
Elsevier = Evil - tokenadult
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/elsevier_evil.php
======
boredguy8
Very interesting to see Darrell Issa (R - CA) as a sponsor on this bill, given
how eloquently he's spoken out against SOPA in the Judiciary Committee. Here's
the copy of the email I just sent his office: I'll try and contact his office
by phone tomorrow.

    
    
      Hello,
    
      It's been with great pleasure that I've been able to watch Representa-
      tive Issa speak out against SOPA in the Judiciary.
    
      However, I'm concerned at seeing him offer "H.R.3699 -- Research Works
      Act" as such an act is a major blow to scientific openness.
    
      As you may well be aware, in many nations it's a requirement that re-
      search receiving federal funds (i.e. research at taxpayer expense) be 
      made available for free to the public. The recent policy proposal by 
      the NIH would move the US towards a similarly open policy and would 
      help foster the openness of research that made this country such a 
      leader in science and technology for so long.
    
      Unfortunately, companies like Elsevier have increasingly treated pub-
      lishing as a private cash cow, banking (in part) on the burgeoning 
      costs of a university education to widen its coffers. The journals 
      published by Elsevier cost colleges and universities millions of 
      dollars each year and burden students with growing debt (and for 
      others, preclude the possibility of higher education at all).
    
      I ask that Representative Issa revisit his stand on this issue. 
      Thank you.

~~~
patio11
FWIW, since people don't seem to know this: Dead tree letters >> phone > fax
>>> email >>>>>>> any online petition, in terms of how motivated staff are to
convey your sentiment up the totem pole. (Anecdotal from brothers' service
with a few congressional reps.)

[Edit: Sorry, checked on my screen but didn't realize my resolution was too
high to show me if it broke lines.]

~~~
rdl
In-person meeting is top, and not THAT hard to get if you can plausibly
represent a group.

~~~
jowiar
Generally I've had no issues getting meetings, at least with a staffer, of my
congressperson.

On a sidenote, does a group that focuses on gov't relations and PR exist that
represents what would is largely the consensus HN community interest - i.e.
making the case to elected officials and the public what sort of laws would
improve prospects for technical innovation. The EFF focuses largely on digital
civil rights, but that certainly isn't the only realm where Washington,
Sacramento, Albany, etc. affect us.

Thoughts?

~~~
rdl
I'd be really wary unless it had a very very focused mission. I think there's
a lot of diversity among HN readers, and I hate being a part of organizations
which claim to speak for me but end up supporting things I oppose, etc.

Right now, I think the startup visa thing and opposition to new stupid laws
like sopa/pipa is all I have mental bandwidth to care about.

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pm90
Elsevier itself has a pretty bad reputation (for overcharging)...Donald Knuth
protested about this
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editori...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editorial_boards)

excerpt:

 _At the end of 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms
resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower
priced publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald
Knuth._

The actual letter (pdf): <http://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf>

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tylerritchie
Really all NIH and NSF grants should come with open access requirements. I
would suggest that all raw data be made available no later than 1 year after
initial collection and all publications be open-access upon publishing with
curated data also available upon publishing.

The "1 year after initial collection" allows slower writers to get
publications in the pipeline before unleashing their data to the hounds of
"competing" scientists.

Scientific publishing is broken. Industry and government have limited access
to modern, relevant academic research. Utilizing the best science for science,
management, construction and business decisions shouldn't be a daunting task
that I usually chose to overcome by contacting current individuals in
academics with access to publications.

~~~
stevenbedrick
Depending on what you mean by open access, all NIH grants already _do_ come
with such requirements. Any publications resulting from NIH-funded research
must be deposited, in full text, including figures, into PubMed Central.

~~~
jofer
That (NIH's policy of requiring things to go into PubMed) is precisely what
this bill is taking aim at.

~~~
baltcode
I thought this bill is for private-sector research, which NIH funded research
is not. Or am I missing something in how the lawyers are going to twist this
once it gets passed?

~~~
synparb
"Private sector research works" is the disingenuous and obfuscating term that
the publishers are using to call publicly funded research manuscripts that the
publisher has then 'added value' to. When they say they 'add value', what they
mean is copy editing, archiving, distribution, etc. They include in this peer-
reviewing the manuscript, but in reality that is done for free by scientists
whose salaries are again, mostly paid for by public funds.

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speleding
"Since Elsevier's obscene additional profits would be drained from America to
the company's base in the Netherlands"

I agree the proposed act is bad, but the author does not do himself any favors
by quoting such bone headed nationalism. Surely anyone with a mild grasp of
the way world works knows that the profits go to the _shareholder_, not to the
headquarters.

