UC system drops Elsevier subscription
March 1, 2019 1:27 PM Subscribe
Negotiations failed and the UC system ended its $10 million annual subscriptions.
Good background links in the article, too.
Good background links in the article, too.
Dayum. I don't know if you folks who aren't part of academe understand how devastating this will be to the productivity of UC system faculty. When I was in grad school, to do my literature research for my dissertation, I spent many hours in the dusty stacks of Wilson Library and Diehl Hall pulling microfiche, bound periodical volumes, and books and lugging them to the Xerox so I could laboriously copy each relevant page. What took weeks then I can do in a couple of hours now owing to the access we have to online journal articles and books. This is devastating. This has to be fixed.
posted by Mental Wimp at 1:35 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by Mental Wimp at 1:35 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
In other Elsevier news, they modified Mendeley last year to encrypt its database, which screws up the import feature of competing open source alternative Zotero. When asked why they started encrypting data to keep it from their users, they blamed the GDPR, which makes no sense, since this is the database that lives on your hard drive. When people complained, they turned Trumpian, calling what was happening #fakenews and conspiracy theories.
posted by zachlipton at 1:36 PM on March 1, 2019 [45 favorites]
posted by zachlipton at 1:36 PM on March 1, 2019 [45 favorites]
This is devastating. This has to be fixed.
It will be fixed when Elsevier is a shadow of its former self and all research is open access. There's no alternative at this point. That's where we're going, and Europe is headed that way already. The only way this ends is if academia pledges not one more penny to these publishers. It's a strike; of course it's going to be inconvenient.
posted by zachlipton at 1:46 PM on March 1, 2019 [160 favorites]
It will be fixed when Elsevier is a shadow of its former self and all research is open access. There's no alternative at this point. That's where we're going, and Europe is headed that way already. The only way this ends is if academia pledges not one more penny to these publishers. It's a strike; of course it's going to be inconvenient.
posted by zachlipton at 1:46 PM on March 1, 2019 [160 favorites]
Well, now I'm glad I switched to Zotero six months ago, then. Yeesh. It's a shame, because I liked the direct PDF editing feature of Mendeley, but I didn't feel as comfortable with it when Elsevier bought it.
Two of my collaborators are currently in the UC system. I hope they're not too badly hurt by this, but I also hope that the UC system prevails against Elsevier. Elsevier is one of the most predatory companies in the world, and it feeds on the careers of academics, who provide both its readership and its authorship and its reviewership and even much of the organization of its journals through the medium of volunteer labor. I would be delighted to see it nationalized or otherwise brought to its knees; it provides relatively little in the way of useful work in exchange for the money it demands.
posted by sciatrix at 1:48 PM on March 1, 2019 [39 favorites]
Two of my collaborators are currently in the UC system. I hope they're not too badly hurt by this, but I also hope that the UC system prevails against Elsevier. Elsevier is one of the most predatory companies in the world, and it feeds on the careers of academics, who provide both its readership and its authorship and its reviewership and even much of the organization of its journals through the medium of volunteer labor. I would be delighted to see it nationalized or otherwise brought to its knees; it provides relatively little in the way of useful work in exchange for the money it demands.
posted by sciatrix at 1:48 PM on March 1, 2019 [39 favorites]
Hey - UC librarian here - it's way more complicated than many of the headlines suggest, but in general we own back-file rights to many journals in these large subscription packages, meaning that we still have access to much published before 2019.
I'll quote here from a letter we received- pay close attention to bullet #2-
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/uc-elsevier
posted by gyusan at 1:48 PM on March 1, 2019 [150 favorites]
I'll quote here from a letter we received- pay close attention to bullet #2-
What content will — and won’t — be affectedAlso, my tireless colleagues have a great page up about this with lots of data, faqs and other resources, including the full text of the letter I quoted from above:
• What is affected: At some point, Elsevier may begin to turn off UC’s direct access to articles with a 2019 publish date and the backfiles of certain journals (download list). However, open access versions of many of these articles are available. Visit Alternative access to Elsevier articles on the Library’s website for advice on where and how to look. You can also submit a request, and the Library can help you get a copy of the final, published version of an article.
• Most Elsevier articles published in 2018 or earlier will still be accessible via ScienceDirect. Because UC’s prior contracts included permanent access to previously published content, you will still be able to get immediate access to the full text of most articles via Elsevier’s ScienceDirect backfiles, just as you have in the past.
• Open access articles in Elsevier journals are also unaffected. Many authors choose to pay an open access fee (called an article processing charge, or APC) when they publish, so it’s always worth checking to see if the article you’re seeking is available open access from the journal’s website or elsewhere online. Learn more about how to search for open access versions.
• Elsevier e-books and other products licensed by UC (e.g., Compendex, Reaxys) or by UC Berkeley (e.g., Scopus, Mendeley, Embase) are covered under separate contracts and remain available as before.
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/uc-elsevier
posted by gyusan at 1:48 PM on March 1, 2019 [150 favorites]
There are enough ways to get the articles you need on the sly—and abstracts are still available online—that I don’t anticipate this hitting academics too too hard. Certainly not a return to the days of microfiche.
posted by Maecenas at 1:49 PM on March 1, 2019
posted by Maecenas at 1:49 PM on March 1, 2019
(Personally, my immediate response is "tch tch tch, that looks rough; better reaffirm my commitment to passing out journal PDFs to anyone who asks based on my own university accesses", because that's just... what you do in academia. I think I last set up and hosted a not-particularly-openly-available journal article that I thought would be useful to a discussion here on MeFi about... four hours ago; in doing so, I harm the scholars who did the work not at all, and arguably I might be boosting their careers by drawing more attention to their work.)
posted by sciatrix at 1:50 PM on March 1, 2019 [47 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 1:50 PM on March 1, 2019 [47 favorites]
There are enough ways to get the articles you need on the sly—and abstracts are still available online—that I don’t anticipate this hitting academics too too hard. Certainly not a return to the days of microfiche.
Exactly. and $11 million, which was the Elsevier bill (they were going to hike it to give open access a shot), would let you hire an awful lot of people to help people track down what they need.
posted by jessamyn at 1:53 PM on March 1, 2019 [38 favorites]
Exactly. and $11 million, which was the Elsevier bill (they were going to hike it to give open access a shot), would let you hire an awful lot of people to help people track down what they need.
posted by jessamyn at 1:53 PM on March 1, 2019 [38 favorites]
It will be terrible, but Elsevier is also terrible.
I don't think we will ever get rid of them until institutions stop paying them. We can't rely on individual researchers choosing not to submit to their journals, because that is just too hard a choice to make when you live in a publish or perish environment. (Depending on your seniority, research area, etc, of course.)
I'll clap for this decision from UC while still feeling sorry for the academics who are going to have trouble accessing research. Just like I currently feel sorry for academics at poorer institutions who never had an Elsevier subscription in the first place.
But I do expect that this will mostly be a big fucking hassle for them, rather than preventing them from accessing the articles at all. There are other ways to get articles, especially if you're an active academic. They're just not as convenient and sometimes involve asking favors (e.g. asking a friend at another institution for it if the author doesn't respond...).
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:54 PM on March 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
I don't think we will ever get rid of them until institutions stop paying them. We can't rely on individual researchers choosing not to submit to their journals, because that is just too hard a choice to make when you live in a publish or perish environment. (Depending on your seniority, research area, etc, of course.)
I'll clap for this decision from UC while still feeling sorry for the academics who are going to have trouble accessing research. Just like I currently feel sorry for academics at poorer institutions who never had an Elsevier subscription in the first place.
But I do expect that this will mostly be a big fucking hassle for them, rather than preventing them from accessing the articles at all. There are other ways to get articles, especially if you're an active academic. They're just not as convenient and sometimes involve asking favors (e.g. asking a friend at another institution for it if the author doesn't respond...).
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 1:54 PM on March 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
Well, and friends are often much faster than contacting authors, especially if you can catch them on IM or Twitter.
posted by sciatrix at 1:57 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 1:57 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
My department's librarian came to speak to one of my classes about access issues when I was a student in the UC system. She was saying that this exact scenario could play out, and that it could have dire affects on students' abilities to conduct up-to-date research. In competitive fields, lack of access to current research can completely derail a research project or PhD.
She illustrated this by talking about her time working in Central Asia, I think in Kazakhstan. The universities there want to produce high-quality scholarship and be a part of the global economy, but the cost of access to current research means they're forced to work with limited and outdated materials. No matter how smart or hardworking their students are, they can never be on the same level as other countries' students if they can't access what they need.
In other words, the business practices of companies like Elsevier are directly contributing to economic stagnation around the world, because they help create a tiered system of research that makes it impossible for much of the world to participate in so-called global scholarship. With all the utopian thinking about interconnectedness and open knowledge in the information age, we're still all only as free as capitalist greed allows.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:58 PM on March 1, 2019 [77 favorites]
She illustrated this by talking about her time working in Central Asia, I think in Kazakhstan. The universities there want to produce high-quality scholarship and be a part of the global economy, but the cost of access to current research means they're forced to work with limited and outdated materials. No matter how smart or hardworking their students are, they can never be on the same level as other countries' students if they can't access what they need.
In other words, the business practices of companies like Elsevier are directly contributing to economic stagnation around the world, because they help create a tiered system of research that makes it impossible for much of the world to participate in so-called global scholarship. With all the utopian thinking about interconnectedness and open knowledge in the information age, we're still all only as free as capitalist greed allows.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:58 PM on March 1, 2019 [77 favorites]
I don't know if you folks who aren't part of academe understand how devastating this will be to the productivity of UC system faculty.
Uh, not having access to Elsevier doesn't mean you're necessarily relegated to microfiche and printed materials.
It just means you go to Sci-Hub.
According to this paper, "as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals", and "For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States." No clue of how Penn compares to UNC though.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:00 PM on March 1, 2019 [29 favorites]
Uh, not having access to Elsevier doesn't mean you're necessarily relegated to microfiche and printed materials.
It just means you go to Sci-Hub.
According to this paper, "as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals", and "For toll access articles, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States." No clue of how Penn compares to UNC though.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:00 PM on March 1, 2019 [29 favorites]
So, I'm not in academia. I work for a nonprofit which does public policy work. And I can't tell you how much time I spend looking for research papers relevant to our policy space that I can actually access.
The siloing of this information isn't just a problem for academics. It also means that the research academics do is much less relevant and useful to the world at large.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:00 PM on March 1, 2019 [57 favorites]
The siloing of this information isn't just a problem for academics. It also means that the research academics do is much less relevant and useful to the world at large.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:00 PM on March 1, 2019 [57 favorites]
Oh, here's a thought. Will inter-library loans still work for folks? Because if so, then this will quickly be downgraded to a very minor hassle indeed as academics learn or re-learn the ILL system for the specific journal entries they're looking for; presumably the UC system has agreement networks with other library systems to provide specific articles on request.
I tend to wind up hunting for weird obscure articles on leptin or other metabolic changes from the 1980s or 1970s treatises on the composition of mammalian milks for Reasons, and those are sometimes not covered by existing university digital subscriptions, so I use ILL occasionally to pick some of these more obscure sources.
