[HN Gopher] I won't review or write for Elsevier and other comme...
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I won't review or write for Elsevier and other commercial
scientific journals
Author : prashantsengar
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-04-10 10:57 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (science.thewire.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (science.thewire.in)
| fock wrote:
| > the editor I was corresponding with had a different take. Like
| many things in life, you get [what] you pay for, he wrote.
| Journals like Nature have open access publishing charges that
| seem outrageous, but they were justified by the editing services
| of full-time professionals and unmatched quality they provided,
| and the citations the papers generated.
|
| Oh yes, I just recommend the editor to browse through e.g. npj
| computational materials and have fun with the "editing services"
| just pushing through horrible english grammar...
| warlog wrote:
| I always replied asking "how much does it pay?" And they answer
| it doesn't. And I tell them "I am a professional, what do you
| take me for?"
|
| They don't write back.
|
| Fuck Elsevier.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| The pernicious side of network effects and prestige. Need some
| top down fix for this. Elsevier is benefiting from our tax
| funded research
| idiot900 wrote:
| I once wrote a book chapter published by Elsevier. They
| actually paid me something like USD 100.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Journals sell one thing: reputation. That is why researchers
| continue to publish their articles there, and why they are
| prepared to pay outrageous prices for it.
|
| And it's not their own reputation that they sell; it's that of
| their (often paying) authors, and of their (usually voluntary)
| reviewers and editors.
|
| It's a very comfortable position as rent-seekers for the
| publishers. And it keeps working because the authors get a needed
| (for tenure, grants, etc.) boost of their own reputation as well,
| and because reviewers get pressured into doing the work via
| arguments like
|
| > every scientist who wants to publish in these commercial
| journals are also obliged to review 2-3 papers for every paper
| they intend to publish, otherwise the system would not work.
|
| Good on the author for not being coerced by that, nor misleading
| themselves they can "engender small and positive changes from
| within". They're not abstaining from reviewing altogether, so if
| "the system" would not work, there would still be ways for works
| to get reviewed and authors to get their stamp of approval. But
| maybe, just maybe, this time without the middle man.
|
| (Disclosure: I work on https://plaudit.pub, one of several
| attempts to establish alternative means for researchers to lend
| their reputation to support quality work.)
| kartoshechka wrote:
| There is a lovely paper [1] discussing scientific communication
| from an akin POV "Scientific Communication--A Vanity Fair?"
|
| [1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/286/5437/53.summary
| 13415 wrote:
| May I assume that you mean open access fees by "outrageous
| prices"? At least in my area of research not a single reputable
| journal asks for money for publishing an article. It's always
| free.
|
| You're right about the open access fees, though, just wanted to
| clarify this.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Primarily, yes, although there _are_ journals that
| (additionally) ask for other publication fees, like page
| charges, or for imagery. But yes, primarily "Article
| Processing Charges".
|
| Although that said, with some more layers of indirection, the
| same holds true for subscription fees: libraries have to keep
| paying those, because authors keep letting publishers lock
| away their research outputs behind paywalls, because they get
| reputation in return. And those subscription fees are equally
| outrageous.
| itcrowd wrote:
| Some, if not all, IEEE journals (which are generally very
| reputable) have a publishing fee, separate from the open
| access fee. Surcharges apply for exceeding page limits and
| for color figures in the printed journal.
|
| The basic fee can be waived if the authors are unable to
| afford it, under some conditions.
| jancsika wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before Sci-hub is shut down
| completely.
|
| The eight things the author suggests "to make science free, open,
| and accessible" remind me of Borges' short story "Pierre Menard,
| Author of the Quixote."
|
| Don't suggest _replicating_ the sci-hub database. Don 't suggest
| _changing the laws_ that make sci-hub illegal. Instead, let 's
| get out our paper swords and attack each of our own pay-walled
| articles, one at a time, reinforced by tiny CV revisions that
| move up open access publications from page 3 to page 2.
|
| Seriously-- let's manually rewrite an entire 33 terabyte database
| so that in forever minus a day we end up with 33 terabytes of
| _the same content_ , in the same form, but for different reasons.
|
| Consider retrieving [insert journal article here] on Elbakyan's
| site: it's a mere mechanical act.
