Sorry for the naive question, but why don't the universities collaborate to publish their own open access journals? Don't the ivy leagues have enough prestige to pull it off? Why is Elsevier needed in the information age?
The answer is unfortunately a common trope. There’s no reason at all it should be this way. It contradicts the principles and spirit of science. It chaps my hide.
But it hasn’t changed, because it’s incredibly hard to fight inertia of a large and long standing system where parties who disproportionately benefit, or stand to lose something, will do everything in their formidable power to stop it, with no regard for what’s best for the world.
These are not piss-ant companies involved, most people don’t realize how incredibly profitable the major player is, raking in billions and billions every year. That money is their war chest.
Then you have parties involved who don’t really like the system, but don’t [choose one: have the balls to, or, cant afford to foolishly risk damaging their career or livelyhood to] all out buck the system. The path to jobs, promotions, prestige, and other rewards winds through this anachronistic, corporate interest driven system.
Also common with good vs. evil wars like this, is there are some stories of heros to be told. Courageous people who have taken a stand, in various ways, and made real progress. Every one of those small wins helps clear the path for the next attack.
This gain was particularly delicious - their own arrogance caused them to overestimate their hand. I guess it’s possible it wasn’t arrogance, rather, a strategic bluff, but in either case, they just sat down at the poker table and lost a big pot.
Simpler explanation is that academics fear each other more than they fear closed access. So they won't publish in an open journal for fear their colleagues will get ahead by publishing in a prestigious closed journal. They are all competing for the same research dollar.
> Simpler explanation is that academics fear each other more than they fear closed access. So they won't publish in an open journal for fear their colleagues will get ahead by publishing in a prestigious closed journal.
That first sentence seems a bit like saying that people suffering from starvation fear their fellow men, simply because they are competing for a scarce resource.
What I, as an academic, fear, or at least have to respond to, is an incentive system that judges the quality of my publications on the established reputations of the journals in which they appear. It's true that my fellow academics are rivals for promotions and positions, and in this respect I suppose that I fear them in some way; but they suffer as much from the system as I do, and some of the most established use their prestige to fight the good fight (Timothy Gowers being one of the big names on that list), and so I think that the antagonistic sound of saying that I fear them is not accurate in its implication even if it is so in some technical sense.
I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics. Hiring committees, grant selection panels etc. are a bunch of our peers doing exactly the thing that so many of us (including the people that I sit on these panels with) gripe about - judging the worth of others based on silly metrics and the journals in which they publish.
> I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics.
The first layer, yes, but after that come non-specialist academics, who aren't qualified to judge my particular work on its merits, and so have to substitute some other metric; and then administrators, whose fitness to judge the merits of any academic work is, let me say, not necessarily a given. For example, even without any worries of bias: as a mathematician, it is always a struggle to get non-mathematicians, even (or perhaps especially) other scientists, to realise that author order on mathematicians' papers reflects only one's place in the alphabet, not one's contribution.
Author order is such an arcane nonsense, and needs to be dismantled. The "roles" indicated by position are peculiar to the discipline and a mystery outside it. The customary position of senior academics e.g. as the "anchor" can confer significant prestige on that academic, while their contribution might be minimal (and even zero, in exploitative situations).
It really is bewildering.
Online academic communities and publishers such as ResearchGate and EndNote could come up with potential solutions here. ResearchGate already asks us to effectively vote about other users' authorship and expertise. Adding a voting system (or similar) whereby users declare the roles played by each author might help dismantle author position hegemony.
Voting might be imperfect, and perhaps there are other options. The current system, though, is ridiculous and contributes towards the exploitation of junior academics, and poor inter-discipline communication. Clearer computational representation of roles could also improve search.
Elseiver has "prestige". What that means is that some of their journals have become the standard destinations to publish at. It's a vicious cycle, to get acknowledged (and perhaps promoted etc) you need to publish in the locations accepted by the people senior to you, then you get sucked in and apply it to the next batch. It would require a massive collective effort to change it, and in some sense this is exactly that. Note something similar happened in CS where there is a successful free journal now, open access and most people put up papers on Arxiv. This was caused by a similar revolt by major universities.
