The thing is, scientists have a much more powerful tool to stop bad publishers: Don't give them your texts.
And maybe even more important: Don't demand from your applicants that they have published in high impact journals from the very same publishers that make your life hard.
That might really change things.
Everyone has been complaining about Elsevier for years now. They still have publications and they still seem to have no problem to fill them. That's the problem.
I would love a world where publishing papers is cheap and reading papers, particularly taxpayer-funded ones, is free.
However, I'd also like a job and none of the "top tier" biomedical journals are open access. While I'd like to think that the quality of my work would speak for itself, the imprimatur that one gets from Nature, Science, Cell, and Neuron is worth quite a bit when applying for jobs and grants.
Unless the big names in academia--and the search committees they sit on--publicly and credibly commit to this, you're essentially asking people (many of whom are on short-term contracts making $40,000 a year) to take an enormous career risk.
This. The biggest and most meaningful way to do this would be for people sitting on search committees and tenure/promotion committees to say publicly that candidates wouldn't be punished for deliberately publishing in OA journals.
The problem is the following: if there is no established OA journal in the field, you can't distinguish the candidate who "deliberately" publishes good quality work in a non-selective OA journal, from the candidate who publishes low-quality work in the same non-selective OA journal.
The only way to tell is to read the papers and judge for yourself, and this is the root of the problem: evaluating candidates based on the number of papers and the impact factor (or some analogous metric) of the venues is much, much easier for committees, than actually reading the papers.
In a very rough analogy, this is why we have film critics, because we can't trust other institutions in the industry (studios, individual theaters, directors) as a guarantee of quality.
If a panel of respected tenured professors in the field ranked the best works in open access journals each month, or if there was a high profile yearly prize for best open access papers of the year, that could help disaggregate reputational effects from the publication itself.
Bootstrapping this sort of thing is hard. I'm sure Nobels didn't signal as strongly in year one as they do now.
Exactly, this nonsense of mostly just counting publications must stop. If at all, there is only a very light correlation (or perhaps even a negative one, who knows?) between the number of publication and the quality of a scientist's research. And what's so crazy about it is that everybody knows this. No one has ever been called a great scientist, because he published many articles. Such scientists may be called prolific, but that doesn't necessarily reflect on the quality of the content.
The same for counting quotations, by the way. This may be different in STEM fields, but I'm in the humanities. In the humanities bad papers are sometimes quoted as often as brilliant papers, because everybody wants to correct the authors. I've seen more than one colleague literally make his career by writing a polemic and obviously wrong book (books=often improper peer review) and then sneaking a few apologetic articles in which they half-retracted their claims past the reviewers. What's worse, I know postdocs who are actively looking for such untenable topics that will surely stir up a reaction. We're talking about theses, conjectures or claims that nobody defended previously, because they are so obviously wrong or flawed. I've also met people at the postdoc level who literally replied "Who cares, it's one more publication" when I raised doubts about their main claim in an article and mentioned that it might not 'work' for purely formal reasons (but adding that I'd have to check, to be polite).
I'm sure it's a bit less drastic in CS and the STEM fields, but in the humanities publication counting almost enforces mediocrity and the publication of uninteresting, pointless papers with vastly overlapping topics - and it's completely obvious that it does so.
The situation is particularly frustrating, because the system makes it harder to publish good science. Good science needs larger studies and/or better formal underpinnings, both of which take more time and more effort than duplicating fake papers about fake problems.
Well, enough ranting for today, you get the point.
The onus is on the administrations to get a metric that is gamed by advancing human knowledge, instead of throwing logs at flame wars. That's why they get the big salaries.
If you find an OA journal with cachet matching Nature or Science, I would be happy to submit stuff there. As far as I know, there's nothing even particularly close.
In other words, I doubt anyone is explicitly penalized for submitting to PLoS Biology instead of Journal of Neuroscience. However, there is an implicit penalty for not submitting to Nature/Science/Cell.
[As an aside, I really hate the obsession with IF and all these other "quantitative" measures of research quality. They're all incredibly ad-hoc, someone easily game-able, and yet otherwise-smart people take them so seriously.]
At least in my country, I'm thankful for these quantitative measurements, that difficult corrupt practices: Oh, I assure you he's a great researcher, just not in any measurable way. He's my nephew you say? Well, that's not the point...
While this is important, in many fields their are cliques of related researchers (1) on the grants committees and (2) on the journal committees. These people know who works on which problems, so blind review is a farce.
