
Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan - Someone
https://universonline.nl/2015/07/02/dutch-universities-start-their-elsevier-boycott-plan
======
badlogic
It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that
publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without
adding anything of value.

That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it
matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame
the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants
(publish or perish). On the other hand i had high ranking university staff
tell me "they love how they can just burn €6M in 2 year EU project with zero
outcome without consequences". Reviewers of such projects only need to have
the right political color and zero domain knowledge.

It's sad really and i'm happy i don't have to work in such an environment
amnymore.

~~~
dougmccune
I'll take a little of the publisher bait (I sit on the board of a "dinosaur
paywall publisher"). I'd like to question the popular thinking that publishers
do not add anything of value.

There has never been a time in history when it has been easier to publish your
research output in any number of other places than a paywall journal. You can
post it on your own blog. You want a DOI? You can post it on The Winnower. You
need it in a journal with an impact factor (even though you hate impact
factor)? Submit it to PLOS One or PeerJ.

By publishing with a paywall journal you are acknowledging the fact that your
field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting,
the prestige. You can argue all day about whether that prestige is earned or
not, but it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige, it's the
tenure committees and faculty. Everyone is "against" the journal impact factor
until it comes time to apply for tenure, at which point your tenure committee
weighs it so highly that you can't avoid pandering to it. So you publish in
the highest impact factor journal.

We're all hoping to change this system. Publishers don't like being held
hostage by Thomson Reuters (who controls impact factor) and having to
constantly worry about the next year's impact factor. In a lot of ways we'd
all love to move to academia-accepted alternative metrics. I would love a
system that allows third parties to provide editorial review of the importance
of a paper, and allow that to be separated from the journal. As a publisher
that's what we're really trying to do, provide a way to judge the importance
of a paper before you can get all the citation data coming in over the years.
I would love to figure out a different way of doing so. But changing that
means changing deep-rooted behavior throughout all of academia. And that is
HARD.

~~~
return0
These publishers added value back in the days when they actually _enabled_
communication via printing. They should have been abandoned the day after WWW
was invented. The "established" publishers literally suck the blood of
academia and taxpayer money nowadays. First, they appropriate other people's
work in all stages (writing, review, corrections, illustations etc etc.). Then
they stymie the development of open-access journals by keeping every good
scientist busy reviewing their papers for free (coddling them, showering them
with "prestige"). Then they keep the copyrights of work they didn't pay for,
they make it impossible for data scientists to collect the experimental data,
they hide the papers behind paywalls and they don't even add a comment section
where readers can post legitimate q&a's, comments etc. And on top of that they
require to be paid for all this free work. If that is not insane, i don't know
what is.

The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the
value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought.

Lastly, consider this. My institution can only afford to pay subscriptions to
the most widely read journals, so I find myself using some obscure russian
proxy to download them illegally. Apparently there is a need for that, and
there are entire websites dedicated to that. This is outrageous.

The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and
fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all
they need is a kick in the butt.

~~~
dougmccune
I'm not going to argue with all the reasons you think publishers are insane.
However, I will argue with the comment that "selling prestige in 2015 is a
ridiculous thought."

Offering prestige in 2015 is even more valuable than it has ever been. There
is more research published than there has ever been, from all around the
world. The amount of research information is increasing dramatically, just
like it is with all information (blog posts, videos published, etc). The value
of curation increases with the increase in content, it doesn't decrease. I
don't know what the future holds when it comes to how curation is going to be
done and how prestige will be awarded, but I'm certain that there will be some
mechanism for separating good research from bad research and bestowing
prestige. That isn't decreasing in value - on the contrary, it's increasing.

~~~
return0
Now you are conflating prestige with curation. Journals dont do curation other
than an initial check, instead reviewers decide, for free. Publishers' job is
basically to make sure that the herd perceives them as prestigious by coddling
the big names to publish in their journals (again, for free). This is social
engineering. They do not do anything that an openaccess journal can't do.
(Look at eLife, open and prestigious).

~~~
nicolapede
The quality of the pool of reviewers is not independent on the prestige of the
journal I'd say.

------
acaloiar
I'm currently co-authoring a paper that will be submitted to an Elsevier
journal because it is a good fit for our work. All of my time and that of one
other co-author is funded by an NIH grant which of course is funded by US tax
dollars. I'm fairly certain the Elsevier agreement stipulates that I cannot
share my paper without their permission – assuming the paper is accepted. If I
were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere
that does not support open access.

[EDIT] There are some conditions under which sharing is permitted:
[http://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/sharing-
and-...](http://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/sharing-and-
promoting-your-article)

