuring out what the actual right cost for that is, or how to create the organizations to organize it without charging extortionate rates. And meanwhile, existing faculty, without who's buy-in no change can happen, have a fear of major changes to the existing precarious system which may be a mess, but existing faculty know how to deal with it (or they wouldn't be existing faculty). Like people scared of change everywhere.

dougmccune12• 11 years ago

Thanks for your insight, it's really great hearing from a librarian. One sad, but interesting note: while it seems ridiculous, our costs to publish a paper have typically increased rather than decreased. The margins on traditional journals are actually shrinking, not growing. This is mostly because we simply can't easily drop print entirely for legacy journals. New ones we can launch digital only (although there are lots of reasons that launching new journals is increasingly difficult too). But even though it sounds ridiculous, our customers (you, the librarian, or at least your peers) often demand print in addition to the electronic. So now we have to pay for the electronic distribution as well as the print.

This is purely a problem of legacy. If you launch a new OA journal there isn't the same print expectation. And granted, it's a problem that will go away eventually. But I continue to be surprised that we can't simply stop doing all printing of journals.

SiVal2• 11 years ago

I would like to see the governments that fund research get together and create a rule that your government funding requires that a public version of the paper be made available online before that paper could be submitted to a private publisher. This would help to separate the public availability of useful information paid for by the public issue from the academics' career-promotion-via-publication issue.

That would, of course, mean that papers would appear prior to acceptance and peer review, which would speed up the pace of research at the cost (if peer review is of any value) of putting more shaky research out there. I doubt this would be a big problem, since researchers in the field know what is going on anyway (they get early copies or at least early discussion at pay-walled conferences already), and others who read the research could see that it had not yet been published in a journal and decide for themselves what to make of it.

Papers that got peer reviewed and published would still have the published version used in citations, so you could see how far it had gone in the publishing process at time of citation. I wouldn't be surprised if people in the field knew how much credibility to give to a paper based on the researchers without waiting for the researchers' more established rivals to "review" it to death.

bunderbunder• 11 years ago

OTOH, I'm not sure if the peer review system isn't ripe for disruption anyway.

Peer review is a system that's designed for the old dead-trees world, where space for publishing in print journals was extremely limited, publishing in a print journal was the only way to share knowledge, and you only got one shot at it because there's limited options for fixing errors after the plates are engraved. It's primarily there to ensure a minimum standard for the quality of the paper, not necessarily the research. So what it's really good for ensuring is that the paper explains the research well enough that someone who's reading it (and knows what they're doing) could attempt to replicate the work.

What it is not designed to do, though, is ensure that the research is valid. Peer review can't reliably detect fraudulent data, nor can it reliably detect fabricated data. Heck, it can't even detect p-value fishing, which is a really sobering problem when you consider how many scientists really don't seem to understand why p-value fishing is such a problem in the first place. There's supposed to be a different mechanism for detecting that stuff: replication.

Buy ironcially, replication is something the current journal system actively discourages. Space in journals is a scarce resource. Furthermore, journals are competing with each other for prestige. They've got very little reason to waste space on replicating old findings (booooooooring) when they could be publishing brand new stuff (exciting!). In turn, researchers have very little incentive to try and replicate each other's findings. It's already hard to justify spending money on replicating existing findings. But there's no way in hell a researcher is going to waste their precious resources on work that they wouldn't even be able to get published.

So the long and short of it is, people place far too much trust in peer review. In fact, peer review is a terribly low hurdle. All too often complete junk gets through it about as easily as excellent science. The trick is that it just has to be well written junk.

OTOH, a system that removes barriers to doing replication work - or better yet, starts actively encouraging it - could also do much of the work of peer review. Because then we'd have peers reviewing the actual research and not just things people write about research.

SiVal2• 11 years ago

Well said, and it explains part of what I meant when I wrote "(if peer review is of any value)" in the post. The other reason I wrote that is because of the political shenanigans inherent in the peer-reviewed journal system. "Anonymous peers" will sabotage the work of their rivals, and the journal editors will often choose them for the purpose of sabotaging research that doesn't support the causes the journal editors are working to promote.

NotOscarWilde4• 11 years ago

As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.

xiaq6• 11 years ago

Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

Besides, if you open up physics papers to public comments you'll be deluged by cranks who think they can prove Einstin woz teh rong!!!! with a bit of algebra and a lot of punctuation.

I don't know how you'd do useful public peer review. By definition, "peer" assumes some professional domain competence.