Elsevier's shareholders are all over the map. Their headquarters are based in
the Netherlands for tax reasons but it does not mean they don't pay tax in the
US on profits made there.

~~~
raphman
Minor correction: Elsevier's headquarters are in Amsterdam for historical
reasons, not for tax reasons.

~~~
speleding
my wife used to work as a tax attorney for Elsevier in Amsterdam and while it
is true the company was founded in the Netherlands (Haarlem actually), the
main reason they are still there are the excellent "tax facilities" (euphemism
for a great deal with the tax man).

~~~
hessenwolf
A surprisingly large number of companies have a 'great deal' with the tax man
behind closed doors whether in US or elsewhere. Published corporate tax rates
are, admittedly anecdotally but from good sources, not representative of what
corporations actually pay.

Understandably, a company providing jobs and infrastructure investment in the
local area can always strike a deal.

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kiba
For every evil bills that is on the public consciousness, another bill slip
by. It's basically a game of whacking a mole.

~~~
tstegart
Ha, but our Congress is so inept they can't write bills faster than we whack
them. So it pays to be vigilant.

~~~
100k
Not exactly, since lobbyists often write the bills and hand them to congress
fully baked.

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hokua
Im not sure why scientists are still publishing in Elsevier journals nowadays.
Pre-internet, OK, but now I think journals should be following the model used
by the Journal of Machine Learning Research, open on the internet.

~~~
pedrobeltrao
Scientists still publish Elsevier because of the so called "impact factor" of
some of these journals. As a young researcher currently looking for tenure-
track positions in academia I can tell you that it is still extremely
important to publish in some of these journals (ex Cell). Unfortunately there
are still very few (or none) open access journals that have the same perceived
impact. I try to publish in PLoS journals or other open access journals as
much as I can but given the chance to publish in higher impact journals I have
to take it or risk not having a job in the future. Once you have the job you
need to secure funding and so there is always pressure to publish in the
"best" possible journal. The ridiculous thing about this situation is that
would be fairly easy to create a new open access and highly prestigious
journal in any field if everyone would switch to publishing in these new
journals at the same time. You would probably just need to convince some of
the leaders in the field to do it. This was how PLoS was born in fact.
Unfortunately for the PhD students and postdocs it is hard to do anything
about it.

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RK
Maybe the silver lining is that a large scale uproar could incline more people
to publish in open access journals in the first place (so-called "gold" open
access). </wishful thinking>

~~~
jedbrown
Counter-point: [http://scienceinthesands.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-defense-
of-...](http://scienceinthesands.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-defense-of-
submission-in-scientific.html)

~~~
scott_s
In many areas of computer science, conference proceedings are where most
people publish. (See the CRA's best practices memo:
[http://www.cra.org/resources/bp-
view/evaluating_computer_sci...](http://www.cra.org/resources/bp-
view/evaluating_computer_scientists_and_engineers_for_promotion_and_tenure/))

Publishing in ACM and IEEE conferences are essentially author-pay.
Technically, you don't pay to publish in the conference, but you must pay to
_register_ for the conference. And most conferences have a rule that if you
don't register, you can't publish.

There are many objections to the ACM and IEEE practices about maintaining
paywalls, but I think that as professional societies, their policies can
change. The for-profit journals, on the other hand, probably cannot survive if
they allowed such open access. And nor should they: their business model is no
longer valid.

~~~
jedbrown
I prefer the CS model in some ways, but there are issues.

* The review process for conferences is necessarily compressed relative to journals. This usually lowers the quality of reviews and also limits paper length.

* It is difficult to "grow" a highly selective conference, so the acceptance rate is usually quite high. This means that archaic tenure review committees evaluating on _where_ you publish instead of _what_ you publish will ascribe little weight to your conference papers. If people are not submitting their best work to a conference, it can't afford to be overly selective. This is much the same problem that new journals have, but worse because conferences usually have to reach a critical number of people to be considered a success.

~~~
scott_s
The conference versus journal issue is orthogonal to professional society
versus for-profit entity, since the ACM and IEEE have journals.

 _This means that archaic tenure review committees evaluating on where you
publish instead of what you publish will ascribe little weight to your
conference papers._

Not in CS, in my experience. People in CS know which are the highly selective
(what I have always heard called "top tier") conferences. In my experience in
industry and academia, conferences are our primary consideration and journals
are an afterthought. (Sometimes not even a thought.) The CRA memo is from
1999. I think most people have caught on by now.

~~~
jedbrown
That is specific to CS. I have one foot in CS, but the other two feet are in
applied mathematics and natural sciences where conferences are not especially
attractive publications venues.