Barring all of that, I bet you ResearchGate gets a lot more uploads soon.
posted by sciatrix at 2:01 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
I tend to wind up hunting for weird obscure articles on leptin or other metabolic changes from the 1980s or 1970s treatises on the composition of mammalian milks for Reasons, and those are sometimes not covered by existing university digital subscriptions, so I use ILL occasionally to pick some of these more obscure sources.
Barring all of that, I bet you ResearchGate gets a lot more uploads soon.
posted by sciatrix at 2:01 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
From an old library school buddy, now dean of Sonoma State University Library, on Twitter: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:03 PM on March 1, 2019 [23 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:03 PM on March 1, 2019 [23 favorites]
as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals
68.9% and 85.1% aren't great numbers if the specific article you need isn't available to you.
presumably the UC system has agreement networks with other library systems to provide specific articles on request.
Ooh, I used to work in ILL as a student, and we did have agreements with a lot of universities, but it's still a complicated process. I never knew the ins and outs of it, but there are restrictions on what can be shared, and how much can be shared. There were articles that I was unable to get because of said restrictions, and others that could be shared with me freely. Some had to be photocopied from printed journals (this was a big part of my day as an ILL student employee), and some could be shared as preexisting digital files.
The bottom line is that even if there are workarounds, nothing is going to be equivalent to open access. There WILL be things that can't be accessed, and I think the most current stuff will be the hardest to get.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:07 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
68.9% and 85.1% aren't great numbers if the specific article you need isn't available to you.
presumably the UC system has agreement networks with other library systems to provide specific articles on request.
Ooh, I used to work in ILL as a student, and we did have agreements with a lot of universities, but it's still a complicated process. I never knew the ins and outs of it, but there are restrictions on what can be shared, and how much can be shared. There were articles that I was unable to get because of said restrictions, and others that could be shared with me freely. Some had to be photocopied from printed journals (this was a big part of my day as an ILL student employee), and some could be shared as preexisting digital files.
The bottom line is that even if there are workarounds, nothing is going to be equivalent to open access. There WILL be things that can't be accessed, and I think the most current stuff will be the hardest to get.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:07 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
This is mentioned in the article, but for those who weren't aware: authors have to pay Elsevier to publish their work and the institution has to pay Elsevier for a subscription to the journal where the work is published. And who is required to do all of the heavy lifting regarding peer review and editing to make sure these articles are considered worthy of publication? Sure as hell not anybody from Elsevier; that responsibility falls on other academics willing to volunteer their time and effort for free. What exactly does Elsevier do in this process to justify the costs incurred at each of these stages of publication?
Publishers' predatory profiteering is one major factor in the recent push for open access academic journalism, and I disagree that this would be devastating regarding information availability (see also: arXiv). All this does is shift the source of that information further into the open, while dealing a blow to the poisonous "publish or perish" mantra that serves as a severe obstacle to many early career academics.
I'm holding back on posting a much more caustic and lengthy diatribe against Elsevier and similar publishers, but TL;DR: Good on UC, and fuck Elsevier. This was a long time coming, and they deserve it.
posted by Arson Lupine at 2:08 PM on March 1, 2019 [71 favorites]
Publishers' predatory profiteering is one major factor in the recent push for open access academic journalism, and I disagree that this would be devastating regarding information availability (see also: arXiv). All this does is shift the source of that information further into the open, while dealing a blow to the poisonous "publish or perish" mantra that serves as a severe obstacle to many early career academics.
I'm holding back on posting a much more caustic and lengthy diatribe against Elsevier and similar publishers, but TL;DR: Good on UC, and fuck Elsevier. This was a long time coming, and they deserve it.
posted by Arson Lupine at 2:08 PM on March 1, 2019 [71 favorites]
authors have to pay Elsevier to publish their work
In some fields? I've published in an Elsevier journal and there was no fee. There are fees for open access.
I imagine this could hit grad students harder than profs. Undergrads won't care and will just read what they still have access to. The worst case scenario for profs is that they send an email to the author and receive a PDF of the paper by email. Grad students actually need the most relevant and newest research and may not feel confident contacting authors to get the papers.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:11 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
In some fields? I've published in an Elsevier journal and there was no fee. There are fees for open access.
I imagine this could hit grad students harder than profs. Undergrads won't care and will just read what they still have access to. The worst case scenario for profs is that they send an email to the author and receive a PDF of the paper by email. Grad students actually need the most relevant and newest research and may not feel confident contacting authors to get the papers.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:11 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
We just had something in one Elsevier's journals. The paper was free IIRC but it was a nearly a thousand more for cover page art.
posted by bonehead at 2:15 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by bonehead at 2:15 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
My wife spent a year as the psych faculty point person for her university's library. The process of selecting journal subscriptions was a nightmare of bundling that makes your cable subscription look like a fair deal. They had to subscribe to about a hundred journals that had received zero touches in five years which none of the faculty had even the slightest interest in inorder to get access to the journals they wanted. Negotiations took more than three months and in when the university simply cancelled a whack of subscriptions to save money the publishers just caved and gave them to them anyway (because journals with zero cites are next to worthless anyway and maybe this way somebody will cite one one day maybe).
Contact with for profit journal subscription services is how the fiercest open science activists are born.
posted by srboisvert at 2:17 PM on March 1, 2019 [18 favorites]
Contact with for profit journal subscription services is how the fiercest open science activists are born.
posted by srboisvert at 2:17 PM on March 1, 2019 [18 favorites]
It just means you go to Sci-Hub.
I do wonder if the next step here as the big deals collapse is going to be for the publishers to emulate the 2000s-era record industry and start suing universities and individual academics for copyright infringement. They've already gone down the road of suing Sci-Hub directly and managed to take domains and obtain blocks from ISPs in some countries. The lawsuits against ResearchGate keep stacking up. But with music and video, we've seen this playbook lead to suing end users directly over individual pieces of media, and it's not inconceivable to me that we're headed there here.
posted by zachlipton at 2:20 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
I do wonder if the next step here as the big deals collapse is going to be for the publishers to emulate the 2000s-era record industry and start suing universities and individual academics for copyright infringement. They've already gone down the road of suing Sci-Hub directly and managed to take domains and obtain blocks from ISPs in some countries. The lawsuits against ResearchGate keep stacking up. But with music and video, we've seen this playbook lead to suing end users directly over individual pieces of media, and it's not inconceivable to me that we're headed there here.
posted by zachlipton at 2:20 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
If they go down that route, though, it is going to be interesting because in that scenario you're looking at a road in which almost everyone illegally downloading music files is also producing them, and in which the people most likely to be illegally downloading the files are the people directly involved in creating new ones, who are not compensated by people paying for "legal" access. That changes the opinions about piracy coming from the community quite a bit.
I suspect that if they try that, the publishers will see strong pushback from academic publishers and quite a lot of fury from authors of papers. It will be interesting seeing how that breaks down legally and internationally. Academics benefit from more people reading their publications regardless of whether they pay for access, so you have a very different incentive system than you do from record companies and musical artists.
posted by sciatrix at 2:24 PM on March 1, 2019 [19 favorites]
I suspect that if they try that, the publishers will see strong pushback from academic publishers and quite a lot of fury from authors of papers. It will be interesting seeing how that breaks down legally and internationally. Academics benefit from more people reading their publications regardless of whether they pay for access, so you have a very different incentive system than you do from record companies and musical artists.
posted by sciatrix at 2:24 PM on March 1, 2019 [19 favorites]
I’m a supporter of open access, but it’s pretty costly right now. For example, I can publish a 10-page article in Journal of Dairy Science (publishedby Elsevier on a professional society’s behalf) for $850, but the same article published OA in, say PLOS One will run more like $2,000. Open Access is worth supporting, but it’s going to hurt a lot along the way.
posted by wintermind at 2:25 PM on March 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by wintermind at 2:25 PM on March 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
In the UK we have to make anything published out of national fixed research projects available OA. The last one i did cost about £3k.
posted by biffa at 2:28 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by biffa at 2:28 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
68.9% and 85.1% aren't great numbers if the specific article you need isn't available to you.
These numbers represent better access than most large research universities have through their subscriptions. Full open access is indeed the way to go.
Fuck Elsevier. They are predatory through and through, and nothing but. I consider it to be a moral virtue to steal all Elsevier papers through sci-hub, even if you have access otherwise.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:28 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
These numbers represent better access than most large research universities have through their subscriptions. Full open access is indeed the way to go.
Fuck Elsevier. They are predatory through and through, and nothing but. I consider it to be a moral virtue to steal all Elsevier papers through sci-hub, even if you have access otherwise.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:28 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
There are other avenues of attack, like pledging to tilt your review work towards open-access, or I've heard of people only publishing in open-access journals -- after they get tenure. (Incentives!) I don't know if tenure decisions could down-weight closed journals and remain even as just as they are.
Thinking about wintermind's comment -- if all the universities switched to open access at once, the money currently spent on closed journals is necessarily enough to pay for editorial and server costs, plus some extra that was the closed publishers' profits. But it isn't necessarily going to balance out university by university.
posted by clew at 2:30 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Thinking about wintermind's comment -- if all the universities switched to open access at once, the money currently spent on closed journals is necessarily enough to pay for editorial and server costs, plus some extra that was the closed publishers' profits. But it isn't necessarily going to balance out university by university.
posted by clew at 2:30 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
This will be inconvenient for scholars, but hardly devastating. Elsevier's journals are still indexed, and Unpaywall will work on a lot of their articles.
UC-affiliated authors moving away from Elsevier journals should also encourage scholars worldwide to do the same.
Elsevier delenda est.
posted by MengerSponge at 2:32 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
UC-affiliated authors moving away from Elsevier journals should also encourage scholars worldwide to do the same.
Elsevier delenda est.
posted by MengerSponge at 2:32 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
As More Universities ‘Ditch’ Elsevier, Sci-Hub Blossoms
posted by chavenet at 2:33 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 2:33 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Oh, another interesting wrinkle that I don't think anyone has mentioned: many of these journals are run by scientific societies, which are generally run by academics acting as volunteers rather than paid journal staff. They're often who coordinates peer reviewing, as I understand it, and these scientific societies may have their own conflicts with Elsevier or other imprints. For example, one of my academic societies is the Society for the Study of Evolution, which prioritizes open access publication but (as I vaguely recall from my last meeting) was unhappy at the fees for doing so which their publisher, Wiley, wanted to impose when publishing its journals (Evolution and Evolution Letters). As I recall, there was some conflict between the society and the publisher about how much this fee should be, and whether or not open access publications would be allowed as a viable option a few years ago.