Also, the concept of IF being a proxy for rigorous review and work quality is weak at best. Just read a few pages of
http://retractionwatch.com/
There's also less nepotistic problems. For example, I've moved between different sides of the same overall field several times. That means, for any given reader of my CV, only about half the "impressive" papers read to them as impressive using most subjective measures.
> Couldn't you just require people to recuse themselves from hiring decisions involving relatives?
They used to have this nice trick where you hired the son of your friend and your friend hired your son. But at least now there are some non-subjective requirements to be met before anyone can get admitted.
This seems like it would be fixable with a fairly small amount of money, relatively speaking: offer something like $250K for the most important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature to instead be published in an open-access journal. After all of the major papers for several months are published in open access journals and the most well-known journals are reduced to publishing only the dregs that are left, opinion could change quite quickly. Sustain this type of payment for a couple of years and I'd bet there would be a sizable number of other people publishing open-access, since to be published in Nature would imply that your paper wan't important enough to be offered the $250K reward.
(Disclaimer: I used to work in this field at biomedcentral.com)
Or just make Science OA. Unlike Nature and Cell, it's published by a non-profit (the American Association for the Advancement of Science). In principle, the American government could just give them money to make everything freely accessible. Or the publishers could ask authors to pay publication fees with waivers for those unable to pay, like most OA journals. Since the goal of the AAAS is (at least theoretically) to publish papers and not to make a profit, the fees need not be much higher than other OA journals. Given the average Science paper probably costs something like $1 million to produce, I doubt the authors would balk at paying a few thousand to make their work accessible to everyone.
If you had any kind of realistic measure to identify "important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature" then the problem would be already solved, since all the evaluation criteria could look at that instead of the journal ratings. However, we do not - currently the only actually usable way to identify "important papers that would otherwise be published in Nature" is simply asking "has this research been published in Nature?"
Competition for positions in academia has gotten so bad that it doesn't matter. Like Google rejecting perfectly good candidates just because they can, but in Academia even south central Kansastucky state university has enough excellent applicants that arbitrary metrics do more good than harm.
We don't necessarily need OA. Nature allows you to publish your papers on the arxiv. If all papers are on the arxiv, and with the journal, the negotiation position of the journals goes away.
Impact factors and similar metrics are part of the problem. These are metrics that support flashy research, not good research. If anything the Impact Factor is a sign of sloppy research (there's a lot of evidence for that, e.g. the higher the IF the more likely there's a retraction).
there's a lot of evidence for that, e.g. the higher the IF the more likely there's a retraction
The higher the IF, the more likely it is the researcher trying to do something 'hard' and the more people will scrutinise the results. These two factors alone will lead to more retractions.
Someone publishing something completely uninteresting in a journal no one reads will never be in a position to have to retract their paper, no matter how flawed, because no one will notice and no one will care.
The issue I see is that "Academia" is not the same as "the scientists", there is a larger community, that includes institutions, processes, administrative people, etc.
So, yes, for instance, I would love that we all published our papers in, say, arxive, an we were evaluated by the actual impact of our publications (~ PageRank). But that is not how the funding organizations, hiring committees, etc, are going to do it.
How to do the transition from the current state of things to a better one, and not to commit career suicide?
That is the question, and that is what those boycotts are aiming to, I believe.
This is a great point. We need to provide researchers with options that don't kill their career prospects. One idea, which we're working on at Authorea (authorea.com) is to help researchers write their documents online so they can be easily published as preprints. This way open access can be achieved in a manner that goes beyond a PDF or Word doc, and researchers can still play the game so long as it exists.
It's a prisoner's dilemma. If you (researcher) defect (publish in Elsevier journals), you perpetuate Elsevier's business, a shitty situation. But it's not as bad as cooperating (not publishing), because there's a chance that everyone else defects and you screw up your career, a really shitty situation. So out of self-interest everyone defects and perpetuates Elsevier's business.
Not quite. You have to deposit a copy of the manuscript in PubMedCentral within a year of publication. Some journals let you deposit the final pdf (or even do it for you). Others restrict you to an unformatted "final draft" (i.e., the last thing you submitted to the journal).
However, this is still tagged with the source journal, so it doesn't really get you around the career-related issues.
Open, but not immediately, I believe. Journals have an embargo period of 1-3 years, and after that you can put the accepted paper on a free repository. Your manuscript can usually be posted for free as soon as you want.