~~~
scott_s
Yes, I agree, it is specific to CS - if you re-read my posts, I think you'll
find that I prefaced everything with that qualifier. I have friends in the
hard sciences, and we sometimes talk about how the publishing models are quite
different.

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notahacker
Seems easy enough for the NIH to counter by changing their funding policy to
exclude all "private sector research works", leaving academics and
universities to decide whether they'd rather carry out research nominally
under the auspices of some public sector organisation that handles
distribution or not take the funds. If they really wanted to they could even
introduce their own peer review process for final publications too...

It's remarkably short-sighted and pointless legislation, unless the real
objective is to start suing authors for forwarding PDF copies of their work
and related documents to interested parties without journal access.

------
zeeed
Elsevier (or any other company) that uses lobbying or gives money to
politicians is just using the system in their favor. That's not evil. It's
evil that the system allows for this to happen.

~~~
mjwalshe
Thats a very naive view - laws are often drafted by lawyers / polaticians -
and what makes non corporate actors in lobying any better or worse they are
just lobbying for their constituents.

With your model extremist churches or other organisations could lobby to
reduce employment rights for women/LGBT etc. For example returning to the 50's
wheer women who got married had to resign like they did at one compnay I used
to work for.

A company with progressive views on employment issues say Google would be
banned from lobbying against this.

And you would have od position where say the UAW could put their views on a
bill concerning the Auto industry but Alan Mulally could not - not teribly
fair.

~~~
jedbrown
Two problems:

1\. Money is an extremely effective campaign tool, so effective that it is
almost impossible for a candidate with no money to get elected, no matter how
popular their views are. Since quite few constituents contribute money, and
individual people don't speak with sufficiently organized objectives,
politicians are only very weakly accountable to their constituents.

2\. The promise of a high-paying job after congress, along with other
benefits, influences the decisions of our elected officials.

To make politicians accountable to their constituents, we have to solve the
first problem. Since advertising costs money and seems to be necessary for a
campaign, this suggests finance reform along the lines that Lessig suggests
(<http://rootstrikers.org>), whereby constituents control campaign funding,
all in small-dollar amounts.

~~~
mjwalshe
You need to first remove any civil service position from being in the
presidents gift as a bribe for contributions no jollies as an ambassador ETC
and NO presidential pardons for anything Scooter Libby ought to be in the cell
next to Manning or more properly have been taken out and shot.

Oh and move to a fully professional Judiciary elections to Judgeship are far
more corrupting.

Oh and you didn't answer my point about other actors do you want to have an
internet where telcos and ISP can't lobby for common carrier status welcome to
the church and other interest groups deciding what is allowed on the internet

Or would you care live a society like China or Russia where your employer and
your job and sweat equity can be expropriated.

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tomjen3
Would somebody please do a startup to provide an alternative to these evil
people? It shouldn't be difficult to disrupt them, as you literally need a
printer and a webserver.

~~~
abrahamsen
You don't need a printer, online only is fully acceptable.

However, what you do need is an "impact rating" calculated by Web of
Science(TM). That rating is based on the number of citations articles in your
journal gets from other rated journals.

Since your journal is new, it won't have an impact rating, meaning scientists
won't publish in it, meaning you won't get an impact rating.

But the alternatives exists, e.g. Bentham and Hindawi are both running
spamtastic marketing campaigns for 100s of open access journals, most with
none or negligible impact ratings.

There are good and successful ones too. PLoS have very high quality open
access journals. Expensive, though.

~~~
tomjen3
There are plenty of academics who don't like the traditional publishing
racket. Some of them are bound to have tenure.

~~~
abrahamsen
That matters less than you would think. Even with tenure, you typically need
research grants in order to have money for research. Research grants are
typically granted based on your publishing history in high impact journals.

But again, there are good open access journals out there. And even traditional
publishers typically allows open access for individual articles for an
additional fee. While these fees may seem high, they will typically only
constitute a small fraction of a research grant, so if you care and you plan
for it in advance, there is really no excuse for not going open access.

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zerostar07
How about another "Protest" for Open Access? How would that go though, maybe
OA advocates could refuse to do article reviews.

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ez77
Please change title to "Elsevier == Evil".

~~~
rbanffy
"=" as a comparator is valid BASIC.

~~~
groovy2shoes
And FORTRAN and Pascal and Scheme and...

~~~
rbanffy
I think FORTRAN had .EQ. for that...