More specifically, Elsevier has high impact factor journals. Somebody had the shitty idea to "rate" scientists "objectively" using some naive version of PageRank (rank = impact factor). Scientists, being scientists, aren't stupid and invented the equivalent of SEO, only there is no Google to tweak the algorithm in response to SEO-spam. Spamming publications of just acceptable quality for high impact factor journals is now a winning strategy for getting tenure, grants etc. Happy sciencing.
It's worse, actually: a large publisher (Thomson Reuters) had the idea to rate journals to help librarians pick which to subscribe to, which evolved to people using that to rate academics as well, which was even less justified. I've written about it in more detail at https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
Though Elsevier's hold onto the prestige/impact factor is tenuous, as shown by several mass resignations of editorial boards that subsequently established competing journals that effectively "took over". (Journal of Algorithms -> ACM Transactions on Algorithms, Topology -> Journal of Topology, etc.)
Universities are not a monolith, they are composed of many independent individuals. It is difficult to convince young researchers (PhD students, Post-Docs, Assistant professors) to "gamble" their future by publishing in new journals. It requires some push from the top, e.g. NSF making it mandatory to publish results from their grants in open access journals.
Isn't it a reasonable request though to demand of university researchers funded by public dollars to be required to publish freely to the public since the public payed for it? Also they can double publish, it could be more of a "all papers are published here for public archival purposes but you can still submit to the journals you want." sort of thing.
And it's somewhat disheartening to see that even academics (who should be in a position to see what's going on) frequently can't come together to cooperate and be better off.
My experience with academia is that it's a kindergarden. Everybody has silly personal 20+ year vendettas going on.
I'm not at all surprised that academics are unable to co-operate.
Elsevier does provide a service.* They manage paper submissions, format papers, sometimes edit them, publish them, etc. Without Elsevier (or other traditional publishers), this work has to be done elsewhere. It thus may make sense for universities to outsource the publishing to a dedicated company. However, Elsevier has become big enough to dictate the terms of the contract. The German universities are doing a very smart thing in pooling their market power. They don't want anything for free, but they want to pay a reasonable price.
* Edit: Of course, they don't do it in a particularly good way.
It varies a lot by field. I'm a computational biologist and have dealt with both the CS and biology ways of doing things. In CS you send a formatted LaTeX manuscript to the publisher and they basically just print that, but the traditional biology way is just to send a Word document with little formatting at all. It is considered the job of the publisher to turn the Word document into something that actually is formatted.
Mediocre service, as you say yourself. Furthermore, they earn way above market returns on equity. It's really not a competitive enterprise, but extracting rent (from the tax payer via university library budgets).
Well, there are university presses (although the big ones often unfortunately also benefit from the current system, as they also make quite handsome profits), but the biggest challenge is getting academics to publish in them. In fact, that's not just a challenge for journals by universities, but for all initiatives to start open access journals.
Because publishing journals requires a great deal of non-academic work that is not particularly glamorous and which becomes increasingly difficult as you scale operations:
scheduling, organizing, communicating, file management, vendor management, budgeting, large scale data conversion (e.g., Microsoft Word --> XML, image conversions), editing, proofing, and correcting articles, not to mention running a fairly content heavy website with appropriate search/browse options, etc.
Basically, throwing 1 monthly journal (~1000 pages/year) up on a WordPress site is pretty easy (except for the part about dealing with the authors) and could probably be done by a couple people putting in a few hours a week.
Creating a useful web platform for 100s of journals is an entirely different proposition and almost certainly a poor use of universities resources.
Now, they could pay someone to do all that work, but that is pretty much what they are negotiating with Elsevier.
Most of this work is done by academics who are either not paid or paid a nominal sum. Yes, running a journal is a lot of work, but most of the people who do the actual work do not reap the rewards.