If conflicts flare up between these scientific societies (typically all working academics) and the publishers, that opens yet another potential front which Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, etc. will need to fight on in a theoretical scientific publishing war on a journal-by-journal basis. I'm not sure who wins if a society chooses to walk away from a publisher, as far as copyright goes; I really suspect that the prestige would follow the society rather than the name of any given publisher. But I'm not aware of cases where the relationship got bad enough to encourage journals to switch publishers. Does anyone know offhand?
posted by sciatrix at 2:35 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
If conflicts flare up between these scientific societies (typically all working academics) and the publishers, that opens yet another potential front which Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, etc. will need to fight on in a theoretical scientific publishing war on a journal-by-journal basis. I'm not sure who wins if a society chooses to walk away from a publisher, as far as copyright goes; I really suspect that the prestige would follow the society rather than the name of any given publisher. But I'm not aware of cases where the relationship got bad enough to encourage journals to switch publishers. Does anyone know offhand?
posted by sciatrix at 2:35 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
In the UK we have to make anything published out of national fixed research projects available OA. The last one i did cost about £3k
Our little school of public health publishes maybe a thousand papers a year. That's $4M US per year just to publish for just one school in the academic health center, so you have the medical, dental, pharmacy, nursing, veterinary, and allied health schools, and then there are the institute of technology, the college of biological sciences, the school of art and design, architecture school, the college of liberal arts, the law school, the business school. That's money that can't be used for research or education.
Now, assume those costs are real and not rent-seeking, then you're just displacing the fees to the publishers for the same constraints, only now the payments route through the scholars rather than the library. I don't have any knowledge of the actual costs involved, but making each professor now worry about budgeting and paying for each publication seems like a much less efficient way to handle it. I'm all for open access and hope that we can find a way to finance it that isn't through cut-throat publishers and doesn't drop the administrative burdens on already over-worked and underfunded academics. Pretty please?
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:39 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
Our little school of public health publishes maybe a thousand papers a year. That's $4M US per year just to publish for just one school in the academic health center, so you have the medical, dental, pharmacy, nursing, veterinary, and allied health schools, and then there are the institute of technology, the college of biological sciences, the school of art and design, architecture school, the college of liberal arts, the law school, the business school. That's money that can't be used for research or education.
Now, assume those costs are real and not rent-seeking, then you're just displacing the fees to the publishers for the same constraints, only now the payments route through the scholars rather than the library. I don't have any knowledge of the actual costs involved, but making each professor now worry about budgeting and paying for each publication seems like a much less efficient way to handle it. I'm all for open access and hope that we can find a way to finance it that isn't through cut-throat publishers and doesn't drop the administrative burdens on already over-worked and underfunded academics. Pretty please?
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:39 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
Yes, it's never been clear to me what Elsevier (or Blackwell or Wiley or any other big publisher) actually adds to the process. They do not create original content. They do not peer review or edit that content. Other than typesetting and hosting, their contribution is pretty much zero. Unless you count rent-seeking.
So yes, the sooner they're ground into dust the better.
posted by orrnyereg at 2:42 PM on March 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
So yes, the sooner they're ground into dust the better.
posted by orrnyereg at 2:42 PM on March 1, 2019 [11 favorites]
Wait, why is Open Access MORE expensive? If the whole gripe about Elsevier is that they're gouging for not much added value, I don't understand why OA is somehow costlier. I'm not an academic (anymore) so I don't have recent experience with this; could someone please elaborate?
posted by axiom at 2:47 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by axiom at 2:47 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
Now, assume those costs are real and not rent-seeking
Well, I think that there's the rub. I wind up genuinely wracking my brain to figure out what on earth those publishing costs go towards, and I'm not the only one. For a paper to be published, what costs are there? Labor is going to be the most important one: labor to pay the authors of the content, labor to fact-check that content and make sure that peers review it: the labor of those peers and also the labor of the people who hunt them down and ask them to review and make sure they turn it in on time. Labor to typeset the final pieces and make sure the figures look all right, too. And then hosting costs and printing costs for journals that have print editions (increasingly less common and a smaller and smaller chunk of the market for the journals), plus marketing for individual journals to try and get readership.
Of all those potential costs...
-labor to pay the authors: nil. Authors are not paid.
-labor to review the submissions: nil. Reviewers are not paid.
-labor to wrangle the volunteer reviewers: nil. Scientific societies manage this.
-typesetting: Actual cost to the journal.
-hosting: Actual cost to the journal.
potentially marketing, but even then, I would say this cost is partially bourne by the society, not the publisher per se, except at the very highest levels that don't really need them.
So.... why the hell don't we jettison these companies and replace them with a basic vanity press? That's how these companies basically assumed their current position anyway; they've just grown fat and bold on the meat of the library subscriptions that made more sense before the Internet and the modern scientific journal process changed the scope of the publishing scene. They are rent-seeking in the most obnoxious sense of the word.
posted by sciatrix at 2:48 PM on March 1, 2019 [22 favorites]
Well, I think that there's the rub. I wind up genuinely wracking my brain to figure out what on earth those publishing costs go towards, and I'm not the only one. For a paper to be published, what costs are there? Labor is going to be the most important one: labor to pay the authors of the content, labor to fact-check that content and make sure that peers review it: the labor of those peers and also the labor of the people who hunt them down and ask them to review and make sure they turn it in on time. Labor to typeset the final pieces and make sure the figures look all right, too. And then hosting costs and printing costs for journals that have print editions (increasingly less common and a smaller and smaller chunk of the market for the journals), plus marketing for individual journals to try and get readership.
Of all those potential costs...
-labor to pay the authors: nil. Authors are not paid.
-labor to review the submissions: nil. Reviewers are not paid.
-labor to wrangle the volunteer reviewers: nil. Scientific societies manage this.
-typesetting: Actual cost to the journal.
-hosting: Actual cost to the journal.
potentially marketing, but even then, I would say this cost is partially bourne by the society, not the publisher per se, except at the very highest levels that don't really need them.
So.... why the hell don't we jettison these companies and replace them with a basic vanity press? That's how these companies basically assumed their current position anyway; they've just grown fat and bold on the meat of the library subscriptions that made more sense before the Internet and the modern scientific journal process changed the scope of the publishing scene. They are rent-seeking in the most obnoxious sense of the word.
posted by sciatrix at 2:48 PM on March 1, 2019 [22 favorites]
Wait, why is Open Access MORE expensive?
Open access is something authors can pay journals for in order to make up for the perceived loss of income to the journal for requiring subscriptions to access it. That's why it's more expensive for authors; because journals will often expect fees from the authors in order to publish the work to everyone.
posted by sciatrix at 2:49 PM on March 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
Open access is something authors can pay journals for in order to make up for the perceived loss of income to the journal for requiring subscriptions to access it. That's why it's more expensive for authors; because journals will often expect fees from the authors in order to publish the work to everyone.
posted by sciatrix at 2:49 PM on March 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
Understanding Submission and Publication Fees (Michaela Panter, PhD, Senior Academic Editor for American Journal Experts)
I wonder what the rise of SciHub has done to the Private/OA balance, in terms of costs charged and articles accessed.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:53 PM on March 1, 2019
Publication fees. These fees, charged by certain open access journals post-acceptance, are also known as author publishing charges or article processing charges (APCs) and range from $8-3,900. APCs may be driven down by submission fees, particularly among open access journals with high rejection rates. In contrast to post-acceptance charges by traditional journals, these APCs are more often flat fees because they primarily fund peer review and online dissemination, which are length independent.Emphasis mine -- that's a pretty wide range.
I wonder what the rise of SciHub has done to the Private/OA balance, in terms of costs charged and articles accessed.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:53 PM on March 1, 2019
If you're interested in OA articles on library, librarian and information science, then Ariadne (www.ariadne.ac.uk) is still going - it looks like the team running it at Loughborough University have finished moving it away from Drupal, with some minor snags to tidy up. It has a bit of a reputation now for being the OA journal/webzine that, while nearly every other UK academic digital library project and service from the 1990s ran its course, is still happily going. There is already talk of the 25th anniversary in 2021.
Free to publish in, free to read, and the turnaround time for articles is usually a few weeks. The first issue was back in January 1996; the editor of the web edition (there was a parallel print version for several years) was an idiot in a waistcoat and here's what his hamfisted HTML produced at the time. Some of the articles rack up a lot of citations, according to Google Scholar; if you want to put an article in, here's the current editor.
Oh, a few years back I did an article in the same Ariadne which lists and links to other library and information science journals and webzines which are free to both publish in, and read. Most, but not all, appear to still be kicking around.
A few other (new) journals which may be of interest to people into games, play and philosophy, and the overlap between them. Both journals are free to publish in, and free to read:
* The Journal of the Philosophy of Games (issue 1 up and live)
* The Journal of Play in Adulthood (just new off the ground)
posted by Wordshore at 2:56 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
Free to publish in, free to read, and the turnaround time for articles is usually a few weeks. The first issue was back in January 1996; the editor of the web edition (there was a parallel print version for several years) was an idiot in a waistcoat and here's what his hamfisted HTML produced at the time. Some of the articles rack up a lot of citations, according to Google Scholar; if you want to put an article in, here's the current editor.
Oh, a few years back I did an article in the same Ariadne which lists and links to other library and information science journals and webzines which are free to both publish in, and read. Most, but not all, appear to still be kicking around.
A few other (new) journals which may be of interest to people into games, play and philosophy, and the overlap between them. Both journals are free to publish in, and free to read:
* The Journal of the Philosophy of Games (issue 1 up and live)
* The Journal of Play in Adulthood (just new off the ground)
posted by Wordshore at 2:56 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
See also: Making the Choice: Open Access vs. Traditional Journals (Sarah Conte, PhD, Research Communication Partner for American Journal Experts).
posted by filthy light thief at 2:56 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
4 Factors to Consider When Deciding Between an Open Access or Traditional Journal:OA boasts higher visibility and faster speeds, though cost seems to come on the front-end for those publishing research, instead of the back-end, for those looking for research, and some OA journals lack the prestige of the Big Name journals.
1. Visibility
2. Cost
3. Prestige
4. Speed
posted by filthy light thief at 2:56 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
YAY! I say that as an Elsevier author.....
posted by acrasis at 2:57 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by acrasis at 2:57 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
I’ve already flagged two comments in this thread as fantastic, and haven’t gotten halfway through it!
Very glad to see UC take a stand against the predatory academic publishing sector. Also appreciate the comments providing context, and how much of the information will still be available, though just not the past year.
Jebus, if even half of that $10 million were redirected into developing non-profit, open access alternatives, it would go a long way toward making it the true industry standard.
posted by darkstar at 2:57 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Very glad to see UC take a stand against the predatory academic publishing sector. Also appreciate the comments providing context, and how much of the information will still be available, though just not the past year.
Jebus, if even half of that $10 million were redirected into developing non-profit, open access alternatives, it would go a long way toward making it the true industry standard.
posted by darkstar at 2:57 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I wind up genuinely wracking my brain to figure out what on earth those publishing costs go towards
One piece of research I read some time ago claimed that the profit margins of academic publishers are larger than medical, weapons, and oil companies.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:58 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
One piece of research I read some time ago claimed that the profit margins of academic publishers are larger than medical, weapons, and oil companies.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 2:58 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Elsevier's profit margin looks to be 35-40%.
posted by foxfirefey at 3:03 PM on March 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by foxfirefey at 3:03 PM on March 1, 2019 [9 favorites]
Contact with for profit journal subscription services is how the fiercest open science activists are born.
Yup. It’s the same way that dealing with for-profit textbook publishers is how many of us became radicalized OER materials activists, too.
