
Elsevier journal editors resign, start rival open-access journal - dankohn1
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/14/elsevier-journal-editors-resign-start-rival-open-access-journal
======
afpx
Not too long ago, I had communications with Elsevier's technology team, and
through that experience, I also spoke with some of their directors. Let me say
that the experience was kind of mind-boggling and surreal.

My impression is that Elsevier is a company locked into the past by a couple
of decades. The leadership that I spoke with seemed to have worked in
publishing for a very long time. And, probably because of that, they had an
old-school publishing mentality with regards to how to reach their customers,
provide value, and create revenue.

I sensed that many in the technology team seemed frustrated with their
leadership. They had new visions for how to evolve the publishing model to
reflect the rise of sci-hub and changes in the industry. However, they were
stymied by a very bureaucratic, well-entrenched, and siloed organization.

I expected that the leadership would have some strategy for dealing with this,
but it seemed like they were aloof, probably grown fat from decades of near-
monopoly. They had a net profit margin of 37% in 2017! Talk about a business
ripe for disruption.

Elsevier has been around a very, very long time (wikipedia says 1880), and it
shows. I can't imagine getting anything done within that company. So, it's no
surprise that some of them are finally leaving to try out a new model. Let's
hope for the best.

~~~
snambi
Who reads all these journals? Let alone pay for them...

~~~
jtmcmc
mostly academics in the relevant fields, largely paid for by the institutions
they work at

~~~
loeg
Institutions in turn funded by some combination of the state, undergrads, or
endowments.

------
dankohn1
I have so much respect for the editors who were willing to make this jump.

I've wondered if there is some cognitive dissonance between the strong
feelings I have that scientific journals should be open access and my
willingness to buy and use closed source software (even though I run an open
source software foundation). But I don't think so.

Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is
used. If they want it to be used and available as widely as possible, they
should publish it under an open source license and in an open source journal.
But when for-profit companies like Elsevier control the journals in which
publication is necessary for getting tenure, they are restricting information
flow and harming science with no countervailing benefits. Furthermore, many
journal articles are supported by government grants, and it's just appalling
to me not to have access to the results of research that I am paying for. (If
not for [https://sci-hub.tw/](https://sci-hub.tw/) obviously.)

I'm optimistic that the author-pays model of funding copy editing will work
out and that for-profit journals will be seen in another couple decades as
akin to leeching and phrenology.

~~~
apathy
Except that leeching has benefits

~~~
dankohn1
It does! I wondered if someone would point that out. (Though blood letting
does not).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting)

~~~
tonyg
Blood-letting also has benefits in some cases! For example, venesection is a
standard treatment for haemochromatosis:
[http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/](http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/)

------
mothsonasloth
Aaron Schwartz would be pleased to see this.

Elsevier, Springer etc. are just syndicates sitting between researchers and
consumers.

They have no place in today's world.

~~~
garethrees
Do you mean Aaron Swartz?

------
ArtWomb
Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques recently published a breakdown of
their costs hosting an open journal. Approx. $100 per annum ;)

[http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html](http://jcgt.org/news/2018-01-04-expenses.html)

~~~
specialp
Last year they published a grand total of 8 articles with the editorial staff
doing the copy-editing, and web work for free. It is nice they are doing this
but it isn't indicative of the cost of hosting/peer review/copy-editing more
substantial journals.

~~~
a3_nm
As for "peer review", this has no cost: reviewers are not paid.

~~~
specialp
Facilitating peer review does have a cost. You would be surprised how much it
takes to find referees that are both qualified to assess the paper and do not
have too close of a relationship with the authors. Then there is the whole
thing of getting them to file their reports.

------
pfortuny
The same thing happened with “Topology”, now “Journal of Topology”. After some
years it was bought by Wiley and is no longer free...

A journal is not an easy task to manage.

~~~
est31
Often, journals aren't founded by the current publishers but instead by people
who do actual research in that field. Then, a publisher approaches them and
offers them a lot of money. Who would decline such an offer?

You are right, this move might just be a strategic measure to get more money
from the publisher.

~~~
wbl
That's not exactly the story with Journal of Topology. It's published by the
LMS, which partnered with Wiley.