|
| But consider looking up [insert journal article here] on an open
| access site where the author _purposely_ went through the
| physical labor of ensuring open access. Here 's there's something
| truly revolutionary in the act of downloading such an article--
| an act not only of sharing in a body on knowledge greater than
| one's self, but also acting in solidarity with a purposeful act
| of defiance on part of the author.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Nature have open access publishing charges that seem
| outrageous, but they were justified by the editing services of
| full-time professionals
|
| _Nature_ might benefit from full-time professional editors, but
| that has become a rarity in some fields. Some of the major for-
| profit academic publishers in linguistics, for example, expect
| the unpaid editors or the authors to do all the editing,
| proofreading and even typesetting themselves, and just give the
| publisher a camera-ready PDF.
|
| A lot of respected journals that are a few decades old were
| originally published by non-profit learned societies. For-profit
| publishers convinced them to hand over their journals by claiming
| that the publisher could provide quality. Then, they gradually
| stopped providing that added quality.
| impendia wrote:
| > they gradually stopped providing that added quality.
|
| I had a paper accepted in a well regarded mathematics journal,
| and the copyeditor proceeded to thoroughly mangle it. I had to
| explain that the meaning of a fraction changes when you move
| stuff between the top and the bottom.
|
| This journal charges $3,250 per year for a subscription.
| Although they are in fact a nonprofit, attached to a
| university.
|
| I _really_ fail to understand the economics of this industry.
| zentiggr wrote:
| > I had to explain that the meaning of a fraction changes
| when you move stuff between the top and the bottom.
|
| Sounds like it's time to communicate that to the entire
| editorial staff, request a refund, and never submit anything
| to them ever again.
|
| Nonprofit or not... If a university can't retain staff with
| even basic competence, they don't deserve to continue in
| their current state.
| type0 wrote:
| > I really fail to understand the economics of this industry.
|
| It's not meant to be understood, that way it continues to
| thrive from public money.
| djoldman wrote:
| Serious question: Why don't tenured professors take more risks
| with their papers and research, as opposed to seeking more
| prestige in the form of quantity of papers? Aka why the quantity
| over quality? Or do they not do this?
|
| Ostensibly once you have tenure at most institutions you really
| don't have to do anything except teach one or two classes a
| semester - that's what tenure is; no real duties and you can't be
| fired. Once you're tenured you don't need the reputation afforded
| by lots of papers that take little risk... That's what you do to
| GET tenure, I thought.
|
| The above is restricted to fields where progress doesn't require
| boatloads of monetary grants (thus requiring reputation,
| inevitably in the form of citation counts and paper counts).
| linguae wrote:
| My understanding of academia is that even tenured professors
| can still be subject to the same publish-or-perish pressures
| that non-tenured faculty have. My understanding of tenure is
| that you cannot be fired without cause, but you can still be
| fired for not fulfilling the obligations of the job, and
| maintaining the department's and university's expected levels
| of research output counts. Ultimately it depends on the
| university.
| djoldman wrote:
| I'd be very interested to hear more on this. It's my
| understanding that you really don't have to do much more than
| teach a few classes in most cases.
| greenwich26 wrote:
| I feel that peer-reviewed journals aren't even going to be
| relevant much longer. Putting aside the commercial side of it,
| the actual scientific quality of peer review seems to have
| drastically declined. Most of the referee reports I receive
| nowadays are trivial and superficial, even at the top journals of
| my subfield. I suppose a lot of research has become so
| specialized that an outsider isn't able to give much intelligent
| commentary on it either way.
|
| As a reader, I almost exclusively look at arXiv and other
| preprint servers, and I find myself caring little if/when the
| papers there are "officially published". In fact some of the best
| "papers" and important references in my field are certain lecture
| notes, monographs, and theses that have never been "published"
| anywhere but arXiv.
| i_love_limes wrote:
| Do you not feel the issues of commercialization and scientific
| quality are more closely linked?
|
| The state of quantity over quality in academic publishing,
| which is a force that is compounded by commercially focused
| journals, does not incentivize deep consideration or rebuttal,
| and only occurs because the academics care about what they do.
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