This is all cut from the same cloth. It’s part of that “disruptive innovation” that people were saying the invention of the Internet was all about. It’s just taken longer for some sectors to truly embrace it than others.
posted by darkstar at 3:07 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yup. It’s the same way that dealing with for-profit textbook publishers is how many of us became radicalized OER materials activists, too.
This is all cut from the same cloth. It’s part of that “disruptive innovation” that people were saying the invention of the Internet was all about. It’s just taken longer for some sectors to truly embrace it than others.
posted by darkstar at 3:07 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I worked for years as an editorial assistant at an academic journal that was independently published, but was outsourced to a large publisher toward the end of my tenure.
I have no love for Elsevier; they were one of the most difficult companies we ever worked with. I'm not surprised to hear that they were charging authors, which is something we never would have done.
But the reason all academic work isn't free and open is because editors and all the other people who work to take it from its original form, vet it, curate it, shepherd it through the review process, proofread and edit it, and make it into what you read in a journal need and deserve to make a living.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:14 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
I have no love for Elsevier; they were one of the most difficult companies we ever worked with. I'm not surprised to hear that they were charging authors, which is something we never would have done.
But the reason all academic work isn't free and open is because editors and all the other people who work to take it from its original form, vet it, curate it, shepherd it through the review process, proofread and edit it, and make it into what you read in a journal need and deserve to make a living.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:14 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
68.9% and 85.1% aren't great numbers if the specific article you need isn't available to you.
I believe that these numbers refer to Sci-Hub's stored collection. If you request an article from Sci-Hub that they don't have stored, they try downloading it from one of oodles of different university accounts they have and then they add it to their repository.
They pull from a huge collection of universities. This makes it more complete than probably any single university, and their locally hosted repo is constantly growing.
posted by painquale at 3:14 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I believe that these numbers refer to Sci-Hub's stored collection. If you request an article from Sci-Hub that they don't have stored, they try downloading it from one of oodles of different university accounts they have and then they add it to their repository.
They pull from a huge collection of universities. This makes it more complete than probably any single university, and their locally hosted repo is constantly growing.
posted by painquale at 3:14 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yep, from the paper: "Since Sci-Hub can retrieve, in real time, requested articles that are not in its database, our coverage figures are a lower bound."
posted by painquale at 3:22 PM on March 1, 2019
posted by painquale at 3:22 PM on March 1, 2019
But the reason all academic work isn't free and open is because editors and all the other people who work to take it from its original form, vet it, curate it, shepherd it through the review process, proofread and edit it, and make it into what you read in a journal need and deserve to make a living.
Yes. And Elsevier does and pays for none of that.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:31 PM on March 1, 2019 [16 favorites]
Yes. And Elsevier does and pays for none of that.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:31 PM on March 1, 2019 [16 favorites]
So.... why the hell don't we jettison these companies and replace them with a basic vanity press?
Academic institutions are partly to blame here. In the field I work in, there are few major journals and most belong to Elsevier, Wiley, Springer etc. Every time I had to co-sign publications with professional scientists it had to be in those journals because academic institutions judge their careers on the impact factors of the journals they publish in. And there's a lot of inertia too: some scientists have been told for decades that publishing their work in Elsevier's International Journal of Irrumative Intercrurality is the only way to go.
posted by elgilito at 3:40 PM on March 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
Academic institutions are partly to blame here. In the field I work in, there are few major journals and most belong to Elsevier, Wiley, Springer etc. Every time I had to co-sign publications with professional scientists it had to be in those journals because academic institutions judge their careers on the impact factors of the journals they publish in. And there's a lot of inertia too: some scientists have been told for decades that publishing their work in Elsevier's International Journal of Irrumative Intercrurality is the only way to go.
posted by elgilito at 3:40 PM on March 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
-labor to wrangle the volunteer reviewers: nil. Scientific societies manage this.
Editors and associate editors get paid. Not a lot but they do get paid. There are also journal staff who assist the editors and associate editors in managing the process and using the systems and do some of the wrangling.
posted by srboisvert at 3:49 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Editors and associate editors get paid. Not a lot but they do get paid. There are also journal staff who assist the editors and associate editors in managing the process and using the systems and do some of the wrangling.
posted by srboisvert at 3:49 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
I don't think anyone objects to paid editors and staff, which exist in non-profit open access journals too. That work has value and the people performing it need to be paid. The market can decide how much it values those services by having journals compete partially on the basis of their publishing fees, which can range from free (in reality, a handful of dollars per article covered by institutional support) of something like arXiv to the $1500-$2900 (with a fee assistance program offered) of PLOS, or a healthier middle ground.
posted by zachlipton at 3:53 PM on March 1, 2019
posted by zachlipton at 3:53 PM on March 1, 2019
Also, the big companies have the infrastructure for promotion and for making articles visible and easier to search for. The same thing has happened as in other industries in this century, where a few big guys have absorbed all the little guys through economies of scale.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:54 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:54 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
Elsevier's profit margin looks to be 35-40%.
As a result of quick googling, so grains of salt etc.: profit margins for pharmaceutical companies are around 12-14%, weapons around 12%, oil around 6%.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:54 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
As a result of quick googling, so grains of salt etc.: profit margins for pharmaceutical companies are around 12-14%, weapons around 12%, oil around 6%.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:54 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
So "Open Access" like "Open Source" is a bullshit term invented by pro-money people to distort the fact that it's not really Open in the Richard Stallman "Free" sense, but still confined and held back by SOMEONE. It's only where the burden of the cost comes from, they're still just raking in money but who pays is the difference?
Well that's pretty shitty then.
Aaron Swartz was doing gods work and it's still a shame what happened to him, and even the small recourse we get that's called "open" is still a shadow of what it could/should be.
Still it's better than the old models. Just... ugh.
posted by symbioid at 3:58 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
Well that's pretty shitty then.
Aaron Swartz was doing gods work and it's still a shame what happened to him, and even the small recourse we get that's called "open" is still a shadow of what it could/should be.
Still it's better than the old models. Just... ugh.
posted by symbioid at 3:58 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
Okay, so, so many facets of this are absurd, but I'm still absorbing this: the authors of studies have to pay journals to publish them?! What's the rationale for that?
posted by overglow at 3:59 PM on March 1, 2019
posted by overglow at 3:59 PM on March 1, 2019
Proving you buy into the system? The same we all are forced to subject ourselves to the system. An act of humiliation? The same sort of tricks all sorts of employers use to trick employees into doing things against their best interest in the name of "getting ahead" and "succeeding"?
posted by symbioid at 4:00 PM on March 1, 2019
posted by symbioid at 4:00 PM on March 1, 2019
What's the rationale for that?
Our careers depend on publishing a certain number of papers per unit time, and the more selective the journal we publish, the better we look?
posted by sciatrix at 4:01 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Our careers depend on publishing a certain number of papers per unit time, and the more selective the journal we publish, the better we look?
posted by sciatrix at 4:01 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
I don't personally pay to publish my papers; the institution I work for pays for it, and everyone is delighted if I get charged an arm and a leg, because that must mean the journal is super cool. Fine, I don't care. What I do care about is that I have to pay for the right to hand out pdfs of the paper, and the price is absurd. People are always asking me for reprints and I have to give them a word document.
posted by acrasis at 4:12 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by acrasis at 4:12 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
What's the rationale for that?
Articles don’t get edited and reviewed on their own. There are costs associated with it. I have no truck with journals charging for submission. Most research grants and funding vehicles allow/encourage money to be earmarked for publication. I think this is a better solution than charging readers of the articles. Mainly because the vast majority of academic research is funded by public entities or non-profits. If the public is funding your research, I feel you have the obligation to publish in an open access journal where the public can read it for free. Some grants/organizations require this, but many do not because a lot of the “prestige” journals are behind a paywall.
All I can say is Fuck Elsevier. The UC system is huge, and I hope the librarians’ refusal to pay Elsevier’s usurious fees is the beginning of the end for them.
posted by bluefly at 4:16 PM on March 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
Articles don’t get edited and reviewed on their own. There are costs associated with it. I have no truck with journals charging for submission. Most research grants and funding vehicles allow/encourage money to be earmarked for publication. I think this is a better solution than charging readers of the articles. Mainly because the vast majority of academic research is funded by public entities or non-profits. If the public is funding your research, I feel you have the obligation to publish in an open access journal where the public can read it for free. Some grants/organizations require this, but many do not because a lot of the “prestige” journals are behind a paywall.
All I can say is Fuck Elsevier. The UC system is huge, and I hope the librarians’ refusal to pay Elsevier’s usurious fees is the beginning of the end for them.
posted by bluefly at 4:16 PM on March 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
It's my understanding as well that if you do go and start your own journal, for your niche field or whatever, and it starts to take off and develop a reasonable impact factor, eventually you'll have someone from Elsevier knocking on your door. They were relentless about buying up formerly-independent academic presses in the early 2000s, and more recently they seem to be moving into preprints and institutional repositories (ironically by buying what was once Berkeley Electronic Press, RIP).
Personally I think they know they're going to lose the war over journals, and they're just milking the scientific world for all they can on the way out, and using all that cash to insinuate themselves elsewhere.
Perversely, one of the ways they seem to be trying to do that is by using open-access deposit mandates as a scare tactic to get universities to buy their proprietary software for managing their internal repository (as a "compliance" tool), and which also injects Elsevier-owned content into that internal repository, undermining it as an open-access tool.
Although I don't know if Elsevier is in the top 10 or maybe even 50 most evil organizations in the world, it's not for lack of trying.
I thought this Tweet from Philipp Winter at Princeton (sort of a big deal in the academic side of the pro-privacy/crypto/anonymity community) was interesting:
Personally I think they know they're going to lose the war over journals, and they're just milking the scientific world for all they can on the way out, and using all that cash to insinuate themselves elsewhere.
Perversely, one of the ways they seem to be trying to do that is by using open-access deposit mandates as a scare tactic to get universities to buy their proprietary software for managing their internal repository (as a "compliance" tool), and which also injects Elsevier-owned content into that internal repository, undermining it as an open-access tool.
Although I don't know if Elsevier is in the top 10 or maybe even 50 most evil organizations in the world, it's not for lack of trying.
I thought this Tweet from Philipp Winter at Princeton (sort of a big deal in the academic side of the pro-privacy/crypto/anonymity community) was interesting:
Use Sci-Hub, especially if you work at a university. Avoiding a publisher's portal will reduce access numbers (universities keep statistics) and eventually your institution will wonder if they should continue to subscribe (they shouldn't).posted by Kadin2048 at 4:23 PM on March 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that page charges evolved as a way of helping offset the cost of publication without having to hike subscription prices to unattractive levels.