It is, but it's after a time. It's not actually weakly enforced - we've been told we can't take credit for publications on grant reports if they're not in PMC.
Don't you need to include the PMC ID number for each paper on the progress report/renewal? I vaguely remember doing something like this for our last one....
It's solved by "publishing" it in an open access repository - so the data is available to public, but all the ratings and citations and relevant rankings go to the closed access journal where you initially published it.
It is interesting to separate the review from the storage/access portions of scientific publishing. Bind the prestige to the review board, not the publisher. Once you have open access, there's nothing stopping academics from forming an independent review board organization which then provide some form of stamps of approval; paper A from It seems like it would be a good organizational excuse to stay in touch with peers and exchange information on the field anyway...
It sorta does that. The "faculty" submit 1-2 paragraph blurbs describing papers. The blurbs often point out the strengths and weaknesses of each paper and give a brief description of how it fits into the broader literature. If you can find a couple of people on there with similar research interests, it can be a great way to get up to speed on something.
Pretty much. The review process seems to be about the same across most journals. In fact, there's probably a niche for some journals that have an actual editorial process where an editor actually...edits the prose.
Nature/Science/Cell are popular because everyone recognizes their "brand" and associates them with interesting, high-impact science. Thus, it's easy for anyone "Hey, we should fund/hire her because she's got a bunch of Nature papers!" It's not miles from the old "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" bit.
In contrast, it's unlikely that one person--let alone more-on the committee has carefully read your J. Soc. Whatever paper and says "This is well done! Get him instead!"
Nature/Science/Cell have a prestigious brand, so many scientists try to get their best work published there. The journals get first pick of new research to choose from, and as a result getting published there really is a good indicator that your work is impactful and high quality. It's a network effect that can be broken only if enough funding & promotion committees, or top scientists in a field take a stand together.
Something I have wondered though:
What if we separate the "measure of quality and impact" from getting published in the journals? Something like "shadow journals", that doesn't publish and edit any articles itself. Its reviewers would pick the top 30 new papers published in their field each month, and just publish links to them. If this would get established, it could be used by funding and promotion committees, and the brand of the original journals would matter less.
> Pretty much. The review process seems to be about the same across most journals. In fact, there's probably a niche for some journals that have an actual editorial process where an editor actually...edits the prose.
Some journals do this. I've had PhD student friends inform me that when they've published to some (well-regarded) journals, after being accepted, they spent months going back and forth with the editor polishing the article.
I think the best leverage is with the funding bodies. Declare that all publicly funded papers need to be OA, and this goes away in an instant.
That said, these news made my life a lot easier right now. I was considering whether to accept an invitation to review for an Elsevier journal (which I've usually avoided). Now I'm fairly sure I will not.
In the US there is a "Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act of 2015" (S. 779, H.R.1477) that requires federal agencies to have a "public access policy" if they receive extramural research expenditures of over $100,000,000. https://act.eff.org/action/keep-publicly-funded-research-pub...
Cheers! Gonna read this. My SO (scientist) and I were just recently discussing the idea of funders as an alternative, but not to any level as detailed as this proposal.
The second one is the hard one, because prestige is the very thing they have.
Something like PageRank (itself a citation-weighting scheme) should do it, based not on the coarse-grained prestige of editor-gatekeeper publishers, but the fine-grained prestige of researcher-authors and the work itself.
The Eigenfactor is a metric for ranking journals that uses an algorithm similar to PageRank http://www.eigenfactor.org/index.php and is one of the many metrics competing to replace IF
Professors don't care about high prices. Universities pay for subscriptions. The pricing is political in Europe where education is funded by the public. US universities pass high prices over to students. Students pay with debt since good universities have oversupply of applicants anyway.
Elsevier had been buying academic journals for decades. A typical scheme is like Cell's story.
A professor establishes a journal under a big university's publishing arm. Then the professor thinks how to make money. Elsevier makes an offer and the professor accepts it. The journal becomes the property of Elsevier and the editors keep reviewing papers for free because it's good for their CVs.
Looking at older HN posts[1], Elsevier becomes another Comcast. That said, boycotts have not reversed the Group's profit trend.
At my university, professors certainly do care about high prices. Our library seems to contact my department every few years, to ask which journal(s) we choose to drop in order to meet upcoming budgetary constraints.
I would be surprised if students are funding the library to any substantial degree.
