
Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall - randomwalker
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/
======
impendia
I am an academic mathematician (albeit one with significantly less clout than
Gowers). A few comments on both the article and some of the other comments:

(1) I wish I could upvote this article 100 times. I am in complete agreement
with Gowers. I published a couple of articles in Elsevier journals in grad
school, because my advisor thought it would be important to get my first job,
but I'm pretty confident I can avoid this from now on.

(2) There are free online-only journals, e.g. <http://www.integers-
ejcnt.org/>, unfortunately they are not very prestigious. I don't know what
can be done to remedy this.

(3) One commenter suggested that peer reviewers should be compensated, but I
disagree. First of all, you don't really "sign up" to do it; typically editors
pick someone they know and just ask them to referee. I do a fair bit of this.
It is not an unproductive use of time, as keeping up with research literature
and thinking critically about it is already part of our job.

In addition, we are paid in a somewhat unusual way; we get flat salaries (plus
grants) and are expected to do "service" in addition to research and teaching.
If refereeing paid substantial money, where other informal methods of
participating in the mathematical community do not, I think this would lead to
an odd system of incentives. For example, for me a referee report might well
take anywhere between five minutes and twenty hours. What amount of
compensation would be fair? And would there be pressure for more favorable
reviews?

(Note that "informal methods of participating in the mathematical community do
not pay" is only mostly true.)

Feel free to ask me questions.

~~~
kevinalexbrown
Hi impendia:

I'm an academic scientist. There are still huge problems with Elsevier in
science, but there has been a huge amount of progress in making open-access
journals more prestigious, which may work in mathematics. My favorite example
is the collection of PLoS journals (Proceedings of the Library of Science).
PLoS Biology was started in 2003, and in 6 years, they became the highest
ranking Biology journal according to the traditional (though perhaps highly
flawed) impact factor rankings. This is significant, because there's more
money invested into research in biology/medicine than all other disciplines
combined, so winning in such a monetized market represents a great step
forward.

The best part of the PLoS journals is that anyone anywhere can read them, you
can send them to your colleagues, since they're licensed under Creative
Commons. And they tend to have the best user interface of any of the journals'
online access sites.

There's a downside in that PLoS journals tend to ask for contributions from
publishing authors to help cover costs. This is less of an issue for, say, a
large biology lab with millions of dollars in funding, than it is for a
theoretical physicist, or in your case, a mathematician. I think it would be
worthwhile to add a part to grants asking for money for publishing in open-
access journals. I don't know how grants work in mathematics, but in biology
they're pretty flexible.

~~~
impendia
+1, I'm glad to hear that the rest of science is doing better than us!

Mathematics grants are relatively small, on the order of $20-60k a year. But
senior mathematicians (of which Gowers is most certainly one) typically have
larger grants. In mathematics, $1-3k (the publishing fee for PLoS) seems like
a rather high barrier -- but I hope the coming years prove me wrong here!

~~~
noahl
The fee does seem high for individual academics, but I bet the costs of
running a journal are low compared to what libraries currently pay for getting
them. Moreover, storing information and making it available is a library's
mission. Therefore, I hope that _libraries_ , rather than individual
researchers, start to host the next generation of open access journals.

Libraries also have infrastructure in place - they already host their own
websites, so running a journal just requires adding another page to it.

The most annoying part would be coordinating the different reviewers, but I
think that job would be done by the editorial boards, composed of researchers
in the specific fields.

------
rd108
The currently pending Research Works Act is a SOPA-like debacle that seeks to
impede the free flow of scientific information to a degree previously unheard
of. Thank you for lending your voice to stop this counter-productive madness.

<http://publishing.umich.edu/2012/01/05/more-legislative/>
[http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/24541-H...](http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/24541-H-R-3699-Research-
Works-Act)

~~~
billswift
Derek Lowe wrote a good post about the RWA last Thursday,
[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/19/the_research...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/01/19/the_research_works_act_one_two_against_and_one_for.php)

------
randomwalker
Summary: Gowers outlines the extraordinarily oppressive business practices of
academic publisher Elsevier, explains why they are able to continue to do so
in spite of widespread anger amongst the community (collective action
problem), and goes on to explain how we might be able to solve this problem by
publicizing the actions of people who've taken a stand.