------
vanderZwan
> _Rooryck, who was editor of Lingua and now leads Glossa, said the most
> challenging aspect of starting a new open-access journal is securing funding
> to ensure it survives. He said Glossa is doing well and has more submissions
> now than Lingua did. Lingua has been described as a “zombie” journal by some
> scholars, but it continues to receive hundreds of submissions._

Is there a list of "zombie journals" somewhere? Would be interesting to see
them all laid out.

~~~
tokai
Not really.

>Unfortunately, unless black and white lists are updated continuously, they
can never keep up with changes in the publication industry. [...] So, the
quick answer to the question ‘where shouldn’t I publish?’ is that [...]
researchers need to engage in critical enquiry and reflection about a
potential publisher. This should not come as a shock – the same advice would
have been true long before the end of Beall’s List.

[https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/world-hijacked-
clone-z...](https://ahrecs.com/research-integrity/world-hijacked-clone-zombie-
publishing-shouldnt-publish)

------
n1000
So, as an academic myself, I have been wondering. Why don't some tech-savy
people (the kinds that roam around HN) create an open-source publishing
platform and offer journals to use their services for free / cheaply?
Something like a GitLab for publishing papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the
German government would agree to fund such a thing these days. This would make
such a jump for willing editorial boards much easier.

~~~
jononor
Recognition/prestige is what the journals offer. Hosting is incidental.
Editing and reviewing too.

~~~
globuous
I mean, github does too. Some projects have 0 stars, some have 16k; some have
0 contribs, some have thousands; some have no forks, some have hundred. You
know what I mean ? All these variables are a pretty good measure of
recognition, I check them every time I add dependencies to my projects. And
just like any other measure, it isn't perfect and is hackable in ways I
haven't imagined yet.

Forks are similar to citations in a way. It's not the same, there are many
differences, but there are some similarities in my opinion. By the way,
wouldn't it be great to be able to contribute to papers, and their assets
(figures, code, equations) ? I don't know how a system like that might work in
practice, it must be non trivial to govern, like any other sizable community -
but I can see how it could work.

Does science really need to pay for recognition and prestige today ? It used
to be the these journals allowed more people to have access to quality
research, now it restricts them. Non free journals are dead a parellel
universe Nietzsche might write.

~~~
bertil
The number of stars on GitHub is significant because most people whose opinion
you’d care about are on GitHub, they wouldn’t star project that they were not
interested in and there aren’t widespread fake accounts.

I don’t believe that there is an equivalent in academia, one that would
capture the h-index dynamic (copied by PageRank) that a star from a
prestigious professor is worth a lot more. It’s trivial to build, but “growth
hacking” for lack of a better word, is hard, especially in areas where actual
growth hacking would be frowned upon.

That’s why, for instance, Facebook celebrates its billion of users so much:
it’s genuinely hard to make that. Hosting them too, but not in the same way.

~~~
Vinnl
In case you're interested: I'm working with eLife and the Center for Open
Science on creating something just like that. Having those two organisations
as partners has really boosted the profile, leading to others jumping on
board.

There's still ways to go, but I think we're on the right track. But you're
right: it's really hard, and it took me a year to even get here.

------
sudoaza
Hurra, Elsevier are a band of crooks, they have way more profit margin than
giants like google and apple, science does good by moving away from them.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Basically we want a similar system but at rates where profit is c. 0 (zero)
and wages are around the median?

But doesn't that translate to other "industries"? Or, is it recognition that
science has a fundamentally greater importance to humanity ... it's that true
though, arts are pretty fundamental too, medicine certainly is, housing, food,
water supply, sewerage, ... Why do we accept rent-seeking and profiteering and
excessive wages and whatever in these other things?

Aside: Seems to me "science must seize [some of] the 'means of production'" is
pretty communist.

~~~
collyw
> Aside: Seems to me "science must seize [some of] the 'means of production'"
> is pretty communist.

When the research is funded by the state it seems reasonable.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So only industries that get government support - like rail, electricity supply
in UK? Food production in USA? Farming across the EU?

Then there's the premise that "private property is theft", so perhaps all
industries that use land ownership or natural resources owe their utility to
the public too?

------
apo
The board's letter is linked in the article.

[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-
Letter.html)

There appear to have been multiple complaints:

1\. Ownership of the journal is non-negotiable.

2\. Article Publishing Charges (APC) are non-negotiable. APC is the charge
paid by an author to get an article published under the journal's current Open
Access policy.

3\. Unwillingness to participate in an initiative to freely publish article
citation data (I4OC): [https://i4oc.org](https://i4oc.org)

Many journals have instituted author-pays Open Access policies. In my view,
this model is just as unsustainable as reader-pays (or more accurately,
library-pays).

The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs
to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not
talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost.