Most research universities charge F&A ("facilities and administration")/indirect costs on sponsored projects. This is essentially a "tax" on grant money that is supposed to cover things like utilities, the library, and so on. While the details vary a bit from place to place (and funder to funder), this is often a pretty sizable amount. Yale, for example, charges a bit under 70%, so if you need $100,000 for a project, you'll need to get the funders to pony up $170,000.
The details vary a lot, but it's usually calculated as percentage of the direct costs (like a sales tax). If your grant involves spending $100k on salaries, reagents, services (etc), the total outlay from the sponsor is closer to $170k (at 70% F&A). Here's an example from UW: http://f2.washington.edu/fm/maa/fa/facosts
In practice, the rate varies a bit. Capital equipment, like a really expensive microscope, is often exempt from F&A, but salaries sometimes have an extra charge (for benefits) attached.
Okay, i stand corrected! I was being intellectually lazy and assumed that what you were saying was that 70% of the raised funds were taken by the faculty, but thanks for the detailed example!
There are multiple problems with the offer from VG Wort (which is the German association "representing" authors and publishers). One is that they raised the license fee. Another one is that they want to replace the current "flatrate" (where a university pays a fixed sum for the right to copy books or parts of books for education) with a individual billing concept. That means, lecturers have to report to administration for EACH part of a book or paper that they distribute. This model is not feasible as the administrative costs exceed the royalties which have to be payed for the copyright.
For this reasons, multiple virtual learning environments (which are used to distribute books and papers) in Germany might go offline in 2017 because the copyright situation is currently unclear.
We got a university wide mail yesterday that nothing will change for us due to §52a because of the "settlement" with VG-Wort. I entered mild rage mode because it was written as "great news, everything is awesome" while my personal interpretation was WTF are you doing settling this...more like negotiating with terrorists.
Oh well, this boycott is very welcome. I'd also like to see a consortium that aggressively sues these publishers for breaking copyright. There's many cases of OA licensed material being illegally reused by closed journals etc. but usually it's just "please stop"...ok. At the same time the publishers bring down the law with full force for the most trivial stuff.
Yes, but isn't the VG-Wort §52a UrhG thing a different issue? It's creating a whole lot of uncertainty right now, no doubt about that, but the article is about universities failing to reach an agreement with Elsevier. What you're talking about is a terrible new deal between VG Wort and the Kultusministerkonferenz about licensing for publication of any kind of protected material for education and research.
I think you are right. Thanks for correcting me. I thought the Elsevier thing was part of the deal with VG Wort as most mails which are currently going around in my university seem to combine both issues.
No, they don't boycott; they play hardball in negotiations:
"The DEAL project, headed by HRK (German Rectors' Conference) President Prof Hippler, is negotiating a nationwide license agreement for the entire electronic Elsevier journal portfolio with Elsevier.
[...]
In order to improve their negotiating power, about 60 major German research institutions including Göttingen University cancelled their contracts with Elsevier as early as October 2016."
Forgive my absolute ignorance on the topic - I genuinely don't understand this environment even though I'm interested, so please don't take this as a stupid or inflammatory questions...
Why are these publishers needed? What service do they provide these days? It seems their role is similar to publishers in other media (TV, movie, music, etc) that can and have been replaced due to the distribution ease of the internet. Aside from a distribution platform, what do these publishers provide?
The journals have an "impact factor", an arbitrary metric that determines how noteworthy they are. My impression is that very few journals are actually read directly - most papers are found via Google Scholar and the journal they're in doesn't matter.
However, in academia, the "prestige" of the journals you have published to is hugely important. Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish, so the assumption is that if you have publications in a good one you must have done more groundbreaking research. To an academic, this is the kind of thing that affects whether you get grants, whether you get paid more, whether you can get a job elsewhere.
Some journals are pretty much talked about in hushed whispers, like "that PhD student got an ___ paper in their first year, they must be some kind of genius". In reality, research tends to be more about who you know, what kind of work you're doing, and whether you're in the right place at the right time.
> Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish
It should be noted that this selectivity is not just on quality, but also e.g. on how "groundbreaking" the results are. This results in papers in top journals actually being retracted more often than in others, since they're more likely to be false.
> Good journals, in theory, are more selective about what they publish, so the assumption is that if you have publications in a good one you must have done more groundbreaking research.
I wonder why nobody created a single peer-reviewed platform for all scientists to use? Elsevier is just piggybacking on other people's work and funds.