The current system is probably too restrictive, but it's hard to imagine a more open system that's at least as useful.

Maybe someone should do a PhD on it. :)

NotOscarWilde4• 11 years ago

I would really like a more comprehensive answer from somebody close to the source; you more or less say "it does not have it because it has not happened yet".

Note that arXiv has features that many previous repositories did not have, such as easy access to the original TeX files.

Plus, a comment system for a repository of preprints sounds very useful to me -- you can have early birds (such as PhDs or very active scientists) comment on your paper even before you submit to a conference/journal, thus getting good advice for free.

Coding_Cat6• 11 years ago

This is actually something I have been thinking about writing myself. Look at all the major social networks, and all their metrics, analysis, ranking systems and the like.

Imaging what you could do with a social-network like publication database (research-gate sort of is, but it doesn't think big enough and the UX is confusing, imho). Every publication became a "post" so to speak. You could easily include discussions (both on the paper, as well as general discussions), ratings, user curated lists (instead of expensive journals), host links to any relevant non-paper data. Funding could be provided by Universities, or by means of a registration fee, or simply with an ad supported model. Targeted ads will probably bring in a relatively high CPM due to the target audience.

<rant> Incidentally, while we're at it, we could also get rid of strict formatting guidelines and super-formal writing, some of the best papers I've read are informal. And it's a very modern thing to do anyway, old papers by Kelvin and the like read much better than what we have to write these days. </rant>

NotOscarWilde4• 11 years ago

Note that there are some projects that are related to this, for instance a social network for scientists [1], a Github-like site for article creation with public comments [2] and some unknown third party comment systems for arXiv [3]. (I just found this one by googling.)

For any success of such a project, the official endorsement from arXiv is crucial. Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social network might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source recommendation systems pop up.

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/

[2] https://www.authorea.com/ -- It costs quite a lot if you have several papers and you wish to release them only after the preprint is ready.

[3] http://pacs.gutcalc.com/

sago4• 11 years ago

What is peer review, but a formal system of review, comment, redrafting and endorsement? That could be moderated through the same system.

Drafting, extending and version control would be particularly important, I think. It's been a long problem with dead-tree journals, following adjustments in results is hard because they inherently rely on back-links, retractions (in extreme cases), letters, etc. Not a coherent way of centralising information.

trurl42• 11 years ago

There is https://scirate.com/

It's only really used by the quantum information community at this point, but you could try promoting it in yours.

newsposter123• 11 years ago

"It is not unthinkable that if I would submit a love letter, it would be published sooner than an intelligent scholarly article by a young researcher."

personjerry• 11 years ago

Anyone else think that this (academia/research) sounds like an industry that could be disrupted?

darkstar999• 11 years ago

Every industry can be disrupted.

xiaq6• 11 years ago

It surely is, but beware that unlike fields like social networking which makes money from idle and bored people, scientists have a lot of things to get busy and excited about and are much harder to convince, unless there is some real advantages coming up.

cossatot• 11 years ago

Don't conflate academic publishing with research. It's a facet of research, and there are those working on 'disrupting' it in some form or another (academia.edu, Mendeley (now owned by Elsevier...), Authoria, etc.). Academia, in some sense of the word, is facing MOOCs.

Research itself is a process that is basically self-disrupting, although maybe not in the original Clayton Christensen sense of a newer, shittier, cheaper product moving up-market and displacing the incumbents. Typically, it's the newer, more expensive, better product displacing the older ones and then moving down-market.

navait• 11 years ago

The commentators have only interpreted industries in terms of potential for disruption - the point however, is to disrupt it.

acaloiar2• 11 years ago

I'm currently co-authoring a paper that will be submitted to an Elsevier journal because it is a good fit for our work. All of my time and that of one other co-author is funded by an NIH grant which of course is funded by US tax dollars. I'm fairly certain the Elsevier agreement stipulates that I cannot share my paper without their permission – assuming the paper is accepted. If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere that does not support open access.

[EDIT] There are some conditions under which sharing is permitted: http://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/sharing-and-...

Someone3• 11 years ago

"If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere that does not support open access”

Don’t they do that? https://publicaccess.nih.gov:

"To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication"

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Fomite3• 11 years ago

They're allowed to drag their feet a little bit, but yes.

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acaloiar2• 11 years ago

That is good news indeed! Thank you for letting me know. This is my first publicly funded work and I am not familiar with many of the policies. I will sleep better knowing that our work will not be holed up exclusively in the Elsevier-beast.