~~~
Someone
_" If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish
anywhere that does not support open access”

Don’t they do that?
[https://publicaccess.nih.gov](https://publicaccess.nih.gov):

_"To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed
articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access
policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts
that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for
publication" _

~~~
acaloiar
That is good news indeed! Thank you for letting me know. This is my first
publicly funded work and I am not familiar with many of the policies. I will
sleep better knowing that our work will not be holed up exclusively in the
Elsevier-beast.

Also of interest: [http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-
access/agree...](http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-
access/agreements/elsevier-nih-policy-statement)

------
SiVal
I would like to see the governments that fund research get together and create
a rule that your government funding requires that a public version of the
paper be made available online _before_ that paper could be submitted to a
private publisher. This would help to separate the public availability of
useful information paid for by the public issue from the academics' career-
promotion-via-publication issue.

That would, of course, mean that papers would appear prior to acceptance and
peer review, which would speed up the pace of research at the cost (if peer
review is of any value) of putting more shaky research out there. I doubt this
would be a big problem, since researchers in the field know what is going on
anyway (they get early copies or at least early discussion at pay-walled
conferences already), and others who read the research could see that it had
not yet been published in a journal and decide for themselves what to make of
it.

Papers that got peer reviewed and published would still have the published
version used in citations, so you could see how far it had gone in the
publishing process at time of citation. I wouldn't be surprised if people in
the field knew how much credibility to give to a paper based on the
researchers without waiting for the researchers' more established rivals to
"review" it to death.

~~~
bunderbunder
OTOH, I'm not sure if the peer review system isn't ripe for disruption anyway.

Peer review is a system that's designed for the old dead-trees world, where
space for publishing in print journals was extremely limited, publishing in a
print journal was the only way to share knowledge, and you only got one shot
at it because there's limited options for fixing errors after the plates are
engraved. It's primarily there to ensure a minimum standard for the quality of
the _paper_ , not necessarily the research. So what it's really good for
ensuring is that the paper explains the research well enough that someone
who's reading it (and knows what they're doing) could attempt to replicate the
work.

What it is __not __designed to do, though, is ensure that the research is
valid. Peer review can 't reliably detect fraudulent data, nor can it reliably
detect fabricated data. Heck, it can't even detect p-value fishing, which is a
really sobering problem when you consider how many scientists really don't
seem to understand why p-value fishing is such a problem in the first place.
There's supposed to be a different mechanism for detecting that stuff:
replication.

Buy ironcially, replication is something the current journal system actively
discourages. Space in journals is a scarce resource. Furthermore, journals are
competing with each other for prestige. They've got very little reason to
waste space on replicating old findings (booooooooring) when they could be
publishing brand new stuff (exciting!). In turn, researchers have very little
incentive to try and replicate each other's findings. It's already hard to
justify spending money on replicating existing findings. But there's no way in
hell a researcher is going to waste their precious resources on work that they
wouldn't even be able to get published.

So the long and short of it is, people place far too much trust in peer
review. In fact, peer review is a terribly low hurdle. All too often complete
junk gets through it about as easily as excellent science. The trick is that
it just has to be _well written_ junk.

OTOH, a system that removes barriers to doing replication work - or better
yet, starts actively encouraging it - could also do much of the work of peer
review. Because then we'd have peers reviewing the actual research and not
just things people write about research.

~~~
SiVal
Well said, and it explains part of what I meant when I wrote "(if peer review
is of any value)" in the post. The other reason I wrote that is because of the
political shenanigans inherent in the peer-reviewed journal system. "Anonymous
peers" will sabotage the work of their rivals, and the journal editors will
often choose them for the purpose of sabotaging research that doesn't support
the causes the journal editors are working to promote.

------
lultimouomo
I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a
single word about the craziness of open access.

Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article:

    
    
      the university or the financier of the research pays to get published
    

In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal.

It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that
provided him with the service of having the article reviewed and doing its
best to make sure the research was solid. Now the emperor is naked, and it's
finally official what's the purpose of academic journals: let people have
their grants renewed.

