MrGunn

Thanks for the heads up, we're looking into this at Quora.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree publishers could do more to change & I especially think we should do more to make all the changes that are happening under the hood more visible. I mean, that's literally my job. You gave me a sincere response & deserve one in return, but we need to work towards a shared understanding of what the current situation is if we want to have a conversation that's not just talking past one another.

My understanding of the situation includes the following: Elsevier has a new CEO. Elsevier has been reporting for several years now that revenue from services has been one of the fastest growing parts of the business, so much so that the company now calls itself an information and analytics company, not a publisher (1). Elsevier, though slow initially, is now fully behind open access. 9/10 of the journals launched last year were open access (2). Elsevier is pursuing a number of what the industry calls "transformative agreements" with libraries, consortia, and whole countries which involve full access to all Elsevier content and built in open access publishing for everyone covered under the arrangement (2). This specific issue was about one way of structuring such an agreement to reduce the financial burden on MIT while still ensuring all their content was published open access and was even designed to make it easier for librarians to keep a collection of the intellectual output of their institution by automatically pushing manuscripts into the institutional repository, which is something librarians have been asking for for a long time (3).

So given all this, the only way I can answer your question about what's stopping change is to say that nothing is stopping it. It's happening & has been happening for years. I am tempted to ask, looking at some of the comments in the parent thread, what's stopping change in people's perceptions of Elsevier? I don't just mean that rhetorically. I really would be interested in understanding why people have the views they do and how they're different.

What's your current understanding of the situation and does it differ in ways from mine that you'd like to highlight?

1. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/02/13/re... 2. https://www.elsevier.com/about/elsevier-and-open-access 3. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/learn-more-about-elseviers-...

To solve your immediate problem, just grab the DOI here: https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery They also have an API from which you can fetch DOIs in various ways.

DOIs are a solution to the issue of having persistent, publisher-independent links that will always resolve, even if a journal changes publisher or goes out of business. Academia uses them because link rot is unavoidable across the web, but there must always be a link to the publication that resolves so that when someone in 2070 wants to follow a citation in the references of a work published today, they can do that. It's the same thinking that underlies people pointing to the internet archive in Wikipedia citations. It's a layer of redirection, but in a way that preserves accessibility for the long term. It's also the same thinking that underlies DNS. There shouldn't be one company that controls how to resolve an IP address to a domain name, and likewise you shouldn't have to go through one publisher to resolve a reference to a research article.

As a side note, Crossref is staffed with exactly the sort of web geeks that you would see at an Internet Archive get-together (#).

So I hear your frustrations, but I think you're giving DOIs short shrift.

(#) I mean, just look at this. A dump of all journal metadata on Academic Torrents. Is that not cool? https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-m...

Journals do transfer among publishers, go out of business, etc so you shouldn't expect a direct link like that to be stable. The recommended practice is to use the DOI. Would using a DOI meet your needs?

The majority (70% or so) of submissions are desk-rejected without even being sent for review, and the ability to do that well is something that's learned over time with extensive detailed knowledge of the particular field served by the journal. Note that there are more kinds of editors than just academic editors, too, even at places like PLOS & eLife.

Hey Gwern, big fan of your GPT2 work. I notice I'm surprised to hear you say you struggle daily to fix broken links to the Elsevier catalog at ScienceDirect, because the links are used by libraries all over the world & they don't have the same feedback. Would you have a few examples available for me to send to the folks responsible?

As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that wasn't apparent before.

Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there are. Is research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will posting preprints or research blogging fix everything? Nope.

If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.

Information and analytical services that support researchers and clinicians is the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for many years now, and these businesses only get even more valuable as more and more content is available openly.

At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end services that scientific societies, funders, researchers, and their institutions need to keep the system running so they can focus on their research.

What are these systems?

Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to support the mission of the society - advocating on policy issues important to their research community - through the society journal. Elsevier makes running the journal financially sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers, attracting and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics complaints, and providing a cheap platform.

Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in alignment with the funders mission, not just by conferring status, but with more advanced ways of understand the broader impact of a work. Elsevier (including me personally) has worked to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the impact factor: https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics...

Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase their work, recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for tenure & decide who should get it.

After spending years working on projects with these different groups, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of how everything works & what the levers of change actually are. Happy to discuss with anyone!

Preprints are great & everyone should post a preprint as soon as they're ready to share what they've been working on. That said, there's a big difference between journals and preprints, not just in the production quality or the improvements made after review, but in the whole hidden infrastructure that supports the discovery of artcles, the indexing, preservation, linking, etc.

It's worth pointing out that running a preprint server isn't exactly cheap, either: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/biorxiv-preprint-ser...

Not only does Elsevier have a very permissive preprint policy, but they own a network of preprint servers - SSRN.

Just this morning, I've replied to several factually incorrect statements you've made. What can I do to help you get the right information?

This isn't true: https://twitter.com/TomReller/status/1075817382726250496?s=1...

Again, Dmitri, there's plenty of reasons to criticize Elsevier without making things up. RELX doesn't break out profit by division, but the operating margin for Elsevier is around 22%, which anyone can read for themselves in their annual report.