Academics usually do the peer reviewing and sometimes the editing (which is almost certainly a waste of their talents as a good editor is cheaper and more efficient at editing than some Biology PhD guy).
Most of the more prestigious journals (e.g., the ones people are paying for) are supported by publishing house staff doing the sort of stuff I mentioned -- or, more likely, managing the vendors in India who are doing the stuff I mentioned.
Source: I worked in scientific publishing for many years. Happy to be out of it...
> Most of the more prestigious journals (e.g., the ones people are paying for)
Since most subscriptions are sold in "big deal" packages, where few of the most prestigious journals get bundled with a lot of the less prestigious ones to get libraries to purchase more of the same publisher, it's not just those ones that people are paying for...
I don't see where I said it was worth any particular amount.
I was just answering the question about why universities don't just self publish everything.
If Elsevier is overcharging for their services (hint: they are), some startup should go disrupt them or something (hint: the problem will be convincing prestigious authors to publish in your journal rather than Elsevier's).
So we all agree: Elsevier is a vampire squid wrapped around academia (to borrow Matt Taibbi's memorable phrase), extracting tremendous profits (from tax payers via university library funds) for little value provided.
Yeah, they are overcharging, and the problem with individual authors moving to the competition is the prestige/impact factor associated with a journal (ie a prisoners dilemma/coordination problem), and possible solutions are
- concerted action of editorial boards to resign and found a competing journal that "inherits" the prestige (as has happened several times, notably Journal of Algorithms prodded by none other than Don Knuth)
- concerted action of universities/libraries (as in the article)
- government/funding agency intervention to mandate open access publication
- etc.
I hope Elsevier have overextended themselves by refusing to accept half price, and, having their bluff called, receive even less.
Yes that’s the point, the prestige is part of the lock-in, but the non-academic work is not relevant, because it’s not part of the reason for the lock-in.
My objection therefore is that merely mentioning such work could suggest to some unfamiliar with the issue that it’s a mitigating factor in Elsevier’s existence.
Who does the grunt work is just a logistical implementation detail.
When you say non-academic I’m not sure how you were envisioning the review process. That part of course is more challenging because you can’t just hire anyone to do it, there could only be a couple qualified people in some cases, they would have to be incented, or at least motivated or effectively compelled in some way to participate. Not trying to overstate the problem, just that it’s a bit bigger challenge than getting the other work done.
Honestly, as I know the industry, I wasn't really thinking of the review process as something Elsevier provides that is worth much.
Aside from sending a few emails, the review process is largely managed by academia, although I suppose academia may be happier thinking they are being managed by Elsevier than their peers (who tell Elsevier who to enlist for the work anyway...).
But the non-academic work is what you have to do yourself if you break the lock in.
It is not trivial and as it scales it gets increasingly complex.
There are two moats that protect Elsevier's business.
The first moat is that academics don't trust each other and perpetuate the "Publish or Perish" mindset.
In some disciplines (e.g., Liberal Arts, Math), there isn't enough money flowing through academic circles for this to be a real problem. But for the Life Sciences and some Physical Sciences in particular, there is a lot of government and industry money sloshing around, and academics seem perfectly willing to undercut each other and themselves as a group to get a bigger slice of it.
Elsevier takes advantage of that.
Maybe academics will get mad enough at them over it to unite long enough to break their ability to take advantage of them. Seems like it would be in their best interest to do so.
The second moat is that building a web platform to efficiently distribute hundreds of thousands of pages of content a year while still maintaining access to all the previously published pages is a seriously non-trivial task.
Now just providing that web platform can be done for much less money than is currently paid to publishers.
But, as I'm sure all the web developers and sys admins on hacker news would be happy to point out, hosting terabytes of data and generating consistently formatted HTML/CSS from thousands of individually created Word docs and graphics with nifty social media integrations and customized search/browse options is not a thing that can be done for free at the scale Elsevier is operating at.