~~~
tmalsburg2
There is nothing crazy about it. Most research is funded by tax money and
researchers have a moral and in some countries legal obligation to make their
results accessible to the public. The traditional publishing model failed to
achieve this. Open access journals are a simple and clean solution.

You say "It used to be that the reader was the customer" but you don't explain
why it should be this way.

~~~
lultimouomo
Because the customer defines the role of the journal.

"If you're not paying, you're the product" is endlessly repeated on the
internet. I think it applies to academic journals as well.

------
NotOscarWilde
As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public
comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this
topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is
functionally the same for quite a few years now.

~~~
Coding_Cat
This is actually something I have been thinking about writing myself. Look at
all the major social networks, and all their metrics, analysis, ranking
systems and the like.

Imaging what you could do with a social-network like publication database
(research-gate sort of is, but it doesn't think big enough and the UX is
confusing, imho). Every publication became a "post" so to speak. You could
easily include discussions (both on the paper, as well as general
discussions), ratings, user curated lists (instead of expensive journals),
host links to any relevant non-paper data. Funding could be provided by
Universities, or by means of a registration fee, or simply with an ad
supported model. Targeted ads will probably bring in a relatively high CPM due
to the target audience.

<rant> Incidentally, while we're at it, we could also get rid of strict
formatting guidelines and super-formal writing, some of the best papers I've
read are informal. And it's a very modern thing to do anyway, old papers by
Kelvin and the like read much better than what we have to write these days.
</rant>

~~~
NotOscarWilde
Note that there are some projects that are related to this, for instance a
social network for scientists [1], a Github-like site for article creation
with public comments [2] and some unknown third party comment systems for
arXiv [3]. (I just found this one by googling.)

For any success of such a project, the official endorsement from arXiv is
crucial. Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social
network might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source
recommendation systems pop up.

[1]: [http://www.researchgate.net/](http://www.researchgate.net/)

[2]: [https://www.authorea.com/](https://www.authorea.com/) \-- It costs quite
a lot if you have several papers and you wish to release them only after the
preprint is ready.

[3]: [http://pacs.gutcalc.com/](http://pacs.gutcalc.com/)

~~~
Coding_Cat
Hmm, authorea looks pretty interesting. Researchgate I touched on before. the
last one looks more like a quick experiment than a serious attempt.

I don't think official endorsement by arXiv is necessary, what is important is
to gain a critical mass. I think authorea has the right idea to give users a
incentive to use the program. If possible, I would offer more free access to
gain that initial traction, but of course this requires an investor with deep
enough pockets to take the hit. Networking would also be key, to bring it back
to the original article: if you could work with those involved here and offer
your services to host all these open-access papers...

>Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social network
might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source recommendation
systems pop up.

I think we need something similar in openness and positioning as Github. AFAIK
Github did not market itself as a social platform at first, but it just made
it so easy for its users that it ended up being key to its success.

I think that is the overall approach one should take, don't force the users
into a pattern, that will not work and definitely not in rigid-academia. You
have to guide them by a good UX, make them think they want to use your
features because that is what's good for them (they're like cats in that
regard).

~~~
NotOscarWilde
Notice that arXiv does not need any money from its users; it is fully funded
from academic/private donations and it does not seek to maximize revenue.

Authorea is very different; it has a very tough pricing model where you have
to either choose to publish even partial work while you are writing
(unacceptable to most scientists I know) or pay per article AND per month.

Basically, my issue with it is the same as with the current open-access model:
I am trying my hardest to produce good science and release it for free; yet
somebody tries to profit not from my own results, but from my _desire_ to have
those results published for free. ArXiv helps me while refusing to profit from
this desire, and thus I love it.

You have to keep in mind that a lot of scientists (I think this is true for
compsci/math/physics) choose a 50% pay cut so that they can do science, and
not go into the (programming) industry. Speaking as a PhD student, we have
modest means and do not like to be gouged.

~~~
Coding_Cat
True, which is one of the reasons why I'd like to do some number crunching
regarding hosting costs vs. sponsors/ads and premium features (like GitHub's
private repos) separate from the Open Access features.

------
thegrif
I'm the former director of innovation for IEEE. I actually recruited many
members of my team from HN. We were developing some great stuff to address
many of the comments here. Unfortunately they just didn't have the stomach for
it - and hardly none of it hit users (and the stuff that did was so watered
down to protect current revenue streams that it's completely different (and in
some cases silly).