I suspect the board of JOI will find out for sure. It will be interesting to
see: (a) whether it charges APCs; and (b) if it does, how they compare to
those Elsevier charges.

~~~
dougmccune
> The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really
> costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling.
> I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full
> cost.

I know you're asking about the full cost including the time of the people
working for free, which you're right, is an impossible number to get. But I
fail to fully see your point. The new journal that's going to be run by MIT
Press isn't going to start paying editors and reviewers any differently than
Elsevier (meaning not paying them).

To answer one of your questions, the article mentions they are indeed going to
try to charge less for APCs ($600-800 instead of $1,800), and they're going to
be fully OA, but those are the only major changes.

But to part of your question about the cost of publishing, PLOS publishes
their financials [1], as does eLife [2]. eLife published 1,307 papers in 2017
and had total expenses of 5.3m GBP (~6.9m USD) for an average per-article
expense of $5,244. PLOS published ~27,000 articles in 2016 [3] and had total
expenses of $42.8m USD for an average per-article expense of ~$1,500. These of
course aren't apples to apples comparisons, since what they're trying to do
with this journal isn't the same as what PLOS does or what eLife does. But I
think those are some good ballparks to understand what the range kind of looks
like.

[1] [https://www.plos.org/financial-overview](https://www.plos.org/financial-
overview)

[2] [https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-
repor...](https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/50d52087/annual-report-
looking-back-on-2017)

[3] [https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-
Update-2016-online.pd...](https://www.plos.org/files/PLOS-Annual-
Update-2016-online.pdf)

------
burtonator
This is awesome.

I'm working on something that would VERY much benefit from open access
journals:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

With Polar you maintain all your research in one place and can annotate and
share with other users.

One thing I want to add is the ability to sync up with open access sources to
fetch PDFs, get metadata for them, find related PDFs and research, etc.

Going to go heads down into this today.

~~~
Vinnl
You probably know about it already, but you'll probably want to use Unpaywall:
[https://unpaywall.org/](https://unpaywall.org/)

It catalogues Open Access links given a DOI, provides an API, and also
provides links to direct PDFs (or web pages containing the complete article,
if available).

------
robertwalsh0
Making academic journals more accessible is a problem that I’ve been working
on the last few years with my project, Scholastica. We provide software that
allows journals to manage their entire toolchain from peer-review to
publication.

Homepage

[https://www.scholasticahq.com](https://www.scholasticahq.com)

Two journals that use our software:
[https://www.surveypractice.org](https://www.surveypractice.org) (OA journal
published by American Association for Public Opinion Research)

[https://discreteanalysisjournal.com](https://discreteanalysisjournal.com)
(arxiv overlay journal started by Fields Medal winner Tim Gowers)

~~~
Vinnl
Heh, I mentioned you above :)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18921700)

~~~
robertwalsh0
Thanks, I really appreciate it :D

------
avar
There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just
telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open
journal.

Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which
is available in open journals will be considered.

You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but
making all their backlog available as well to increase their odds of getting
funding.

That would chip away even more at the moat of companies like Elsevier since
presumably much of their funding is from universities who'll need access to
historical research for a _long_ time.

~~~
Fomite
One problem this does is it shifts the costs of this to individual _projects_.

In my field, the average OA field is probably around $3000.

Assuming a five year project that produces 5 papers a year (not unreasonable),
you get $75,000.

That's almost exactly what it costs, with salary, tuition, and fringe, to
support two graduate students. So funders would have to accept getting _less_
productivity from the same projects.

It also favors large labs with senior PIs that have the funding to absorb
those costs.

~~~
dougmccune
Your lab only has to pay grad students $7,500 a year? Seems like that might be
the number that’s out of whack in the equation. To be fair, I live in the Bay
Area, where $7,500 only gets you like 3-4 months rent.

~~~
Fomite
^For a year. Which is still a significant loss, but yeah.

------
xiaodai
If you have the means to do so, can I suggest you sponsor one paper that you
like to support for open access? It's $600m, which is a significant sum, but
if you feel that your career has been helped in a significant way by research
performed by others that freely available to you, and if you have the means to
do so, this would be a good way to start giving back to the community. Now I
just wonder if any of the journals allow such individual contributions.

------
tokai
JOI is a great journal. I hope they manage to keep QSS top tier.

------
bitwize
I had a crooter approach me about a software position at Elsevier once. I told
her no, and that you can't spell Elsevier without E-V-I-L.

------
Lxr
As a shameless plug, we are hiring right now (we’re a small remote team)
working on this exact problem - neliti.com/careers

------
SomeHacker44
Imagine if they had signed the ubiquitous non-competes we have in the tech-
world outside California.

------
Xelbair
Elsevier has editors?

------
KasianFranks
This is great.