------
nohat
This is quite important. The main lock in effect of a Elsevier journal is the
impact factor. Researchers careers are made on the regard for their papers,
and the most visible component of that is the citation rate. The academics who
can afford to refuse to publish in Elsevier journals are the well known and
well regarded ones. So getting the top academics - such as Gowers - to
publicly disavow Elsevier is the first step.

------
toyg
Considering the entire system of journals and papers is about reputation
rather than profit (from what I understand, nobody in academia gets money from
the publishing process), it’s a prime candidate for disruption. If a small
group of universities started publishing all their papers on an official
website (maybe with an opportune system of ranking, to somehow reflect quality
of the reviewing process and make it really equivalent to traditional journal
publishing), then the incentives to publish in an Elsevier paper would
disappear. The system could then grow as more universities join.

I’m surprised nobody has done it yet, there must be some stumbling block I’m
not aware of.

~~~
jedbrown
A record of publishing in prestigious journals (many of which are run by the
major publishers) is generally good for tenure review and grant proposals.
Starting a new publication is challenging because you have to attract the best
quality work in order to gain prestige.

The current publishing model is a frequent topic of conversation among my
colleagues. We share and discuss papers (formerly on Google Reader, now using
substitutes like G+) from many sources. I would like to see <http://arXiv.org>
acquire a public review process.

~~~
MaysonL
I wonder if a prestigious department could start a practice of ignoring
Elsevier-published articles in tenure decisions?

~~~
toyg
That's the main problem I see, really: buy-in from high-profile institutions.
If a decent number of them started to publicize that they see papers published
with New-Uber-Journal-System.XYZ as "preferred" over traditional papers, then
people would queue up to publish there, and would force others to follow suit
or be seen as "2nd rate". To do that though, NUJS better be have a bombproof
method to produce quality reviewing (high-profile reviewers, a system of
incentives targeted on quality not quantity etc etc).

~~~
_delirium
You can do that _de facto_ in smallish areas through "journal revolts", which
have happened a few times, where the senior people of the field all band
together to endorse/run a new open-access journal, and basically say, "as far
as we're concerned, this is now the top place to publish". For example, when
nearly all the senior editors of the journal _Machine Learning_ resigned to
form the open-access _Journal of Machine Learning Research_
(<http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html>), that also sent a
pretty direct signal that JMLR was the new place to publish, at least in these
senior researchers' opinion.

------
saurabhnanda
Okay, so where's the Reddit/Digg for scientific research papers and articles?
There could be some sort of "dual voting system" where against each article
two vote counts are maintained -- one set of votes by the editorial team
("peer review") and the other set of votes by the community at large.

The editorial team could be selected through a semi-democratic process, if
required.

Is it that tough? How many big names in science are required to pull this
through? The technology is dead-simple - the main problem is to cross the
critical threshold of number of articles submitted and number of editors.

~~~
JS_startup
The technology isn't the hurdle here, it's the prestige. The academic
publishing world is all about who you are, what institutes you belong to, etc.
To put it bluntly, a Reddit-like journal site just wouldn't have enough "cred"
to attract decent content.

~~~
foamdino
Indeed, get someone like MIT to do an OpenJournal to complement the rest of
their OpenX initiatives and you might start getting buy-in.

The problem is that the system is broken - publish n papers => you're better
than before (ignoring the content of the papers of course). Academics are
encouraged to publish (and re-publish older stuff with a slight tweak) to meet
publishing 'targets' handed down by government.

This model feeds into the Elsiver etc closed publishing as academics are
forced to compete to earn their stripes - so now we have a model that
encourages re-publishing crap and then locking it behind a paywall, but when I
ask PhDs if they think this is fine, they don't see the problem :(

~~~
saurabhnanda
As part of their "publishing targets", does the government mandate the exact
journals, or type of journals, in which papers need to be published?

Are these journals explicitly named, or is there a criteria they need to
satisfy to be eligible?

------
6ren
Wouldn't a more effective boycott be of _citation_ of articles in Elsevier
journals?

Rough on those articles, and will leave (some) gaps in your references, but
that is Elsevier's actual source of power.