Also of interest: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access/agree...

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escherplex• 11 years ago

In last week's Economist of London (June 27, p.56) there is an article titled 'The halo effect' which explores conclusions drawn by a recent Princeton University study of large firms prosecuted for corruption and amount of subsequent punitive damages as a function of perceived 'corporate social responsibility'. Interesting finding was that 'spending on employee and community relations had a much bigger impact on the prosecutors than did promoting diversity or being environmentally friendly.' When push comes to shove all human interaction, like politics, is parochial. So it's not surprising that within the first-world academic community all Elsevier effort at 'making developing world libraries flourish' by supplying discount textbooks coupled with programs to 'award women scientists in the developing world' has done little to mitigate perception of the firm as being both avaricious and elitist. Seems like a change in strategy is in order.

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rsfern• 11 years ago

For most Elsevier journals, you can post your preprint or even the accepted manuscript online--for example on a personal site or the arXiv. Sometimes I wonder why this point isn't brought up more often in discussions on open access publishing.

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lultimouomo3• 11 years ago

I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access.

Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article:

  the university or the financier of the research pays to get published

In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal.
It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with the service of having the article reviewed and doing its best to make sure the research was solid. Now the emperor is naked, and it's finally official what's the purpose of academic journals: let people have their grants renewed.

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ricardobeat• 11 years ago

Aren't universities the main customer of journals already? They pay millions for subscriptions.

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sago4• 11 years ago

But the financier of the research is already paying for the research to be done, rarely for their economic interest, but so that it gets out there, establishes the science, furthers knowledge, cements reputations, etc. For research done by economic interests the incentive is even stronger, a drug company, say, wants to get their drug out, proven, marketed.

Your response seems high on derision, but you've not actually made any point about why it shouldn't be the people paying for the research's role to pay for the research's availability.

The counter arguments is on availability, the hegemony of large institutions, and the lack of transparency of funding bodies.

So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?

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lultimouomo3• 11 years ago

  > So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?

The fact that the interest of the journal is now naturally aligned with that of the writer, instead of with that of the reader. This makes it very useful for the writer, which pays[0], publishes and so gets to live another year having his grant renewed; it also makes it quite useless for the reader, which cannot count on a seriously curated publication.
[0] "Pays" meaning "diverts part of his funding allowance"

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_delirium• 11 years ago

In reputable open-access journals, you can have the fees waived if you don't have grant or institutional funding that's earmarked to pay for publication/dissemination of research. What usually happens is that universities take at least some of the budgets they previously used to buy journal subscriptions, and put them towards publication fees instead. NIH and NSF and those kinds of grants will also pay publication fees (along perhaps with other ways of disseminating research). If you have access to neither, then you don't pay. Here's is the policy from PLoS, for example: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/plos-publ...

In CS there are typically no fees to begin with, at least in the areas I work in (JMLR and JAIR are no-fee open-access journals). Instead journals are run basically without staff, authors format their own documents in LaTeX, and an institution (in the case of JMLR, MIT) donates some server space and maybe the time of a student assistant. The main downside to this is that publication quality control tends to be a bit worse, as there's no copyediting or layout type of service (JMLR has quite a few surprisingly badly edited papers, despite being a generally good journal). But it is usually "good enough".

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obstbraende• 11 years ago

Put more favourably, the purpose of an open access journal is to arrange a critical evaluation of my stuff and to point other researchers to it (curation). To justify paying for this, I think of it like hiring a consultancy and, later, a marketing firm for my research.

Perhaps in a better world, we would disentangle the review and the curation aspects -- I'd pay for the arrangement of peer review of my article, upload it freely to the arxive, and pay separately for unbiased, curated lists of noteworthy articles in my field.

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tmalsburg2• 11 years ago

There is nothing crazy about it. Most research is funded by tax money and researchers have a moral and in some countries legal obligation to make their results accessible to the public. The traditional publishing model failed to achieve this. Open access journals are a simple and clean solution.

You say "It used to be that the reader was the customer" but you don't explain why it should be this way.

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lultimouomo3• 11 years ago

Because the customer defines the role of the journal.

"If you're not paying, you're the product" is endlessly repeated on the internet. I think it applies to academic journals as well.