This is something I hear all the time about publishers, and it used to resonate with me, too, until I started to work for a publisher and realized how much goes into the system we have beyond just putting manuscripts online. The real eye-opening thing for me was talking to editors and seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff that they do. They have to know enough about their field to know what's worth sending out for review in the first place, manage the review process so that you don't have nasty, unhelpful reviews or personal vendettas getting exercised, manage ethical concerns, deal with authorship disputes, etc, and that's just the review piece of things. There's a whole information infrastructure behind the scenes making sure that once something is published that it can be found, indexed, searched for, aggregated by author, connected to the data and code and protocols and other entities that it mentions... I mean, I've been at this for 8 years and there's still so much I don't know.

All that just to make the point that the value proposition is still very much there, though I'll agree publishers could do more to make this apparent.

Dmitri, I feel like you're being deceptive here. RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, hasn't been involved in this for over a decade, and in fact Lancet led the movement to divest! https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.w...

There are perfectly good reasons to criticize Elsevier - you may feel like they should have a way for patients and caregivers to access research about their condition, for example - so there's really no need to be disingenuous.

I wish people would work on the systemic issues of access, rather than acting like Elsevier is somehow uniquely responsible. If Elsevier disappeared overnight, there would still be the other 84% of the market.

Efforts like the above just lead to the open access movement getting co-opted by anti-capitalists, which hurts progress.

This will be a big deal. People are a bit conflicted in their use of Sci-hub, so there's definitely an appetite for something that works without requiring you to support copyright infringement.

That's kinda sweet, given what they must have trained the network on. Lots of people say I love you!

It's not a user's fault they have to root to regain some control over a piece of hardware they own. Your app shouldn't crash under xposed - test for it.

I'll checkout stirplate.io, but just wanted to point out that there has been a mandate on the books for years now that if you get funding from a federal agency (that does a significant amount of research funding), you have to deposit that article in a public archive, usually Pubmed Central or an institutional repository.

The NIH now requires you to include the PMC ID number on any reference you cite in a grant, so they're more or less forcing people to comply, after years of asking, pleading, and begging.

I personally have always found DeepDyve to be kinda pointless, as when you need to go back and refresh your memory before citing the article later, your access has expired.

There's a filter in Mendeley's research catalog: http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22cat... for showing only open access papers.

(disclaimer: my employer)

I don't work for them (in fact, they could be considered a competitor), but check out PeerJ. $99 per author for an article. PLOS ONE also has fee waivers if you really can't afford it.

So there is a theory that if something doesn't reproduce it's because the other guy was just incompetent, and that may be the case, but just like everyone wants to believe they're above average, everyone will want to go to the theory that the other guys just aren't any good, when I suspect that that will be much less of a factor. At any rate, when you start trying these drugs on the wide diversity of the patient population, if they're not super robust, they don't be of much use anyways.

It's really critical that we don't confuse research that's nor reproducible with fraud. Very few scientific theories survive unmodified over time, so lack of reproducibility isn't a criticism and we really need to move the debate past this. Every theory is expected to be inaccurate as it only explains the data using the understanding of the time, but this isn't an indictment of the research or the researcher and studies of outright fraud indicate that that actually only happens around 1% of the time.

Reproducibility isn't about calling out people whose work isn't reproducible, it's about identifying and promoting the most robust stuff.

Your assumption is that now Mendeley is going to suddenly shed it's sheep's clothing and reveal itself to be a wolf. As a Mendeley employee (and a scientist, not a PR person), you may not believe me or you may think I'm just naive but I think you will have to wait and see.

Nothing we've done over the past 4 years should give you reason to worry and there's plenty of reason to believe that Elsevier doesn't want to piss off our community.

There will be no favoritism for Elsevier content: http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/

Lots of people have had bad experiences, especially this year. I was one of the people leading the charge against them, in fact. However, they were able to convince me that they really do want us for our openness and they want us to bring that to them. I didn't change my mind easily and I wouldn't expect you to either, all you have to do is consider our track record and continue to hold us up to a exactly the same high standards as before.

How about giving it a month or two to see if things really are that bad? I understand you have no reason to trust Elsevier, but Mendeley has been a staunch advocate of open access from the very beginning, so I really do think we'll bring more openness. At the very least, we've earned that.

I know exactly how bad Elsevier has been and I've spent most of my career with Mendeley campaigning against them. If anyone has the right to be mad about this, it would be me, but I've actually had the chance to speak with folks there, from the CEO on down, and I really believe they see something valuable in us.

There have been detailed discussions about how Mendeley can integrate with parts of Elsevier like Scopus and Science Direct. I don't think they would have gone through all that effort just to bury it. I could be wrong, but I think things are changing at Elsevier and I think bringing us in is part of that.

The API will remain open: http://blog.mendeley.com/press-release/qa-team-mendeley-join...

See, that's the thing. It's hard for open source projects to attract top caliber developers and build a critical mass of users. Firefox has done really well, AOSP has done well, but Mendeley and Zotero are really the only competitors in this space, and they're not exactly comparable.

That said, this isn't a buy and bury situation. Mendeley is now very well positioned to dominate so there's no reason to worry, and anyways you can always take your data with you.

FYI - I work for Mendeley.