I’ve had my eye on PeerJ for a while. They’re an Open Access publisher with an interesting model — you can pay a one-off charge to publish an article($1,095 for PeerJ – the Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences) or purchase a lifetime membership and publish 1, 2, or 5 articles each year ($399 to $499 for the membership). The only real catch is that all authors must be members. There are no article submission fees, you pay only after an article is accepted following peer-review. For some scientists it could work out very affordably.
posted by wintermind at 4:25 PM on March 1, 2019
I’ve had my eye on PeerJ for a while. They’re an Open Access publisher with an interesting model — you can pay a one-off charge to publish an article($1,095 for PeerJ – the Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences) or purchase a lifetime membership and publish 1, 2, or 5 articles each year ($399 to $499 for the membership). The only real catch is that all authors must be members. There are no article submission fees, you pay only after an article is accepted following peer-review. For some scientists it could work out very affordably.
posted by wintermind at 4:25 PM on March 1, 2019
Math, physics, and CS have long had the arXiv (pronounced "archive", the X is actually a Greek letter "chi", for some reason people love cutesy names like this), where versions of most articles get posted before submission to journals. These are usually substantially the same as the journal versions. This is great, it means effectively almost everything is open-access.
There's now bioRxiv and PsyArXiv (why did they stick with the weird naming schemes?!?) for biological and psychological sciences. Consider checking these if you're looking for an available version of recent work and can't access journal subscriptions.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:35 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
There's now bioRxiv and PsyArXiv (why did they stick with the weird naming schemes?!?) for biological and psychological sciences. Consider checking these if you're looking for an available version of recent work and can't access journal subscriptions.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:35 PM on March 1, 2019 [7 favorites]
I realize I'm spoiled by working in a field with a decades-long preprint culture where nobody actually bothers to read the paper as published by the journal, 'cause they've already read it months earlier when it was accepted. But, this sounds fantastic.
I've written for several expensive, for-profit journals. I've been a guest editor for one. They contribute nothing to the process except shockingly bad online interfaces and pointless arguments about debatable grammar choices. That and a prestigious name that convinces the rest of us to pay them money to publish and to work for free as referees.
It's high time we scraped the barnacles off this academic boat.
posted by eotvos at 4:52 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
I've written for several expensive, for-profit journals. I've been a guest editor for one. They contribute nothing to the process except shockingly bad online interfaces and pointless arguments about debatable grammar choices. That and a prestigious name that convinces the rest of us to pay them money to publish and to work for free as referees.
It's high time we scraped the barnacles off this academic boat.
posted by eotvos at 4:52 PM on March 1, 2019 [8 favorites]
Think how far $10M / year could go to helping fund open access to journals outside Elsevier's clutches. The rogue in me likes the idea of using some of the money to improve Sci-Hub itself, but since Sci-Hub isn't licensing copyrights I suspect the UC system can't touch it. So maybe some other indexing systems, or just take some of the sting out of the Open Access publishing fees its staff are paying.
posted by Nelson at 5:05 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Nelson at 5:05 PM on March 1, 2019 [1 favorite]
I looked briefly at PLOS and PeerJ's webpages to see if there was a breakdown of their operating costs to provide transparency regarding their fees. I didn't find any. (Maybe such breakdowns do exist and I just didn't find them?)
Considering the enormous costs, the fact that many universities pay twice (subscription fees and individual fees for publishing articles), the stifling effect on research at less wealthy institutions, the meager services provided, and the fact that much research is actually publicly funded (as are many of the universities paying for access and publication) and therefore should be publicly available -- the least we should be demanding is transparency regarding what all the money is going toward.
posted by trig at 5:07 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Considering the enormous costs, the fact that many universities pay twice (subscription fees and individual fees for publishing articles), the stifling effect on research at less wealthy institutions, the meager services provided, and the fact that much research is actually publicly funded (as are many of the universities paying for access and publication) and therefore should be publicly available -- the least we should be demanding is transparency regarding what all the money is going toward.
posted by trig at 5:07 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I'm in the humanities where there are many actually-free open-access journals. I firmly believe in publishing in these venues so that my work can actually be read by anyone who's interested. They are often viewed with disdain by uptight/arrogant senior faculty and admins, which I find classist and short-sighted, among other rants I'll save for another day. Many of us have been working to change institutional attitudes toward newer publishing models so that they become more accepted. This also overlaps with greater critiques of the biases and gatekeeping in traditional/prestige journals which has been a frequent topic of discussion from those in gender, race, and/or ethnic studies, among other fields. (And don't even get me started on the top journals in my field which are either currently embargoing new submissions and/or taking 2+ years to publish your work, as if tenure clocks weren't a thing.) The sooner we completely get rid of the traditonal models the better, I say.
posted by TwoStride at 5:38 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by TwoStride at 5:38 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
Good. Great, actually. The sooner that US moves to open access, the better. I was without institutional access for a few months and still had to do work, and it was awful. From what I understand, it's even worse for poorer institutions outside of the US, and that's created a grey market network of sites that specialize in providing access without paying insane library fees.
If we're going to continue reforming publishing: make peer review and editing either compensated, or associated with reviewer scores.
posted by codacorolla at 5:48 PM on March 1, 2019
If we're going to continue reforming publishing: make peer review and editing either compensated, or associated with reviewer scores.
posted by codacorolla at 5:48 PM on March 1, 2019
But the reason all academic work isn't free and open is because editors and all the other people who work to take it from its original form, vet it, curate it, shepherd it through the review process, proofread and edit it, and make it into what you read in a journal need and deserve to make a living.
You absolutely need editors, but that's a lot of profit margin beyond editors' salaries. The argument here is not about whether it's fair to pay something, it's about whether the academics and universities are being gouged while simultaneously being pressured into donating free labor. (Hint : yes.) Also, the publishing agreements make it very clear that the buck stops with the authors for final proofing errors, including ones that the journal INTRODUCES into the paper.
Also, Elsevier still employs this person, who thought it was cool to be rude and dismissive if not outright unpleasant to people on twitter. He used to be listed Elsevier's Director of Scholarly Communication, but the account is now labeled as personal views. (At least after much outcry, he did the minimum of apologizing days later.)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 5:55 PM on March 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
You absolutely need editors, but that's a lot of profit margin beyond editors' salaries. The argument here is not about whether it's fair to pay something, it's about whether the academics and universities are being gouged while simultaneously being pressured into donating free labor. (Hint : yes.) Also, the publishing agreements make it very clear that the buck stops with the authors for final proofing errors, including ones that the journal INTRODUCES into the paper.
Also, Elsevier still employs this person, who thought it was cool to be rude and dismissive if not outright unpleasant to people on twitter. He used to be listed Elsevier's Director of Scholarly Communication, but the account is now labeled as personal views. (At least after much outcry, he did the minimum of apologizing days later.)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 5:55 PM on March 1, 2019 [10 favorites]
As a federal employee, I can’t assign copyright to any journal and we’ve posted PDFs of our papers for years. I also post them to my personal website. I’ve never been hassled about it, but I’m not really sure it’s actually okay in a strict sense. I’d much rather have a fully open system that lets everyone read everything. I think most scholars would.
posted by wintermind at 6:00 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by wintermind at 6:00 PM on March 1, 2019 [3 favorites]
mefi's own, I might add.
One of the problems with a lot of the alternatives is that they also rely on contingent labor. I recently received an email from PLoS: "Thanks for agreeing to edit our upcoming special issue on {topic related to your research}, Dr. Sockermom!" I wrote back and said I had never agreed to such thing, because I had not. But I've reviewed for and guest edited for them before, and their model--while still open-access--still relies on a lot of contingent, unpaid labor to happen. So do services like Unpaywall, which recently copped to using low-paid contingent labor from Mechanical Turk for some of its operations.
We've got to really dismantle this whole thing, which is going to require a serious restructuring of the tenure process if it's to work. We can't just replace the current scholarly publishing model with another one that relies on invisible contingent labor.
The Internet's Own Boy, the film about Aaron Swartz, does a really lovely job of describing how scholarly publishing works, starting at about minute 37 (but the whole movie is worth a watch, for sure).
posted by sockermom at 6:04 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
One of the problems with a lot of the alternatives is that they also rely on contingent labor. I recently received an email from PLoS: "Thanks for agreeing to edit our upcoming special issue on {topic related to your research}, Dr. Sockermom!" I wrote back and said I had never agreed to such thing, because I had not. But I've reviewed for and guest edited for them before, and their model--while still open-access--still relies on a lot of contingent, unpaid labor to happen. So do services like Unpaywall, which recently copped to using low-paid contingent labor from Mechanical Turk for some of its operations.
We've got to really dismantle this whole thing, which is going to require a serious restructuring of the tenure process if it's to work. We can't just replace the current scholarly publishing model with another one that relies on invisible contingent labor.
The Internet's Own Boy, the film about Aaron Swartz, does a really lovely job of describing how scholarly publishing works, starting at about minute 37 (but the whole movie is worth a watch, for sure).
posted by sockermom at 6:04 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
I'm not sure who wins if a society chooses to walk away from a publisher, as far as copyright goes; I really suspect that the prestige would follow the society rather than the name of any given publisher. But I'm not aware of cases where the relationship got bad enough to encourage journals to switch publishers. Does anyone know offhand?
The whole editorial board quit Lingua, a highly rated Linguistics Elsevier journal, and founded open access Glossa instead.
posted by heyforfour at 6:08 PM on March 1, 2019 [19 favorites]
The whole editorial board quit Lingua, a highly rated Linguistics Elsevier journal, and founded open access Glossa instead.
posted by heyforfour at 6:08 PM on March 1, 2019 [19 favorites]
At least after much outcry, he did the minimum of apologizing days later.
posted by grouse at 6:23 PM on March 1, 2019 [13 favorites]
How to apologize, the @ElsevierConnect way:This is great news and I am happy to see it. I like journals and I find them valuable. Yes, it costs money to run scholarly journals, even though the bulk of the work is done by volunteers. But Elsevier makes more than a billion U.S. dollars per year in profit from their publishing business. Their only defense for this obscene profit margin is that it is "what the market will bear". Looks like the market isn't bearing it anymore.
1. Block your critics
2. Delete truths you previously spoke that are now... inconvenient
3. Claim you were misquoted (no one can check—you destroyed the evidence!)
4. Say you're sorry for your "tone"
5. Change absolutely nothing
posted by grouse at 6:23 PM on March 1, 2019 [13 favorites]
(I cannot watch a film about Aaron Swartz because I will cry. I had no connection to him, but it feels like someone hurt one of my students - HOW DARE YOU DO THAT TO ONE OF MY CHILDREN.)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 6:32 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 6:32 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
the fact that many universities pay twice (subscription fees and individual fees for publishing articles)
This really hits the nail on the head. The traditional model was merely exorbitant when it was free publication and ever-increasing subscription fees. Then we added non-open access publishing charges in some journals: submission fees, page fees, color charges, etc.... Then with open access came article processing charges in the thousands of dollars to pay off the publisher to make the article freely available. The publishers are charging more and more to publish, but still want the same big deal money to access the resulting research.
As UC writes in their excellent FAQ:
This doesn't look like a standard "hey, your monopoly power means that price increase is pretty steep, so let's jostle until we both cave a little" negotiation. This is the UC system calling bullshit on the entire business decision to treat open access as a new revenue stream, continuing some of the work that has started in Europe.
posted by zachlipton at 6:44 PM on March 1, 2019 [23 favorites]
This really hits the nail on the head. The traditional model was merely exorbitant when it was free publication and ever-increasing subscription fees. Then we added non-open access publishing charges in some journals: submission fees, page fees, color charges, etc.... Then with open access came article processing charges in the thousands of dollars to pay off the publisher to make the article freely available. The publishers are charging more and more to publish, but still want the same big deal money to access the resulting research.
