
Elsevier journals – some facts - kanzure
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/
======
dougmccune
Throwing this out there for anyone working on a startup in the academic
journal space. I'm on the board of SAGE Publications, which is (depending on
how you count), the 5th or so largest publisher in the space. See this diagram
for where SAGE fits:
[http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_pub...](http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_publishers.png)

If you’re doing a startup in this space and want to reach out, please contact
me. I live in SF and would happily take you out for coffee or meet up for a
beer. My contact details are on my HN profile.

SAGE is a 100% family owned business. My grandmother is chairwoman, my dad and
I are on the board. I'm a coder working in an unrelated startup for my day
job, living in SF. We’re not dinosaurs trying to bleed the system dry until
our business model collapses, but at the same time I wholeheartedly
acknowledge the fundamentals of the journals business are antiquated and I
believe they will radically change eventually. Academia is incredibly
complicated and moves at a glacial pace.

So if you’re interested in seeing the world of academic journals from the
inside, please get in touch. I can get you in contact with anyone in the SAGE
organization at every level.

~~~
RichardPrice
I like Doug a lot, and his family who run the business. His grandmother is
terrific. She and her husband started the business several decades ago.

I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years talking to
Doug and others at Sage about the future of academic publishing. I've always
enjoyed the conversations, and they have always been open to hearing my
radical views :)

(I'm the founder of Academia.edu).

------
robertwalsh0
When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of
academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you
imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't
compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit.

You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those
people at least receive advances.

And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new
knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television
mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead
you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine."

Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into
their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an
editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking
the process into their own hands:
[http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-
sociologist...](http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologists-
launch-new-online-journal)

(Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)

~~~
paulgb
> You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those
> people at least receive advances.

Also, recording artists don't receive taxpayer money.

~~~
nraynaud
note that neither do record companies.

~~~
teddyh
Actually, yes, record companies do receive taxpayer money:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy)

~~~
nraynaud
let's talk about proportions and tax law here. I don't find my argument
countered in any ways. 1) this is a collection that doesn't go to the general
budget, it's a directed levy. 2) it's not as if the record companies main
income and business model was to sell to public institutions. Whereas most of
the scientific articles are bought by publicly funded laboratories, hospitals,
universities (in the non-US world) etc.

------
nraynaud
I just came here to say that accessing papers is a pain in the butt when
you're not an academic. I've not been near an university in the last decade (I
hated my time there as a student, I leave them alone now), but I need access
to some papers for my personal projects. I resort to begging people in the
academic field to send me papers, you can't pay 45€ a paper you don't even
know if it will be useful, I read 10s of them. And, even worse, this high
price doesn't even pays the authors. A music album costs 10€ and the author
gets all his money out of it plus you can listen to it on youtube to decide
before buying.

Academics tend to cite papers for completely different reasons than for
implementation, but you don't know if a paper will be useful for
implementation or not from the title.

edit: and I couldn't find an option in scholar.google.com to filter only the
free to view articles.

~~~
quasque
Despite having what seems to be a reasonable level of access via my university
subscription, I too sometimes have the same problem, especially for older
papers.

Some online resources I quite like for this:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar](http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar) \- paper
requests fulfilled by people who happen to have access

[http://www.libgen.org/](http://www.libgen.org/) \- large collection of
scientific articles (and other literature), searchable by DOI

[http://www.sci-hub.org/](http://www.sci-hub.org/) \- proxy service for
accessing publisher collections; very unreliable though

Hope this helps with your research!

~~~
Fomite
See also the Twitter hashtag #icanhazpdf

~~~
RighteousFervor
I didn't find that method helpful, but I guess YMMV.

------
fsk
The problem is that (in the USA), most academic research is funded via
taxpayers (either via outright grants or indirectly via student tuition and
government tuition assistance).

The professors write and edit and referee the papers for free.

Then, that research is copyrighted and owned by a corporation, who is allowed
to extract economic rent by charging for access.

Professors have to publish in the top journals (owned by these corporations),
because that's how they advance their careers.

BUT, if all the professors switched AT THE SAME TIME, it would work. If you're
the only professor who switches, you're just ruining your own career.

~~~
Brakenshire
Or, if the funding body mandates the switch, as is starting to happen:

[http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&p...](http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/index.php?la=en&mode=simple&page=browse)

------
dmunoz
This is a long post, with a wealth of information that will take some time to
digest. The comment section also has contribution from well targeted
participants, and replies from Timothy Gowers himself, so it's probably best
to comment anything substantial there.

However, I would just like to say that I am very happy to see Timothy Gowers
is still on this case.

------
return0
1\. Build databases where scientists can enter their methods and their results
_only_ , preferably in machine-readable format

2\. Make it mandatory for publicly-funded scientists to enter their data into
said databases

3\. Let them publish all their introductions and discussions to whichever
ancient publishing house they want

4\. do good science

p.s. It really pisses me off when elsevier's sites take 50 seconds to give me
the damn pdf. or when their javascript doesn't let me increase the font size.
Or to open references in another tab.