~~~
luchak
That's not really something I would want to try. Omitting references can lead
to accusations that you are trying to claim as your own novel contributions
things that others have already done.

~~~
6ren
You could reference another paper that discusses it (assuming there is one),
perhaps one that references the paper in question, ideally by the original
authors. It's common for authors to write a series of papers on some topic.

This doesn't give the ideal credit, but it addresses the concern you raise.

------
Gatsky
This whole situation is doubly absurd when you consider clinical trials, where
patients have risked their helath or died to prove that certain treatments
work or do not work. That data then gets locked down by these shameless
monopolising profiteers.

I think it is completely unethical that such a patient cannot access the final
report about the trial they participated in without paying $31 to Elsevier, or
just settling for an abstract.

------
lhnz
Is the peer review process explained in enough depth anywhere for a non-
academic to try to build a tool to support it into some kind of publication
web app?

edit; It turns out there is something worth taking a look at on the front page
right now:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3494395>

~~~
wbhart
There are web apps that do this already. The process itself is straightforward
(at least for mathematics). An editor-in-chief and a group of associate
editors (who are always top academics in related fields) accept publications,
sometimes to their email addresses, other times through some automated system.
The papers are then assigned to the appropriate associate editor who is
handling that particular subfield. The paper is then sent to a referee
(sometimes two or three, especially if the first review is not satisfactory).
The referee will be an expert in the field capable of evaluating the work. The
referee (after some months, or more) will return a written report. Part of the
report will be for the editor, the other part for the author of the paper.
Some journals also request that the reviewer fill out some additional details,
such as scores on how important, correct, appropriate the paper is, etc. The
decision is passed on to the editor and if the editor agrees the author is
informed of the outcome, along with perhaps an edited version of the author
comments. They may be required to amend some minor problems in the paper,
rework it substantially and resubmit or it may just be rejected.

Publication itself can be complex. It often involves journal style files,
professional typesetters, sending page proofs to the authors for approval,
getting transfer of copyright forms signed, dealing with diagrams and so on.
This side of things is the side that fewer mathematicians actually care about.
Much of it is not relevant for web-only publications.

------
zerostar07
Shouldn't someone suggest credible OA journals to use instead of Elsevier's?

------
rotskoff
Another reason the arxiv should pursue a serious refereeing system. Perhaps it
should work something like Hacker News--high quality work could be measured by
community support.

~~~
cperciva
_high quality work could be measured by community support._

Absolutely not. Assessing the quality and correctness of groundbreaking
research requires a large amount of both talent and effort; a reddit or HN
style voting system would swamp the signal with uninformed noise.

~~~
raphman
Absolutely agree. It seems to be really hard even for experienced researchers
to assess which papers will be seen as important in the future [1].

However, maybe something like PageRank might work out well. The more citations
your papers get, the more weight your reviews will have. Certainly, there are
problems, like people learning how to game the ranking system. On the other
hand, the current system is certainly worse in this regard.

[1]
[http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalys...](http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalysisOfTheCHI/index.html)

~~~
cperciva
That would certainly help. But more than anything else, I think what we need
(at least in computer science) is a mechanism to penalize people who publish
the exact same research at half a dozen conferences.

Running pagerank on authors with an unnormalized weighting function of "how
many papers does author X have which cite something written by author Y" (so
that if author Y publishes the same paper multiple times it doesn't have any
effect even if both copies get cited, while author X publishing the same paper
several times downweights all of his outgoing links equally) could work,
though.

~~~
raphman
Don't search engines already penalize duplicate content? Maybe it would
suffice to 'just' put all papers online, convert all references to hyperlinks,
and let Google sort out what is important and what not. Actually, (at least in
computer science) I don't think that stretching one's research across several
publications is being done widely - at least when looking at 'top'
conferences.

------
zyfo
Tim Gowers is also the editor of the extraordinary mathematics companion
Princeton Companion to Mathematics ([http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-
Companion-Mathematics-Timoth...](http://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-
Mathematics-Timothy-
Gowers/dp/0691118809/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327179503&sr=8-1))