As UC writes in their excellent FAQ:
I've heard the current system described as double dipping. What does this mean?The publishers decided that open access mandates were a wonderful opportunity to extract even more revenue in return for nothing. Elsevier has a bunch of words that try to explain why they're not double dipping, but none of this holds up. If UC wants everything they publish to be open access (setting aside those journals that don't allow it at all), they'd have to pay tens of millions in processing charges and they'd still be paying tens of millions for subscriptions. If everyone did that, it would just be a giant pot of money for Elsevier. So UC tried to negotiate a combined deal: the library would have a single contract that covered both subscription and publishing fees. As I understand it, Elsevier's proposal to do that would have cost a fortune ("Elsevier’s revenue would have increased by $30 million (an 80% increase in total payments) if all current UC authors were to take advantage of the open access option over the life of the three-year contract"). What a deal: pay 80% more and everything you publish will be free for other people to read. Uh, will those other people be paying less for their subscriptions then, since the word "free" presumably means something? Of course not, they can negotiate their own deals to pay 80% more too. There's no transition to actual free access to scholarship here, just, as always, ever-increasing revenue for the publishers with no corresponding expenses.
Many traditional subscription journals now permit authors to opt to pay an article processing charge (APC) to publish their article as open access, a practice that’s come to be called “hybrid” publishing. Under this system, authors who publish open access are treated as an added revenue source, while subscription fees are rarely reduced. Elsevier targets authors as an added revenue source and has strategically prioritized the expansion of its “author-pays” hybrid model. Yet Elsevier does not reduce its subscription fees when an open access fee is paid by an author, and thus they are effectively charging twice for access to this content.
This doesn't look like a standard "hey, your monopoly power means that price increase is pretty steep, so let's jostle until we both cave a little" negotiation. This is the UC system calling bullshit on the entire business decision to treat open access as a new revenue stream, continuing some of the work that has started in Europe.
posted by zachlipton at 6:44 PM on March 1, 2019 [23 favorites]
Could someone clarify the relationship between Elsevier and the Digital Commons network, and to what degree that's related to this?
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:51 PM on March 1, 2019
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:51 PM on March 1, 2019
Also, Elsevier still employs this person, who thought it was cool to be rude and dismissive if not outright unpleasant to people on twitter. He used to be listed Elsevier's Director of Scholarly Communication, but the account is now labeled as personal views. (At least after much outcry, he did the minimum of apologizing days later.)
Oh this is rich: Oh, one more thing: the public has free access to all Elsevier content, through many official channels, not to mention just emailing a researcher to ask for a copy [link to some stuff that does not actually provide "the public" "free access to all Elsevier content"]
So, uh, Elsevier is straight up claiming that all the content they charge billions for is available for free to everyone? If that was actually true, why subscribe?
posted by zachlipton at 7:12 PM on March 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
Oh this is rich: Oh, one more thing: the public has free access to all Elsevier content, through many official channels, not to mention just emailing a researcher to ask for a copy [link to some stuff that does not actually provide "the public" "free access to all Elsevier content"]
So, uh, Elsevier is straight up claiming that all the content they charge billions for is available for free to everyone? If that was actually true, why subscribe?
posted by zachlipton at 7:12 PM on March 1, 2019 [4 favorites]
It will be fixed when Elsevier is a shadow of its former self and all research is open access. There's no alternative at this point.
I'm not entirely happy about this.
Not that I think Elsevier should rake in $35 a paper. The real value in these journals is not the papers themselves. It's the table of contents of each issue, and more importantly, it's all the dross that is NOT in the table of contents.
The problem, however, is that if you are not the customer for these journals, then you are the product. Reader-pays is the only way to align the editors' interest with the reader's.
posted by ocschwar at 7:42 PM on March 1, 2019
Could someone clarify the relationship between Elsevier and the Digital Commons network, and to what degree that's related to this?
For a potted version of the Elsevier/DCN relationship: the Digital Commons is an institutional repository software/platform created by bepress; bepress was then bought by Elsevier in August 2017, to much commotion. I just skimmed through a 2018 article by Christine Ferguson which seems to provide decent details and context - "Elsevier, bepress, and a Glimpse at the Future of Scholarly Communication". (Recognising the irony of using a bepress link for this, but it's Open Access. The DOI to the published article is https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2018.1434379 if you're fortunate enough to have institutional access)
So, broadly unrelated afaik, except in that Elsevier is weaseling its way into all aspects of the scholarly communication lifecycle. The current thing is about university (library) subscriptions to provide students&staff access to Elsevier publishing content, while the Digital Commons is an institutional repository solution (place the university stores and promotes its academics' publications etc).
posted by gesso at 8:13 PM on March 1, 2019
For a potted version of the Elsevier/DCN relationship: the Digital Commons is an institutional repository software/platform created by bepress; bepress was then bought by Elsevier in August 2017, to much commotion. I just skimmed through a 2018 article by Christine Ferguson which seems to provide decent details and context - "Elsevier, bepress, and a Glimpse at the Future of Scholarly Communication". (Recognising the irony of using a bepress link for this, but it's Open Access. The DOI to the published article is https://doi.org/10.1080/00987913.2018.1434379 if you're fortunate enough to have institutional access)
So, broadly unrelated afaik, except in that Elsevier is weaseling its way into all aspects of the scholarly communication lifecycle. The current thing is about university (library) subscriptions to provide students&staff access to Elsevier publishing content, while the Digital Commons is an institutional repository solution (place the university stores and promotes its academics' publications etc).
posted by gesso at 8:13 PM on March 1, 2019
As a federal employee, I can’t assign copyright to any journal and we’ve posted PDFs of our papers for years. I also post them to my personal website. I’ve never been hassled about it, but I’m not really sure it’s actually okay in a strict sense. I’d much rather have a fully open system that lets everyone read everything. I think most scholars would.What would be the potential risks of everybody who publishes just posting their files on their own site like this? I'm a techie (and v much not an academic), so my first thought was, well, throw up a Github Pages site with Dr. Yourname in an H1 at the top and a list of your papers with links to a Mega upload or something for each one. Is there some contractual limit on you that would flag this as different than distributing a file via email? Trying to fight a technological solutionism tendency here, because there are obviously massive cultural issues, but that seems like it could be a way for younger researchers to get their work out into the world and decrease the friction of an emailed request. (I googled around and this is harder to find info on that I thought it would be.)
posted by protocoach at 8:36 PM on March 1, 2019
What would be the potential risks of everybody who publishes just posting their files on their own site like this?
Depends on the publisher conditions. Some journals/publishers are fine with you making it available on your personal website (maybe after an embargo period, maybe not). Some of them allow specific versions of the paper to be made OA. (You can look up many journals' publisher conditions on SHERPA/RoMEO, or they may be buried somewhere on the publisher's website)
The risks for the individual, for their own work, if it's not permitted by their publisher conditions? Probably a take-down notice, and then escalating legal issues if ignored. But it depends on how litigious the publisher is, and I am definitely not a copyright lawyer.
posted by gesso at 9:10 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
Depends on the publisher conditions. Some journals/publishers are fine with you making it available on your personal website (maybe after an embargo period, maybe not). Some of them allow specific versions of the paper to be made OA. (You can look up many journals' publisher conditions on SHERPA/RoMEO, or they may be buried somewhere on the publisher's website)
The risks for the individual, for their own work, if it's not permitted by their publisher conditions? Probably a take-down notice, and then escalating legal issues if ignored. But it depends on how litigious the publisher is, and I am definitely not a copyright lawyer.
posted by gesso at 9:10 PM on March 1, 2019 [5 favorites]
What would be the potential risks of everybody who publishes just posting their files on their own site like this?
Many computer science academics already do this. Physics and math academics tend to use arXiv.org. Doctors almost never do. I've never heard of anyone getting a take-down notice, but I suppose the publishers could do that, they make you sign a copyright transfer before publication.
posted by demiurge at 9:18 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
Many computer science academics already do this. Physics and math academics tend to use arXiv.org. Doctors almost never do. I've never heard of anyone getting a take-down notice, but I suppose the publishers could do that, they make you sign a copyright transfer before publication.
posted by demiurge at 9:18 PM on March 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I once tried to start an alternative journal within my field, with the "support" of an association of 20+ deans. The scare-quotes are because I quickly realized that the big challenge was distribution, and those deans neither could nor would understand why that was a challenge in the time of the internet. Because they wanted it, we were both print and online, and they actually paid us the production costs fair and square. But they never did a thing to make sure that the scholars and students at their institutions had access to our journal, and we never got the breadth of contributors we were looking for. I do love my little stack of print journals, though. It was beautiful.
I realize now that I should probably have made a roadtrip to all the libraries of those institutions, and dumped the cost of that into the production price. But I'm telling this story to explain what it is big publishers like Elsevier can do: they are great at distribution. They also can't give a s*** about quality. One of my friends ran a little journal that never really took off, but then she got the institution she was at to pay Elsevier a fortune to get it out. In the long run it was too expensive, but the journal got out globally during the two years they had it.
posted by mumimor at 11:02 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
I realize now that I should probably have made a roadtrip to all the libraries of those institutions, and dumped the cost of that into the production price. But I'm telling this story to explain what it is big publishers like Elsevier can do: they are great at distribution. They also can't give a s*** about quality. One of my friends ran a little journal that never really took off, but then she got the institution she was at to pay Elsevier a fortune to get it out. In the long run it was too expensive, but the journal got out globally during the two years they had it.
posted by mumimor at 11:02 PM on March 1, 2019 [6 favorites]
I just hate it when I as a layman can’t read something because it’s behind a Elsevier wall.
posted by unliteral at 2:42 AM on March 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by unliteral at 2:42 AM on March 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
This English-language interview by Japanese broadcaster NHK is mostly about meat substitutes but there's a bit in the middle where Patrick O. Brown talks about co-founding PLoS.
posted by XMLicious at 2:50 AM on March 2, 2019
posted by XMLicious at 2:50 AM on March 2, 2019
I just hate it when I as a layman can’t read something because it’s behind a Elsevier wall.
In the past there have been many important discoveries made by people working outside the western university system. The fact that this system still exists is just proof the universities are more interested in money than education/research.
We need a league table of all universities ranked by the number of Open Access articles they publish, to shame them into opening up.
posted by Lanark at 3:50 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
In the past there have been many important discoveries made by people working outside the western university system. The fact that this system still exists is just proof the universities are more interested in money than education/research.
We need a league table of all universities ranked by the number of Open Access articles they publish, to shame them into opening up.
posted by Lanark at 3:50 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
I left academic work for a few years and came back, and one weird thing that changed in the meantime is that Elsevier itself now has some open access journals. My last first author paper went to one. I felt pretty weird about this (all the cool kids love to hate on Elsevier) and even weirder having to admit that their process for getting articles out is actually smooth and good - it was the least painful proofs-reading experience I’ve had.