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leni536• 11 years ago

It makes much more sense to pay once for publishing a paper than continuously paying for it forever, doesn't matter by who. Searching for a 50+ years old paper and bumping into a paywall is really frustrating. What justifies these journals to make a profit from these papers forever?

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aswanson3• 11 years ago

Why don't all universities just make all their professors papers available online. No journals, etc, just put the damn pdfs online and let people cite by hyperlink and normal inline citations. To hell with the publishers.

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Maken2• 11 years ago

Most people do that, and most publishers allow authors to publish preprints of their works. Google Scholar is the usual place for looking for citations.

But all this rely on the good faith of the editor and universities preserving the author personal pages forever. And the entire system lacks any standardization or interoperability.

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aswanson3• 11 years ago

Sounds like a startup opportunity then, if for nothing else than the preservation and forwarding of human knowledge.

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PeterisP2• 11 years ago

The people generally already do make the papers available, but that's still not a replacement for journals or indexed conferences; if I just put the paper online without it also being in a reputable publication, then from the point of carreer and future funding I might just as well thrown it in garbage.

The same goes with low-ranked open access publication venues - publishing in them is worse than not publishing at all; since it prevents me from publishing that research in some place that matters.

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aswanson3• 11 years ago

What seems to be broken, though, is the question of why that place matters; it seems to be cabal-driven and to some extent corrupted. The results of research should be able to matter purely on their own merit, not because of a tag some committee put on it. Idealistic? Of course, but that doesnt mean that is not worth pursuing.

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mnw21cam• 11 years ago

Why just the professors' papers? You have lecturers, postdocs, PhD students, and other researchers all churning out papers too.

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ylem2• 11 years ago

The following is interesting: http://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-increase...

It will be interesting to see how this evolves. I also see more open access publications (where the publication is free for the public, but the author pays the publisher) these days--but I'm not sure if they have subsidies for researchers from smaller institutions.

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elektromekatron3• 11 years ago

The wheels may turn slowly. But they turn.

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kanyethegreat• 11 years ago

Practically speaking, asking them to resign their posts is kind of extreme. Food is a little more tangible than morality.

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jerven• 11 years ago

Those are basically unpaid posts

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thegrif• 11 years ago

I'm the former director of innovation for IEEE. I actually recruited many members of my team from HN. We were developing some great stuff to address many of the comments here. Unfortunately they just didn't have the stomach for it - and hardly none of it hit users (and the stuff that did was so watered down to protect current revenue streams that it's completely different (and in some cases silly).

There were a handful of folks in this thread who said they'd be interested in building some new stuff to solve the era problems in how scientific knowledge is created and shared. If anyone wants to contact me directly, I'd be happy to organize those interested, capture ideas, and see if there's something common we all want to work on. I'm at tom@thegrif.net or www.linkedin.com/in/tomgriffin.

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kragen• 11 years ago

That sounds really interesting! What kind of stuff were you developing, and what kind of roadblocks did you hit?

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shmerl• 11 years ago

Reed Elsevier have a really nasty reputation. They also supported SOPA / PIPA.

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tomkat0789• 11 years ago

There's good arguements for and against a complete conversion to open access research. Ruining all the free fun of open access are charlatans from around the world creating open access journals from nothing and picking up free money and prestige. I'd like to abring up this website: http://scholarlyoa.com/

It's run by a librarian in Colorado, and he has a set of criteria to determine whether a given open access journal qualifies as a "predatory" journal. Sometimes you see stuff like this gem:

http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-prof...

I can't find the link, but I once read a story where they published a paper titled, "Enter paper title". That's how reputable some of these outfits are.

Open access won't be perfect.

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hitlin37• 11 years ago

Not just Dutch universities, other universities within EU should join the effort.

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roelvanhintum• 11 years ago

I'm surprised this isn't big news in The Netherlands. I have not seen a single thing about it in the news!

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bluenose69• 11 years ago

The main funding agency in my country is starting to demand that we publish in open-access journals. It seems like a wonderful thing, except for one little detail: the agency is not supplying any extra funding. The difference in cost between conventional and open-access grants is a significant fraction of the typical grant. Are researchers expected to publish less frequently, or to reduce students stipends?

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transcranial• 11 years ago

Over 15,000 academics and researchers have already signed a petition boycotting Elsevier. The effort is but a drop in the bucket in terms of what's needed. http://thecostofknowledge.com/

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mierek4ever• 11 years ago

No whole world can't be like tiny Denmark. With size half-brooklyn you can afford being awkward. We can't.

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Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan

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