~~~
omnisci
I'm working on something similar to what you mentioned right now @
stirplate.io

However, to "make it mandatory for publicly-funded ..." is the difficult part.
I'm with you 100% (I'm a neuroscience PhD) and this needs to happen,but it
needs to come from the financial groups such as NIH/NSF who really just aren't
good at dealing with this kind of stuff. They do make it mandatory, but they
don't provide real resources for scientists to access these tools. Either
that, or they are insanely difficult to use, so people don't do it. I'm
shooting for getting raw data from scientists, populating a huge f'in database
that is linked and categorized, and if/when the group makes the data open,
allow scientists to work off of that huge database of raw, unedited data.
(this is specific to life sciences)

I've learned the following when talking about my company: 1\. Investors don't
want to hear about open science because they immediately get stuck on "what if
they don't share". That tends to end the conversation. 2\. Scientists
themselves complain about the system, but are unwilling to change behaviors.
So we have to address their fears in order to start making change (that is
what I'm working on now) 3\. Schools and funding agencies are using technology
from 1996 and thinking that is sufficient. People need to be educated, and
this is hard to do.

This isn't impossible and it's happening slowly...the mindset of academics
just needs to change. (IMHO)

~~~
return0
I too think it's impossible to make it work without giving an incentive to
scientists. When so much of your career depends on where you publish, your
whole career centers around how to publish and please editors, not how to
solve problems. I am pessimistic that "if you build it, they will come". This
needs to come from academia or in collaboration.

p.s. coincidence - i 'm doing a compneuro PhD myself

~~~
omnisci
What you mentioned there is one of the reasons why I left to do this company.
They won't come if you build it, and many of the science startups have felt
that (Quartzy.com and ScienceExchange.com). Both are doing well, and run by
awesome people, but academics need something to drive them to a site. Hence
why I built data automation tools :)

Re: PhD, Cool, best of luck:) If you ever want to work on something outside of
academic work, let me know. I'm always looking for people to work on Stirplate
with me. Also,I'm always happy to help people getting started, so feel free to
reach out if you have any questions keith @ stirplate.io

------
fdej
Elsevier is just a symptom of the disease that is academic publishing. We need
to get away entirely from the 17th century approach to disseminating
scientific knowledge.

But as long as your chance to get a job in academia is proportional to (number
of publications * exp(nobleness of journals)), most scientists will just
continue playing the same game, and publishers will continue exploiting them.

------
dredmorbius
Related: "No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial
Expansion?[1] ", by Frank Thadeusz at Der Spiegel.

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-
copyright-l...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-
law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html)

 _[O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the
Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without
consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that
caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the
span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught
up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900._

 _Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development
-- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established
early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the
United Kingdom._

 _Germany, on the other hand, didn 't bother with the concept of copyright for
a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a
copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states
meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire._

I've posted a few more thoughts (and more on copyright) here:
[http://redd.it/23xrkd](http://redd.it/23xrkd)

------
username223
> How easy is it on average to find on the web copies of Elsevier articles
> that can be read legally and free of charge?

It was quite a bit easier while CiteSeer still worked, and before Google
started indexing stuff behind paywalls. Usually it was easy to find a draft or
pre-print.

------
knz42
There's a article coming up at the TRUST workshop this year (co-located with
PLDI) which addresses this issue:

[http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e](http://tinyurl.com/kwnbl9e)

(workshop:
[http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/](http://c-mind.org/events/trust2014/))

It describes a new dissemination model where journals are entirely dismissed
(including open access), in favor of a true peer-to-peer network, open
reviews, guaranteed timestamps, and free access to articles.

Hopefully the full text of the article will be online as the workshop date
comes close...

------
jdmitch
Why are private universities subject to the FOIA? Or am I wrong in thinking
that Oxford and Cambridge are private?

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
There are only four private universities in the UK (and I confess I'd only
heard of one of them, Buckingham):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingd...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university#United_Kingdom)

------
robertwalsh0
Also: here's the a treatment of the post as an infographic:
[http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-
infographi...](http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/84136359198/an-infographic-
view-of-gowerss-elsevier-expose)

------
delinquentme
This is written like an academic paper. Shorten it. Seriously. I know it takes
more mental processing to simplify things but you're limiting your feedback
pool to people who have 30 minutes to read something.

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biehl
Impressive work! I guess I ought to FOIA some Danish universities...

------
nraynaud
there is some kind of drug dealer spirit in the idea that the current price
depends on the past price, and you can't really cancel.