Not sure what I think of Elsevier’s “gold” (fee-based) open access model, but I suspect it leads to more systematically available literature, as “green” (self-archiving) requires you to have a functioning and frequently updated website, which not everybody does. Centralized repositories are better than both, I think. My field has bioRxiv but I’m not sure what its readership is. In practice I get most of my articles out of PubMedCentral, which has an embargo period but is often good enough for me - so hats off to NIH’s open access policy. I know there was noise somewhere toward the end of the Obama admin about expanding the policy to non-NIH fields - has that happened? Has it worked?
posted by eirias at 4:38 AM on March 2, 2019
Not sure what I think of Elsevier’s “gold” (fee-based) open access model, but I suspect it leads to more systematically available literature, as “green” (self-archiving) requires you to have a functioning and frequently updated website, which not everybody does. Centralized repositories are better than both, I think. My field has bioRxiv but I’m not sure what its readership is. In practice I get most of my articles out of PubMedCentral, which has an embargo period but is often good enough for me - so hats off to NIH’s open access policy. I know there was noise somewhere toward the end of the Obama admin about expanding the policy to non-NIH fields - has that happened? Has it worked?
posted by eirias at 4:38 AM on March 2, 2019
The real value in these journals is not the papers themselves. It's the table of contents of each issue, and more importantly, it's all the dross that is NOT in the table of contents.
That's not a part of the process that the publishers are involved in at all, and is a part that scholarly societies can manage for themselves either pre- or post-publication to some repository.
Reader-pays is the only way to align the editors' interest with the reader's.
Citations should work just fine there.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:48 AM on March 2, 2019 [3 favorites]
That's not a part of the process that the publishers are involved in at all, and is a part that scholarly societies can manage for themselves either pre- or post-publication to some repository.
Reader-pays is the only way to align the editors' interest with the reader's.
Citations should work just fine there.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:48 AM on March 2, 2019 [3 favorites]
The Elsevier negotiators must have thought University of California faculty would demand that their library restore subscriptions right away. Instead, faculty like me at other institutions are going to see what the University of California negotiating team were demanding and ask how can we get that too?
posted by grouse at 5:18 AM on March 2, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by grouse at 5:18 AM on March 2, 2019 [6 favorites]
Reader-pays is the only way to align the editors' interest with the reader's.
Citations should work just fine there.
No. Citations are not what prevents a bad article getting published (where bad is in the eye of the reader.) What prevents that is. editorial independence reinforced by the journal's expenses being financed either by the reader or by the editor's pro bono work, and not by the author or sponsor.
posted by ocschwar at 5:48 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
From a job posting at Elsevier:
posted by grouse at 6:22 AM on March 2, 2019 [14 favorites]
Open Access Strategy ManagerEmphasis added.
Purpose of the Job:
The Access and Policy team exists to:
- promote a positive policy environment through engaging closely with leading research organisations and helping the business develop and deliver impactful solutions and flexible policy frameworks
- support commercial goals by working closely with other teams to develop win/win Open Access (OA) solutions for the business and for the customer
- change the image of Elsevier, so that we are viewed as an organisation which supports OA
posted by grouse at 6:22 AM on March 2, 2019 [14 favorites]
So "Open Access" like "Open Source" is a bullshit term...
My understanding is not that it's a bullshit term, per se, just a broad one. And it's describing a benefit to the reader. Different models of "open access" can be good or extremely bad for the author side of things, depending upon how it's being done. Good if the articles are open as a matter of course. Bad if , for example, self-archiving is real hassle, or if the publisher is charging exorbitant amounts just to tack a different license term onto the exact same product.
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:36 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
My understanding is not that it's a bullshit term, per se, just a broad one. And it's describing a benefit to the reader. Different models of "open access" can be good or extremely bad for the author side of things, depending upon how it's being done. Good if the articles are open as a matter of course. Bad if , for example, self-archiving is real hassle, or if the publisher is charging exorbitant amounts just to tack a different license term onto the exact same product.
posted by pykrete jungle at 6:36 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
Elsevier will always be free to go fuck themselves. They've been playing this game for years while doing the bare minimum to actually improve anything about academic publishing and actively breaking big parts of it.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:52 AM on March 2, 2019
posted by aspersioncast at 6:52 AM on March 2, 2019
Open Access isn't a bullshit term, but it's complicated - Open Scholarship has a lot of different implications, and people get a little sloppy with it.
Publish or perish creates a need for people to get their work published and pay-to-publish creates an incentive for predatory journals to do so. Publicity around OA has even meant a lot of journals claiming to be open access when they aren't.
Turning the whole thing into a vanity press model is undesirable for a variety of reasons, but the last decade saw a consolidation of rent-seeking distributors such as Elsevier and T&F adding less and less value (outsourcing everything to academics who were already doing the work, eliminating copy-editors, etc.), charging more (generally in backroom non-disclosed negotiations on an institutional basis), and in general behaving as holdout rent-seekers in an industry that had been turned on its head almost twenty years ago.
But as more robust and laid-out open access initiatives have been established over the last 5-10 years there are a lot more sustainable and academically rigorous models out there, costs are getting lower, and universities have more awareness and more support. The Budapest Open Access Initiative is probably the document to read at this point.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:13 AM on March 2, 2019 [10 favorites]
Publish or perish creates a need for people to get their work published and pay-to-publish creates an incentive for predatory journals to do so. Publicity around OA has even meant a lot of journals claiming to be open access when they aren't.
Turning the whole thing into a vanity press model is undesirable for a variety of reasons, but the last decade saw a consolidation of rent-seeking distributors such as Elsevier and T&F adding less and less value (outsourcing everything to academics who were already doing the work, eliminating copy-editors, etc.), charging more (generally in backroom non-disclosed negotiations on an institutional basis), and in general behaving as holdout rent-seekers in an industry that had been turned on its head almost twenty years ago.
But as more robust and laid-out open access initiatives have been established over the last 5-10 years there are a lot more sustainable and academically rigorous models out there, costs are getting lower, and universities have more awareness and more support. The Budapest Open Access Initiative is probably the document to read at this point.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:13 AM on March 2, 2019 [10 favorites]
I work on a product that was briefly owned by Elsevier, and while I don't have any especially fond things to say about its current custodian, I have never once seen that name and had cause to wish that I worked for them.
posted by wotsac at 7:18 AM on March 2, 2019
posted by wotsac at 7:18 AM on March 2, 2019
Digital repository/OA scholcomm librarian checking in! As I described to a post-ac PhD colleague who just relocated to the Bay Area, joebiden_bigfuckingdeal.avi. I echo everything gesso, aspersioncast, and zachlipton said. My favourite bit of Elsevier trivia is that the embargo of the green OA, self-archived, accepted manuscript version of articles published in the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies is 36 months long.
All of these publisher pay-to-play tactics are an accounting nightmare at the institutional level. I am presently trying to assemble a database that will aid in the estimation of APC spends and it's like quicksand and the data are impossible to find or behind a paywalled API. Hahahah.
posted by avocet at 8:08 AM on March 2, 2019 [11 favorites]
All of these publisher pay-to-play tactics are an accounting nightmare at the institutional level. I am presently trying to assemble a database that will aid in the estimation of APC spends and it's like quicksand and the data are impossible to find or behind a paywalled API. Hahahah.
posted by avocet at 8:08 AM on March 2, 2019 [11 favorites]
And OMG that job posting.
posted by avocet at 8:08 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by avocet at 8:08 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
Nowadays it would probably be using LaTeX and vim or pico or maybe even some non UNIX/Linux os. Anyway I was well paid compared to nontechnical admins but the pay wasn't super high. Not like a software dev or a hardware engineer. And supporting 4 full time publishing and research scientists was absolutely a full time job.
These days, any equation-heavy physicist writes their own LaTex. I am teaching a sophomore level undergrad class, and half my undergrads use it (via Overleaf mostly, so browser cloud based platform independent).
I learned to type in Tex as a grad student in the early 2000s, and even then it was the standard. The journals I publish in most often have their own style files and so we submit preset in their style— but I am also in an arXiv field so that’s after the preprint is up.
It’d be brilliant if journals had good typesetters or even grammar editors (especially given the large number of non-native English speakers), but mostly they don’t; the one time a journal actually did their own typesetting they introduced errors to around half the equations (in a paper with an equation every four lines). And I doubt even the national labs have the money for a typesetter on site these days; certainly no university I’ve been at ever has.
posted by nat at 8:33 AM on March 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
These days, any equation-heavy physicist writes their own LaTex. I am teaching a sophomore level undergrad class, and half my undergrads use it (via Overleaf mostly, so browser cloud based platform independent).
I learned to type in Tex as a grad student in the early 2000s, and even then it was the standard. The journals I publish in most often have their own style files and so we submit preset in their style— but I am also in an arXiv field so that’s after the preprint is up.
It’d be brilliant if journals had good typesetters or even grammar editors (especially given the large number of non-native English speakers), but mostly they don’t; the one time a journal actually did their own typesetting they introduced errors to around half the equations (in a paper with an equation every four lines). And I doubt even the national labs have the money for a typesetter on site these days; certainly no university I’ve been at ever has.
posted by nat at 8:33 AM on March 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
Oh, also for a neat newish system of journals, see SciPost, https://scipost.org/PlanSciPost
They are trying to provide the infrastructure for true open access, as well as a modern reviewing system. I’m planning on submitting there as soon as I have a paper that fits their current calls.
posted by nat at 8:39 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
They are trying to provide the infrastructure for true open access, as well as a modern reviewing system. I’m planning on submitting there as soon as I have a paper that fits their current calls.
posted by nat at 8:39 AM on March 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
I’ve liked when I publish with Springer, because they do introduce some value-added in the article preparation process, in terms of making sure the figures float nicely and that all the figure references are cross referenced correctly and that generally the fussiness of all the typesetting is checked. But I do the vast majority of the typesetting myself, in LaTeX.
posted by leahwrenn at 9:06 AM on March 2, 2019
posted by leahwrenn at 9:06 AM on March 2, 2019
Arson_Lupine: What exactly does Elsevier do in this process to justify the costs incurred at each of these stages of publication?
Ladies and gentlemen of the legal profession, I give you....West Publishing!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:34 AM on March 2, 2019 [3 favorites]
Ladies and gentlemen of the legal profession, I give you....West Publishing!
It is best known for establishing the National Reporter System, a system of regional reporters, each of which became known for reporting state court appellate decisions within its region. West also reports decisions of the federal Courts of Appeals in the Federal Reporter and of the federal district courts in the Federal Supplement, and retroactively republished the decisions of all lower federal courts predating the NRS in Federal Cases. All these reporters are also part of the NRS, meaning that all cases published therein are annotated with headnotes by West attorney-editors, and all those headnotes are then indexed in the West American Digest System (and its electronic version, KeyCite) for easy cross-referencing.They basically just collected public-access court records and smeared their special sauce of citation indexing across the top.
