Fwd: [tt] As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
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Bryan Bishop
Feb 3, 2012, 10:34:35 AM2/3/12
to diybio, Bryan Bishop
From: Eugen Leitl <eu...@leitl.org>
Date: Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:10 AM
Subject: [tt] As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
To: t...@postbiota.org
(Wiley is another candidate)
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Journal-Boycott-Grows/130600/
January 31, 2012 As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
A petition effort to boycott Elsevier, the journal publisher, was inspired by
a blog posting by Timothy Gowers (above), a prominent mathematician at the U.
of Cambridge.
By Josh Fischman
A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher,
is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end
of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to
an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's
journals, including refereeing papers.
The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that
Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to
protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will
keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.
"Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the
publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal
access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure
why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one
dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."
She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said
that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40 percent
when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.
Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing
industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and
we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant
professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they
charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after
reading about it on Facebook.
Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal
publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some
observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal
content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if
publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from
valuable research tools.
The Boycotters' Complaints
According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals
including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic
researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company
bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing
libraries to spend money to buy things they don't want in order to get a few
things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed
federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies
like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by
grant recipients freely available.
The complaints surfaced on January 21 in a blog post by Timothy Gowers, a
prominent mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has won the Fields
Medal, math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. "Why do we allow ourselves to be
messed about to this extraordinary extent, when one would have thought that
nothing would be easier than to do without them?" he wrote. "It might help if
there were a Web site somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not to
contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names
electronically. I think that some people would be encouraged to take a stand
if they could see that many others were already doing so."
Within days, just such a Web site surfaced. It's called The Cost of
Knowledge, and biologists, social scientists, and others began signing the
pledge along with mathematicians.
Sean M. Carroll, a prominent cosmologist and senior research associate at the
California Institute of Technology, signed the pledge and added on his own
blog that Elsevier charges "amazingly exorbitant prices to university
libraries—and then makes the published papers very hard to access for anyone
not at one of the universities."
Senior scholars like him, and Mr. Gowers, arguably have little to lose by
turning their backs on well-regarded journals. But the protest has also
reached junior scholars like Mr. Abrahams of Albert Einstein, who has yet to
gain tenure.
"I have three papers I'm hoping to submit in the next 12 weeks. One was
destined for Cell, and another for Neuron," also published by Elsevier, he
said. "It would have been a real feather in my cap to publish there. But I
won't, based on this week's discussions." His work, focused on identifying
genes related to autism, will go other places. "There are other good
journals. And, long term, I'd like my library to be able to use its limited
resources to better ends" than high journal prices, he said.
That could signal real problems for Elsevier, says Kevin Smith, director of
scholarly communications at Duke University Libraries. "Librarians have long
complained about prices and bundling journals together, and nothing has
changed," he says. "Now it's not just the customers who are complaining. It's
the suppliers."
Academic librarians may buy journals, but it's the scientists who produce and
submit articles that make them worth buying, he says. "If they are upset,
there is a chance they may change the system."
The Company Responds
Ms. Wise, from Elsevier, says she understands why libraries complain about
prices. "Globally, the amount of research that's published and needs to be
read is going up every year. But library budgets are not keeping pace."
That is why her company offers a variety of packages and pricing schemes to
libraries, and negotiates discounts based on institution size, type, and
usage patterns. And while Elsevier in the 1980s and 1990s did increase prices
steeply year after year, that has stopped. "We got it wrong then. But we've
improved and have become good citizens," she said. So much of the community
ire comes from past reputation, not present practice, she said.
Individual academics often do not have accurate notions about prices and the
value of journals, particularly when they are sold in groups, said Thomas
Reller, the company's vice president for global corporate relations. "They
don't have access to library usage figures. They see journals that they don't
use, and wonder why the library has them. It's because other people are using
them, but the individual doesn't know that."
Indeed, Mr. Gowers wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle, "I don't have
detailed facts at my fingertips: So many people have complained about
Elsevier that I am inclined to believe that there is something to the
complaints." He also agreed that libraries are not forced to buy bundles of
journals but said "that the costs of buying journals individually are so high
that it's not far off compulsion."
Mr. Reller counters, emphatically, that the way to look at prices is per use,
or download, of the individual articles, and that viewed that way, "access to
published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever."
Elsevier officials declined to provide specific examples of its journal
prices, saying they were negotiated privately with individual institutions.
