"Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier"
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
Jordan Miller
ooh-- I just looked at the HTML source to the page you posted... the coders mistakenly put the referencing link encased in an HTML comment so it won't render in any browser and no one will know what the hell this site is about... might want to tell the domain owners that. This is from the HTML source:
<!-- This site was built as a reaction in support of
<a href="http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/">Tim Gowers's post on Elsevier</a>. -->
jordan
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Jordan Miller
If people don't like their practices they should not publish there. That is, after all, what prompted PLoS One to be started...
The flip side of these kinds of arguments is that the cost of publishing (publishing always incurs cost, bandwidth, typesetting, proofreading -- these ARE important) is now placed WHOLLY on the authors. That means if you don't have a couple grand $$$ lying around in your desk drawer you probably can't afford to publish in open access journals anyway, and you might accuse them of extortion. That is also NOT a helpful argument.
Will anyone make a comprehensive list of every policy from every publisher at every school? Nope, that's an extremely complicated question and as the article says, it varies from school to school and is confidential from school to school.
In the biomedical sciences the NIH open access policy is freeing up (literally) a lot of the information that our tax dollars are paying to generate, independent of the publisher. As it should be.
Perhaps the agencies that pay for mathematics research should institute a similar national policy?
Boycotting (blacklisting) individual publishers is really not an efficient way to get the point across IMHO. Additionally it will probably have close to zero impact on the financials of the journals since these researchers are not the ones that make journal subscription decisions at their school libraries.
Better to go to the top of the funding agencies.
Also I thought a lot of the core sciences like Math and Physics have Arxiv which is by definition open access? Do people not cross-post their articles on Arxiv?
so... where's the beef?
jordan
Bryan Bishop
In the biomedical sciences the NIH open access policy is freeing up (literally) a lot of the information that our tax dollars are paying to generate, independent of the publisher. As it should be.
Phil
> Elsevier has a lot of journals and books and minibooks... is there a link somewhere to what they have done wrong?
freely available is one thing.
The other is that they publish phony journals for hire, without any
indication that the "journal" is just an advertisement, as in this
case:
http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/
- Phil
Jordan Miller
jordan
Jordan Miller
jordan
Jeswin
> the original article is about Elsevier and math journals. nothing bio related there...
>
> jordan
>
how to do broad-scale reform of the scientfic/academic journal
publishing done by Elsevier. He even wondered how to get people from
broader scientific fields to join in. If you look at the signature
list, there are more than mathematicans signing out.
kingjacob
Jordan Miller
Jordan Miller
what about the other thousand publishers? I just don't see this
approach as scalable to scientific revolution.
you need to go above the publishers to the funding agencies.
jordan
Guido D. Núñez-Mujica
Jordan Miller
jordan
Guido D. Núñez-Mujica
It is obvious that a substantial part of the science community
supports open access policies. Lobbying for a law that renders them
void is confrontational and hostile. And definitely deserves an
answer.
Jordan Miller
jordan
Ashley Heath
Patrik
> and btw... you can email the professor or author of ANY paper and they are legally allowed to send you a copy...
help with figures, so they'll claim copyright over the final formatted
paper with figure, but they'll allow you to retain copyright over the
unformatted manuscript without the journal's figures. Other will get
you to sign over copyright over the entire paper, arguing that their
reviewing, editing, and formatting provides a significant contribution
to the paper. It's blackmail, but that's what you get when you start
treating copyright as intellectual "property", rather than a "right".
Fair use laws provide some exceptions to these issues, but fair use
laws do differ from country to country.
Cathal Garvey
--
www.indiebiotech.com
twitter.com/onetruecathal
joindiaspora.com/u/cathalgarvey
PGP Public Key: http://bit.ly/CathalGKey
Jordan Miller
for non-profit educational purposes. that's why they are allowed to
have xerox machines in every library in the country...
jordan
Cathal Garvey
closed-access publisher *chooses* to let you see their papers, you can
photocopy them.
...What if they don't?
Also, that's Fair Use you're talking about. And, as I said, we don't
have that in Ireland. It's a precious, rare and awesome thing you guys
have in the US. However, educators simply don't get sued over here,
thankfully, despite the lack of protection.
Phil
> I'm not a lawyer but I know copyright legal protection does not apply
> for non-profit educational purposes. that's why they are allowed to
> have xerox machines in every library in the country...
xerox copies of books or articles to read for class - and they are
not.
That changed in the 1990s in America.
Jordan Miller
any other ideas?
jordan
Cathal Garvey
paper, I'd refuse to publish with anyone that didn't guarantee
open-access to the paper forever, online. I'd also refuse a publisher
that wanted to claim any copyright, whatsoever, over the final work;
it's my work, and they have the opportunity to publish it.
Yea, that seems naive; it'll probably mean that big guys like Nature and
Science (And, laughs-all-around, Elsevier/ScienceDirect) wouldn't handle
a paper of mine even if it happened to be awesome. But then, I don't
really care.
Perhaps that'll change if my career path takes a veer back towards
academia, where short-sighted committees demand "HIGH IMPACT! HIGH
IMPACT!" and measure you by the journal you publish in. But as a
solitary scientist, I refuse to accept that model on principal.
On 25/01/12 16:02, Jordan Miller wrote:
> look, I'm all for open access and it's the future of science and
> indeed you can download any paper i've ever published for free and i
> hope the publishers change their ways. but i'm just trying to see if
> there's a better way to go about this to make it happen within our
> lifetimes... online petitions are hard to work with.