Technically, all of West's reporters were originally unofficial reporters published without the express authorization or endorsement of the courts. West reporters have become the nationwide de facto standard used by all federal courts and most state courts, despite their technically unofficial nature.Eventually they got bought and their monopoly was broken, but they are still big.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:34 AM on March 2, 2019 [3 favorites]
No relation!
posted by jessamyn at 11:46 AM on March 2, 2019 [10 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 11:46 AM on March 2, 2019 [10 favorites]
I'm an academic librarian at a large ARL institution and I cackled with outrageous glee when I heard this news. The one time I sat down to dinner* with an Elsevier rep I told him I thought his company was morally bankrupt and would be out of business in five years. I knew my audience: he relished the debate. Next time I saw him he was, naturally, working for their major competitor.
On the other hand, as has been alluded to in this thread, Elsevier has long since read the handwriting on the wall and pivoted to controlling the rest of the scholarly supply chain [pdf] through buying or acquiring BePress and Mendeley and the rest. So too are their competitors. The threat from these companies is now more multi-faceted and I hope academics will continue to pay attention even as the OA landscape shifts.
Interesting resources that I use to keep up with this area (outside of listservs):
-SPARC's Big Deal Cancellation list (any package with the major vendors that requires libraries to accept a list of titles they don't want in order to get a list of titles they do want is known as a Big Deal; the UC cancellation is one of them)
-Scholarly Kitchen brings an interesting group of people to the table and covers things like Plan S and the future of publishing
-Idealis is a single-service recommender site that surfaces really unusual content in the OA, OER, schol comm vein.
*Which yes, so many ethical problems with leeching off the expense accounts of vendors but let's set that aside for a moment, shall we? Because otherwise I will go into a really long rant about Charleston and ER&L and even ALA and this isn't the place for that. Also for some reason vendors really appreciate that stance and it tends to make them like you more, which is some real cognitive dissonance on someone's part.
posted by librarylis at 2:26 PM on March 2, 2019 [7 favorites]
On the other hand, as has been alluded to in this thread, Elsevier has long since read the handwriting on the wall and pivoted to controlling the rest of the scholarly supply chain [pdf] through buying or acquiring BePress and Mendeley and the rest. So too are their competitors. The threat from these companies is now more multi-faceted and I hope academics will continue to pay attention even as the OA landscape shifts.
Interesting resources that I use to keep up with this area (outside of listservs):
-SPARC's Big Deal Cancellation list (any package with the major vendors that requires libraries to accept a list of titles they don't want in order to get a list of titles they do want is known as a Big Deal; the UC cancellation is one of them)
-Scholarly Kitchen brings an interesting group of people to the table and covers things like Plan S and the future of publishing
-Idealis is a single-service recommender site that surfaces really unusual content in the OA, OER, schol comm vein.
*Which yes, so many ethical problems with leeching off the expense accounts of vendors but let's set that aside for a moment, shall we? Because otherwise I will go into a really long rant about Charleston and ER&L and even ALA and this isn't the place for that. Also for some reason vendors really appreciate that stance and it tends to make them like you more, which is some real cognitive dissonance on someone's part.
posted by librarylis at 2:26 PM on March 2, 2019 [7 favorites]
Good. Sooner Elsevier, et al, go broke, the better for science and society.
For-profit science journals is one of the bigger mistakes humans have made in recent times.
posted by Pouteria at 7:53 PM on March 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
For-profit science journals is one of the bigger mistakes humans have made in recent times.
posted by Pouteria at 7:53 PM on March 2, 2019 [2 favorites]
What I haven't seen mentioned much in this conversation is the absolute plague-of-locusts proliferation of bazillions of predatory open access journals. Seriously, I am an academic in the STEM field and I get three or four "invitations" PER DAY for these garbage rags. (Dear I.M. Scientist, Greetings of the Day!) You block them and another pops up like whack-a-mole. I guess if we fix the system to be less profitable they will wither and die on the vine? Still, without some agreed-upon universal standards of rigorous, transparent peer review open access in and of itself does no good. Don't get me wrong, the system is severely broken and must be overhauled, but simply making things open access is only one part of it. Easy access to unvetted garbage is not helpful. We've all seen Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List...
posted by SinAesthetic at 6:12 AM on March 3, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by SinAesthetic at 6:12 AM on March 3, 2019 [9 favorites]
the absolute plague-of-locusts proliferation of bazillions of predatory open access journals
I did link to the not-really-open-access journals list above, but with Beall's list in an archival state (and a lot of criticism surrounding it, some justified), I don't really have a great link for the predatory ones, partially because of exactly what you're saying - they just keep popping up and changing.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:18 AM on March 3, 2019 [2 favorites]
I did link to the not-really-open-access journals list above, but with Beall's list in an archival state (and a lot of criticism surrounding it, some justified), I don't really have a great link for the predatory ones, partially because of exactly what you're saying - they just keep popping up and changing.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:18 AM on March 3, 2019 [2 favorites]
Via this tweet, a "list of scholarly publishers (google spreadsheet) who already allow zero-embargo green OA..."
posted by Wordshore at 8:15 AM on March 4, 2019
posted by Wordshore at 8:15 AM on March 4, 2019
throw up a Github Pages site with Dr. Yourname in an H1 at the top and a list of your papers with links to a Mega upload or something for each one
And a xt=urn:btih Magnet link for good measure.
posted by flabdablet at 2:32 AM on March 6, 2019
And a xt=urn:btih Magnet link for good measure.
posted by flabdablet at 2:32 AM on March 6, 2019
Followup-
Norwegian research institutions have decided not to renew their agreement with Elsevier
posted by gyusan at 1:10 PM on March 12, 2019 [6 favorites]
Norwegian research institutions have decided not to renew their agreement with Elsevier
posted by gyusan at 1:10 PM on March 12, 2019 [6 favorites]
Github doesn't seem ideal, since it's owned by a for-profit organization too. But something, like Github, designed to authenticate authorship, not control readership.
posted by clew at 4:53 PM on March 12, 2019
posted by clew at 4:53 PM on March 12, 2019
The beauty of xt=urn:btih Magnet links is that they cannot be falsified. The hash code that defines the link is unique for the specific content it links to, so it simply ceases to matter who physically stores the content. If you have a Magnet link and somebody has an online copy of what it links to, a DHT BitTorrent client will eventually dig it out and make an uncorrupted copy for you as well.
The fundamental basis of my imaginary scientific publishing utopia is authors producing work which they digitally sign in order to establish an authorship claim, then publish via BitTorrent using Magnet links for peer review. Those same Magnet links then become the only authoritative format for cites. Authors can be working scientists, or reviewers, or review aggregation houses, or science journalists, or reputation aggregators; doesn't matter, publishing anything whose content needs to be what it purports to be works the same way.
posted by flabdablet at 10:31 PM on March 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
The fundamental basis of my imaginary scientific publishing utopia is authors producing work which they digitally sign in order to establish an authorship claim, then publish via BitTorrent using Magnet links for peer review. Those same Magnet links then become the only authoritative format for cites. Authors can be working scientists, or reviewers, or review aggregation houses, or science journalists, or reputation aggregators; doesn't matter, publishing anything whose content needs to be what it purports to be works the same way.
posted by flabdablet at 10:31 PM on March 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
But something, like Github, designed to authenticate authorship, not control readership.
Isn't this basically describing ArXiv.org? I haven't gone all the way through the account-creation process, but I went far enough that I got blocked because you need to demonstrate affiliation with a bona fide institution, and I don't have that anymore. (So my not-very-valuable undergrad thesis will never see the light of day. Alas, said nobody, probably.)
There's a bioRxiv now, and probably some other ones that I'm not aware of. Oddly there doesn't seem to be one for CS topics, but maybe that's because more CS researchers have their own web pages and just put their papers up directly.
ArXiv is a preprint repository, but that's only because it has to exist alongside the traditional journal model. That was the stage of the process where it could live and not be too threatening to the established process, when it was introduced. There's no particular reason that I can see why it couldn't be the de facto library for an entire field, not just for preprints but for final versions as well; you could add metadata to track the relationships between the preprint version of a paper and the peer-reviewed one, and if you wanted to get really ambitious you could probably have it pick peer reviewers automatically from a pool based on related papers or citations or something. From what I can tell, much of the "value add" of Elsevier's mega-journals could be automated, since they really aren't doing any work, they're just (at best) facilitating the process.
Like, if I envisioned what scientific publishing would look like if I were God Emperor and just designing it from scratch, using public funding instead of some shitty public/private-for-profit model, what I think I'd end up with wouldn't be that dissimilar to the ArXiv, just with more metadata and a bunch of paid employees to curate it. (TBH I'm not really clear on who maintains the ArXiv now or who pays for it.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:35 PM on March 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
Isn't this basically describing ArXiv.org? I haven't gone all the way through the account-creation process, but I went far enough that I got blocked because you need to demonstrate affiliation with a bona fide institution, and I don't have that anymore. (So my not-very-valuable undergrad thesis will never see the light of day. Alas, said nobody, probably.)
There's a bioRxiv now, and probably some other ones that I'm not aware of. Oddly there doesn't seem to be one for CS topics, but maybe that's because more CS researchers have their own web pages and just put their papers up directly.
ArXiv is a preprint repository, but that's only because it has to exist alongside the traditional journal model. That was the stage of the process where it could live and not be too threatening to the established process, when it was introduced. There's no particular reason that I can see why it couldn't be the de facto library for an entire field, not just for preprints but for final versions as well; you could add metadata to track the relationships between the preprint version of a paper and the peer-reviewed one, and if you wanted to get really ambitious you could probably have it pick peer reviewers automatically from a pool based on related papers or citations or something. From what I can tell, much of the "value add" of Elsevier's mega-journals could be automated, since they really aren't doing any work, they're just (at best) facilitating the process.
Like, if I envisioned what scientific publishing would look like if I were God Emperor and just designing it from scratch, using public funding instead of some shitty public/private-for-profit model, what I think I'd end up with wouldn't be that dissimilar to the ArXiv, just with more metadata and a bunch of paid employees to curate it. (TBH I'm not really clear on who maintains the ArXiv now or who pays for it.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:35 PM on March 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
Isn't this basically describing ArXiv.org?
Yes, or maybe arXiv plus OrcID.
posted by clew at 3:46 PM on March 14, 2019
Yes, or maybe arXiv plus OrcID.
posted by clew at 3:46 PM on March 14, 2019
arXiv already has CS sections plus lots of CS work fits into math or stats. tbh the fundamental cultural divide for “original arXiv” vs “our discipline needs its own version” may just be the use of LaTeX.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:51 PM on March 14, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by vogon_poet at 3:51 PM on March 14, 2019 [2 favorites]
and since CS doesn’t have many journals it effectively is the repository for the field. people frequently cite the arxiv version of something that’s been published elsewhere.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:55 PM on March 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by vogon_poet at 3:55 PM on March 14, 2019 [1 favorite]
Education and Science Giant Elsevier Left Users’ Passwords Exposed Online
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:29 PM on March 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 12:29 PM on March 18, 2019 [2 favorites]
I'm astonished that they didn't paywall those.
posted by flabdablet at 12:32 PM on March 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 12:32 PM on March 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
Someone should tell them that's not what "open access" means.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:14 PM on March 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:14 PM on March 18, 2019 [3 favorites]
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posted by mumimor at 1:31 PM on March 1, 2019 [13 favorites]