There were a handful of folks in this thread who said they'd be interested in
building some new stuff to solve the era problems in how scientific knowledge
is created and shared. If anyone wants to contact me directly, I'd be happy to
organize those interested, capture ideas, and see if there's something common
we all want to work on. I'm at tom@thegrif.net or
www.linkedin.com/in/tomgriffin.

~~~
kragen
That sounds really interesting! What kind of stuff were you developing, and
what kind of roadblocks did you hit?

------
tomkat0789
There's good arguements for and against a complete conversion to open access
research. Ruining all the free fun of open access are charlatans from around
the world creating open access journals from nothing and picking up free money
and prestige. I'd like to abring up this website:
[http://scholarlyoa.com/](http://scholarlyoa.com/)

It's run by a librarian in Colorado, and he has a set of criteria to determine
whether a given open access journal qualifies as a "predatory" journal.
Sometimes you see stuff like this gem:

[http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-
prof...](http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/11/20/bogus-journal-accepts-profanity-
laced-anti-spam-paper/)

I can't find the link, but I once read a story where they published a paper
titled, "Enter paper title". That's how reputable some of these outfits are.

Open access won't be perfect.

------
azdle
> If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next
> step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that,
> scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack
of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would
think that all the other pieces would be much more replaceable than the actual
papers themselves.

~~~
detaro
Because it also has the highest impact on your scientists. Asking somebody to
stop publishing in the major journals of his field is not going to get as much
understanding as the weaker measures. You don't want all your potential PhD
students running for the hills because they fear they won't get good
publications...

------
bluenose69
The main funding agency in my country is starting to demand that we publish in
open-access journals. It seems like a wonderful thing, except for one little
detail: the agency is not supplying any extra funding. The difference in cost
between conventional and open-access grants is a significant fraction of the
typical grant. Are researchers expected to publish less frequently, or to
reduce students stipends?

------
aswanson
Why don't all universities just make all their professors papers available
online. No journals, etc, just put the damn pdfs online and let people cite by
hyperlink and normal inline citations. To hell with the publishers.

~~~
PeterisP
The people generally already do make the papers available, but that's still
not a replacement for journals or indexed conferences; if I _just_ put the
paper online without it also being in a reputable publication, then from the
point of carreer and future funding I might just as well thrown it in garbage.

The same goes with low-ranked open access publication venues - publishing in
them is worse than not publishing at all; since it prevents me from publishing
that research in some place that matters.

~~~
aswanson
What seems to be broken, though, is the question of _why_ that place matters;
it seems to be cabal-driven and to some extent corrupted. The results of
research should be able to _matter_ purely on their own merit, not because of
a tag some committee put on it. Idealistic? Of course, but that doesnt mean
that is not worth pursuing.

------
transcranial
Over 15,000 academics and researchers have already signed a petition
boycotting Elsevier. The effort is but a drop in the bucket in terms of what's
needed. [http://thecostofknowledge.com/](http://thecostofknowledge.com/)

------
ylem
The following is interesting: [http://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-
energy-increase...](http://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-
increases-access-results-doe-funded-scientific-research)

It will be interesting to see how this evolves. I also see more open access
publications (where the publication is free for the public, but the author
pays the publisher) these days--but I'm not sure if they have subsidies for
researchers from smaller institutions.

------
newsposter123
"It is not unthinkable that if I would submit a love letter, it would be
published sooner than an intelligent scholarly article by a young researcher."

------
kanyethegreat
Practically speaking, asking them to resign their posts is kind of extreme.
Food is a little more tangible than morality.

~~~
jerven
Those are basically unpaid posts

------
mierek4ever
No whole world can't be like tiny Denmark. With size half-brooklyn you can
afford being awkward. We can't.

------
roelvanhintum
I'm surprised this isn't big news in The Netherlands. I have not seen a single
thing about it in the news!

------
shmerl
Reed Elsevier have a really nasty reputation. They also supported SOPA / PIPA.

------
hitlin37
Not just Dutch universities, other universities within EU should join the
effort.

------
elektromekatron
The wheels may turn slowly. But they turn.

------
personjerry
Anyone else think that this (academia/research) sounds like an industry that
could be disrupted?

~~~
xiaq
It surely is, but beware that unlike fields like social networking which makes
money from idle and bored people, scientists have a lot of things to get busy
and excited about and are much harder to convince, unless there is some _real_
advantages coming up.