>
> any other ideas?
>
> jordan
Jordan Miller
maybe if a place like MIT, under their umbrella of OCW, posted their own online repo of every paper they ever published, that would be another way to attack this problem...
jordan
Cathal Garvey
case without a dramatic remodelling of the journal infrastructure. For
starters, getting a paper hardcopy should be a paid-for luxury rather
than the norm, because that's probably the biggest cost in publishing
that forces ruthless business models of closed-access.
Disintermediation is harsh on incumbent businesses, but you can't try to
preserve those businesses against the obvious-next-thing; they have to
adapt, and if they refuse, then they will perish.
Open-Access is an inevitable result of the internet. We no longer need
intermediaries such as journals; we can reach the entire scientific
community online. The only role journals now play is in editorial
management of papers; handling peer-review, page layout and online hosting.
Eventually, even that may prove pointless. Peer review could be handled
by a web-of-trust wordpress plugin, where the weight of a "peer"'s
review is based on their own relative weighting by other members of the
professional network.
I'm not saying "This is it!" (far from it, there are tons of holes in
that plan I imagine) but if I can casually think of such simple
replacements for the existing messy, expensive system, then a simple
replacement is inevitable. Peer reviewed journals now have a half-life.
Jordan Miller
this cost in my view actually makes it less likely that individual DIYers will publish there.
maybe we should start fundraising to make it free to publish there in open access?
jordan
Cathal Garvey
ago: they used Kickstarter to pay their PLOS fees.
PLOS offer to waive their fees for people who can't pay, you know.
But, even considering the waivers, there are other ways to go
open-access. For example, you could personally solicit peer review and
publish on your own blog; it's entirely unconventional, but it's
something that would get your knowledge out in the open for extremely
low cost. It's something that I'll be doing when/if I have something to
publish: whether or not I publish "traditionally" through an open access
publisher, I'll also be hosting on my own site, soliciting peer review
if I don't publish by other means.
Perhaps I'll be ignored. That doesn't really concern me; I'll have
generated what I believe to be useful knowledge, and I'll have put it in
a public forum for scientific debate. That's my duty as a scientist
fulfilled, as far as I'm concerned.
John Griessen
> For example, you could personally solicit peer review and
> publish on your own blog; it's entirely unconventional, but it's
> something that would get your knowledge out in the open for extremely
> low cost. It's something that I'll be doing when/if I have something to
> publish: whether or not I publish "traditionally" through an open access
> publisher, I'll also be hosting on my own site, soliciting peer review
> if I don't publish by other means.
>
> Perhaps I'll be ignored. That doesn't really concern me; I'll have
> generated what I believe to be useful knowledge, and I'll have put it in
> a public forum for scientific debate. That's my duty as a scientist
> fulfilled, as far as I'm concerned.
Hear hear. Good thinking.
Everyone in the US should explain this to their reps in congress, asking to
vote down H.R.3699.IH and use any influence they have before a vote to stop it.
Guido D. Núñez-Mujica
this is a very minor concern, it can be an issue for researchers from
developing countries, but they get a waiver. And researchers already
pay for figures in traditional journals, so right now publishers get
labor for free, money from the researchers and money from universities
and readers of the papers.
There was a conversation, and a compromise: They got to keep papers
locked for a year if the research was funded with US taxpayer money,
then they had to release it. Now, unilaterally, they want to make that
void using political maneuvering, without asking the science
community. So, I do not really understand why more talking to them or
why so much politeness. What else can we lose?
Patrik
> agree, but it unfortunately doesn't bring people to the table for a discussion of ways to make it a win-win for these journals. essentially saying "you are all useless and should be fired" makes it hard to find a way forward.
scientific publishing in the 21st century is clear: shift from "reader
pays" to "author pays". That's how all the big Open Access journals
make it work. And even some of the Nature family journals have
switched to this model.
Elsevier, however, is notorious for resisting Open Access, and for
charging extortionary rates to libraries and universities. Boycotts
have been quite effective in the past against these kinds of tactics.
These publishers live off the free labor provided by their authors and
reviewers, and off their reputation as measured by their citation
index. If disgruntled researchers start putting a dent into those, you
can bet they'll take notice.
CoryG
> agree, but it unfortunately doesn't bring people to the table for a discussion of ways to make it a win-win for these journals. essentially saying "you are all useless and should be fired" makes it hard to find a way forward.
capitol exists as it does in relation to the rest of society: markets
naturally follow oscillating trends - when the oscillation is down -
whether a technology/service is still needed or not at a point in the
future - the company survives on a the capitol it has obtained up to
that point, allowing it to continue to produce when it is again
needed. When this concept is applied to corporations that specialize
in the redistribution of ideas (the music/entertainment industry, the
publishing industry, patent trolls, stock forecasters and investment
groups) it gets transformed into "capitol is a means to secure more
capitol by changing the system when the corporation has reached the
end of it's usefulness or capped it's market" - the more logical
solution to the issue, to halt the damage of the aforementioned
industries upon the rest of the world once they, or those like them,
reach the end of their usefulness - would be to outlaw the resale of
information except when it comes directly from the originator - since
they are all essentially middlemen who have obtained too much
influence with no value added in the course of their work.
Ashley Heath
Anselm Levskaya
up until 2009 the parent company Elsevier used to organize some of the
world's largest arms' trade conferences.
so that's the kind of corporation you're dealing with here.
-a