Ms. Wise said that it's also a misconception that publishers like Elsevier
make scientists pay to read their own work. "What publishers charge for is
the distribution system. We identify emerging areas of research and support
them by establishing journals. We pay editors who build a distinguished brand
that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers.
"And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to
each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search
engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter.
All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more
efficient. That's the added value that we bring."
The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment
in those products, she added: "It's not a disavowal of the National
Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid
inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to
PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles, Mr. Reller
pointed out.
Those arguments, however, are lost on senior scholars like Mr. Gowers, who
told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's
papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a
commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.
Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr.
Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone,"
he said.
_______________________________________________
tt mailing list
t...@postbiota.org
http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt
Date: Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:10 AM
Subject: [tt] As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
To: t...@postbiota.org
(Wiley is another candidate)
http://chronicle.com/article/As-Journal-Boycott-Grows/130600/
January 31, 2012 As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
A petition effort to boycott Elsevier, the journal publisher, was inspired by
a blog posting by Timothy Gowers (above), a prominent mathematician at the U.
of Cambridge.
By Josh Fischman
A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher,
is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end
of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to
an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's
journals, including refereeing papers.
The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that
Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to
protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will
keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.
"Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the
publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal
access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure
why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one
dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."
She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said
that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40 percent
when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.
Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing
industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and
we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant
professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they
charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after
reading about it on Facebook.
Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal
publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some
observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal
content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if
publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from
valuable research tools.
The Boycotters' Complaints
According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals
including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic
researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company
bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing
libraries to spend money to buy things they don't want in order to get a few
things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed
federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies
like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by
grant recipients freely available.
The complaints surfaced on January 21 in a blog post by Timothy Gowers, a
prominent mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has won the Fields
Medal, math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. "Why do we allow ourselves to be
messed about to this extraordinary extent, when one would have thought that
nothing would be easier than to do without them?" he wrote. "It might help if
there were a Web site somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not to
contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names
electronically. I think that some people would be encouraged to take a stand
if they could see that many others were already doing so."
Within days, just such a Web site surfaced. It's called The Cost of
Knowledge, and biologists, social scientists, and others began signing the
pledge along with mathematicians.
Sean M. Carroll, a prominent cosmologist and senior research associate at the
California Institute of Technology, signed the pledge and added on his own
blog that Elsevier charges "amazingly exorbitant prices to university
libraries—and then makes the published papers very hard to access for anyone
not at one of the universities."
Senior scholars like him, and Mr. Gowers, arguably have little to lose by
turning their backs on well-regarded journals. But the protest has also
reached junior scholars like Mr. Abrahams of Albert Einstein, who has yet to
gain tenure.
"I have three papers I'm hoping to submit in the next 12 weeks. One was
destined for Cell, and another for Neuron," also published by Elsevier, he
said. "It would have been a real feather in my cap to publish there. But I
won't, based on this week's discussions." His work, focused on identifying
genes related to autism, will go other places. "There are other good
journals. And, long term, I'd like my library to be able to use its limited
resources to better ends" than high journal prices, he said.
That could signal real problems for Elsevier, says Kevin Smith, director of
scholarly communications at Duke University Libraries. "Librarians have long
complained about prices and bundling journals together, and nothing has
changed," he says. "Now it's not just the customers who are complaining. It's
the suppliers."
Academic librarians may buy journals, but it's the scientists who produce and
submit articles that make them worth buying, he says. "If they are upset,
there is a chance they may change the system."
The Company Responds
Ms. Wise, from Elsevier, says she understands why libraries complain about
prices. "Globally, the amount of research that's published and needs to be
read is going up every year. But library budgets are not keeping pace."
That is why her company offers a variety of packages and pricing schemes to
libraries, and negotiates discounts based on institution size, type, and
usage patterns. And while Elsevier in the 1980s and 1990s did increase prices
steeply year after year, that has stopped. "We got it wrong then. But we've
improved and have become good citizens," she said. So much of the community
ire comes from past reputation, not present practice, she said.
Individual academics often do not have accurate notions about prices and the
value of journals, particularly when they are sold in groups, said Thomas
Reller, the company's vice president for global corporate relations. "They
don't have access to library usage figures. They see journals that they don't
use, and wonder why the library has them. It's because other people are using
them, but the individual doesn't know that."