There are many possible platforms, however, there's a significant network effect since it's very harmful to your self-interest to switch to such a platform before everyone else does and (even more importantly) all the funding agencies acknowledge that this is the thing to look at.
1. They coordinate the submission of papers, and their dispatch for peer review.
2. They handle layout, typesetting, copyediting, etc.
3. For journals with print editions (of which there are many), they handle distribution.
All of those things could be replaced by the internet, but they take time, and they cost either time or money. And I much prefer reading journals with professional typesetting over those that rely on LaTeX.
There's also just the weight of history - many "good" journals aren't open access, and an academic's career trajectory is largely determined by publishing in those good journals. Going exclusively open access (in many fields) is either:
1. Expensive (paying for open access publication in a commercial journal)
2. An affectation by senior people who already have established careers
3. A huge risk by junior researchers making a principled stand at the cost of potential damage to themselves.
If anyone is wondering "how much do points 1 and 2 cost?!" the financial overview of notorious not-for-profit publisher PLOS is a good starting point: https://www.plos.org/financial-overview
If you create an electronic document of a few MByte size, 1500$ should cover hosting it for the next 1000 years!
The largest cost (besides writing the paper) is reviewing it and that cost is already externalized by publishers.
I do not understand the point. The barriers to publication (i.e., how selective an academic journal is) have nothing to do with the barriers to access (i.e., subscriptions being required to access the content).
And indeed, there are selective open-access journals, whose content is free to access once it's been accepted for publication; and there are non-selective, crappy journals which are not open-access.
Yes these Journals without the Internet would just sit in boxes in Libraries (They still do this with print journals) WHY is it cost more to have OLD Journals then they did when they were first published. It is such an anti-Education, anti-Science corporate plan based on selfish Win for them and loss for Science and ideas.
Elsevier must be extremely conscious that this can only drive the uptake of SciHub. German academia on the other hand must be aware that SciHub will soften the blow.
This is really cool. I'm no scientist, but it was Uni Göttingen where I was properly introduced to the world of academia, doing programming for a research group there. This was just 2-3 years ago, and Elsevier was a regular discussion point at the lunch table. I'm glad all the talk has translated in to some real action, and so many have gotten on board.
People want to publish in high-impact journals. Aside from name recognition (Nature, Science, New England Journal, etc), impact factor and similar metrics drive where people want to publish.
If you really want to strike at a particular journal or family of journals, you could work to convince academics not to cite articles in those journals. Since all these metrics are some variant of (inward citations)/(publications), usually over a 2-5 year window, this would have a tremendous effect.
I don't see this as a workable solution. You can't neglect to cite relevant research ideas simply because they were published in a closed journal, and there often isn't an open alternative to cite. I think you really need to have authors stop submitting to closed journals in the first place.
I'm fine with that characterization, too. I'm just saying that any barrier to access will shift the degree to which articles get cited away from what they (perhaps) "should" be based on their scientific value.
This is a really interesting point. I've definitely passed on reading papers that seemed potentially relevant because my institution didn't have a subscription to the journal.
Perhaps this is field-dependant, but I have never failed to find the full text of a recent paper I'm interested in even if the original paper is closed access - the paper is inevitably available on the webpage of the author, or their university/research group, or arxiv, or something like that.
For classic papers from the 1980s I have to bother with getting the VPN required for my university subscription access to work properly which is a pain, but I don't recall having any issues with publications from this millenium.
I wonder if, in a year or two, this will affect the Impact Factor of these journals - i.e. will their articles be cited less often now academics have (theoretically) no access to it? And then a few years later, will this the number of articles submitted drop as well?
(Assuming, of course, that no agreement will be reached at all.)
I'm surprised at this being such a painful problem and no one jumping forward to solve it (pardon my ignorance, if such startups exist but are not well known, I wouldn't know it).
Why wouldn't blockchain db for receiving and requesting p2p reviews not a good solution? This journal can be open access and still make boat loads of money on allied services, ads and so much more. The best part, most of this can/needs to be automated leading to super low costs of operation.
Who is going to build "TheFacebook" of academic journals. Journal publishers have become SCAM artist. Opening countless new journals and charging hundreds to thousands of dollars to get into open access articles or charging millions from institutes. This market is ripe for disruption plus scientific data is going to be the next "refined OIL" in the data and AI economy...
That might really change things.
Everyone has been complaining about Elsevier for years now. They still have publications and they still seem to have no problem to fill them. That's the problem.