Indeed, Mr. Gowers wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle, "I don't have
detailed facts at my fingertips: So many people have complained about
Elsevier that I am inclined to believe that there is something to the
complaints." He also agreed that libraries are not forced to buy bundles of
journals but said "that the costs of buying journals individually are so high
that it's not far off compulsion."
Mr. Reller counters, emphatically, that the way to look at prices is per use,
or download, of the individual articles, and that viewed that way, "access to
published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever."
Elsevier officials declined to provide specific examples of its journal
prices, saying they were negotiated privately with individual institutions.
Ms. Wise said that it's also a misconception that publishers like Elsevier
make scientists pay to read their own work. "What publishers charge for is
the distribution system. We identify emerging areas of research and support
them by establishing journals. We pay editors who build a distinguished brand
that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers.
"And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to
each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search
engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter.
All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more
efficient. That's the added value that we bring."
The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment
in those products, she added: "It's not a disavowal of the National
Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid
inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to
PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles, Mr. Reller
pointed out.
Those arguments, however, are lost on senior scholars like Mr. Gowers, who
told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's
papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a
commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.
Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr.
Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone,"
he said.
_______________________________________________
tt mailing list
t...@postbiota.org
http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
Bryan Bishop
Feb 3, 2012, 10:37:31 AM2/3/12
to diybio, Bryan Bishop
On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
That is why her company offers a variety of packages and pricing schemes to
libraries, and negotiates discounts based on institution size, type, and
That's a common business trick-- even Oracle does it. On a $12M product, maybe you'll get a $2M discount. That doesn't excuse the other $10M for hosting files on a server..
"And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to
each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search
engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter.
All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more
efficient. That's the added value that we bring."
Ah, so it's tagging.... right... got it. *ahem*
CoryG
Feb 3, 2012, 11:54:42 AM2/3/12
to DIYbio
lol, 12M of tagging - they should look into semantic search - for 10k
you could pay a (as in one) marginally above average developer to code
out a semantic tagging/footprinting/search algorithm.
On Feb 3, 10:37 am, Bryan Bishop <kanz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> - Bryanhttp://heybryan.org/
> 1 512 203 0507
you could pay a (as in one) marginally above average developer to code
out a semantic tagging/footprinting/search algorithm.
On Feb 3, 10:37 am, Bryan Bishop <kanz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1 512 203 0507
CoryG
Feb 4, 2012, 1:07:44 AM2/4/12
to DIYbio
More journal-related news and abuse:
http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-feel-pressure-to-cite-superfluous-papers-1.9968
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542
http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-feel-pressure-to-cite-superfluous-papers-1.9968
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542
Phil
Feb 5, 2012, 12:59:13 PM2/5/12
to DIYbio
On Feb 4, 1:07 am, CoryG <c...@geesaman.com> wrote:
> More journal-related news and abuse:http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-feel-pressure-to-cite-superflu...http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542
The supplementary data names the journals studied.
They studied only journals on economics, sociology, psychology, and
business (marketing, management, finance, information systems, and
accounting). These fields could be highly unusual - it looks like the
degree of corruption in business journals is unusually high, which
doesn't really surprise me.
209 out of 557 reported incidents of coercion were committed by 8 of
the 832 journals studied. 5 out of these 8 journals are published by
Elsevier. So this practice of coercion is probably committed more by
Elsevier than by all other publishers combined.
> More journal-related news and abuse:http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-feel-pressure-to-cite-superflu...http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/542
The supplementary data names the journals studied.
They studied only journals on economics, sociology, psychology, and
business (marketing, management, finance, information systems, and
accounting). These fields could be highly unusual - it looks like the
degree of corruption in business journals is unusually high, which
doesn't really surprise me.
209 out of 557 reported incidents of coercion were committed by 8 of
the 832 journals studied. 5 out of these 8 journals are published by
Elsevier. So this practice of coercion is probably committed more by
Elsevier than by all other publishers combined.
Nathan McCorkle
Feb 5, 2012, 4:02:53 PM2/5/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
Where do we sign the petition/protest list?
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--
Nathan McCorkle
Rochester Institute of Technology
College of Science, Biotechnology/Bioinformatics
Cory Geesaman
Apr 18, 2012, 4:07:49 PM4/18/12
to diy...@googlegroups.com
May not be news, but it looks like Elsevier is on the list of SOPA supporters:
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.
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