
Opinion: Elsevier are corrupting open science in Europe - slbenfica
https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europe
======
DrBazza
Elsevier have always been like this, it's just that now, with cheap internet
globally available and having seen what Napster did to the record industry
(indirectly creating Spotify, Apple music, etc.) they're fighting to protect
their monopoly with whatever (dirty) tricks they can muster.

As far as I can see, the only things they now provide that hasn't been
replicated as a 'free service' is matching editors and referees to
submissions, and journals of repute, i.e. publish in Nature and it's a bona
fide article, publish on your blog and no-one knows who you are or whether
your work was refereed.

To be clear Sci-Hub merely provides copies of work that has been accepted for
publication in a journal, it's not a free replacement for the full 'service'
that Elsevier and other publishers provide.

~~~
gh02t
The biggest thing Elsevier does that requires actual work is final typsetting
and editing of your article. They have someone take your preprint submission
and take care of the formatting for the final article.

I don't think this justifies their ridiculous fees and business practices, but
it is a service they provide that costs money.

~~~
madhadron
Elsevier requires a strict format on submissions so it can be put through
their typesetting pipeline. There's almost no humans involved in that. Nor do
they have professionals that edit the papers.

This is the case for the whole scientific publishing industry.

~~~
gh02t
Not true, having just gone through publishing in an Elsevier journal (and not
for the first time). There was a person involved, because I discussed several
of their edits over the phone. It's partially automated, but there is
definitely a person involved doing actual work.

It is _not_ , however, a full blown copy editor - it's primarily just minor
changes, fixing formatting, and figure placement etc. Again, I don't like
Elsevier, but it's not fair to say that they do _nothing_.

------
afandian
This contract is causing outrage in the open science corner of the world. Many
people think this is a conflict of interest. And many are unhappy that closed,
private infrastructure is being used. In the broader context, hardly a day
goes by without a story about problematic public infrastructure contracts.
Organised commercial companies always have an advantage over open,
transparent, community projects.

Here's my take on the collection of some of this kind of data:

[https://blog.afandian.com/2018/05/five-principles-
altmetrics...](https://blog.afandian.com/2018/05/five-principles-altmetrics/)

~~~
vanderZwan
> _In the broader context, hardly a day goes by without a story about
> problematic public infrastructure contracts. Organised commercial companies
> always have an advantage over open, transparent, community projects._

Can you clarify whether you mean if the open public infrastructure is broken,
or has trouble getting contracts? Because if you mean the former, I'd say that
arxiv.org has been running just fine for ages.

~~~
afandian
I was drawing wider parallels with processes for public contracts outside
scholarly publishing, the "Big four" style government contracts. An endless
stream of stories and comments appear here. Eg
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740428)

Edit: not comparing Elsevier to McKinsey per se, but the power imbalance of
proprietary vs open.

~~~
vanderZwan
Thank you, that helped me make sense of your arguments and links :)

------
Cenk
Every student I know already uses Sci-Hub anyway, either directly or through
Citationsy Archives ([https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-
archives/](https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/)). All
this does is push everyone further into piracy.

~~~
geezerjay
That may be a short-term solution but that also does nothing to tackle the
rentism problem created by these multinationals. They still own and control
the communication chanels and researchers are still obliged to serve the
rentier's self-interests to see their papers published for the sake of their
career.

------
eveningcoffee
It looks to be a major miscalculation by the European Commission and they
should fix it.

~~~
Yaa101
It is not a miscalculation, by design the European Commission is proprietary
and almost always make proprietary decisions that often have to be corrected
by the relative toothless European Parliament.

~~~
gmueckl
This us by far the biggest criticism that I have of the structures within the
EU: far too often the Parliament takes up a position that is friendlier to the
citizens themselves, but they are not heard or overpowered in the decision
making process by the Comission or the Council of Ministers. Complex processes
also help direct attention away from this.

If anything, I wish that the EU structures are reformed into something that
resembles a "standard" modern democratic government with a clear balance of
powers. But it seems people are preparing to tear it all down and plunge
Europe into the next war instead of fixing it.

Oh, and just to finish my rant: even RMS calls for the dismantling of the EU!
His argument is exactly that it is too friendly to corporations in his
opinion. I came close to walking out of the room in anger when I heard him
advocate for that. Don't throw good things away as long as there is a chance
to fix them.

~~~
blattimwind
> Don't throw good things away as long as there is a chance to fix them.

It's like the NIH syndrome, but for politicians.

> _I_ didn't build it, so it sucks. Let's start from scratch, with _me_
> building it!

~~~
gmueckl
I would put it differently: it is often easier to agitate people to be against
something than convincing them of the good of something.

In a democracy, politicians need a power base made up of followers (future
voters). The more, the better. And when the right conditions meet, sowing a
seed of destructive opposition leads to a plentiful harvest of loyal voters.

Why people fall for this mostly nationalistic rhetoric that opposes the EU is
quite complex. I don't think that I have a good enough picture of that to say
more about it.

------
DanielleMolloy
The business model of these large publishing companies is not selling access,
it is peer review. Science and Nature keep their reputation despite Elsevier
because it is notoriously hard to pass their peer review process, and the
academic world trusts it.

We may live in a better academic world if rigorous peer reviewing was a full-
time paid job. Presumably it would not be difficult to do better than 90% of
the current peer reviewing by letting people with full-time experience (and
the overview of the state of science that comes with it) do it. It may also
solve a couple of other problems with anonymous peer reviewing.

(eventually with ever-more complex methodology and involvement of complex
programming routines and tools we still have to get rid of the scientific
paper as the main form of communication)

------
Luc
This is what the finest lobbyists at the highest level can buy you...

[https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog/status/1005064249763385344](https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog/status/1005064249763385344)

~~~
erispoe
That's a bit misleading. Lobbyists have to be registered and controlled in the
European Parliament. Of course Elsevier is going to talk to MEPs and try to
influence them. I would much rather that process happened under public
scrutiny than not.

------
Havoc
Does it matter? I get the impression that big journal has essentially already
lost the war.

The open line of reasoning seems to align well with scientists so I don't a
version where it doesn't slowly take over the world.

------
dougmccune
One thing to keep in mind is that none of this, even when it comes to
Elsevier, is black and white. Yes, Elsevier has been one of the staunchest
opponents of the move to Open Access. And yet simultaneously, Elsevier has
made one of the most aggressive pushes into OA publishing. They are likely the
largest OA publisher by article volume today. Yes, they have the most to lose
with a big shift to OA, but they also have the most to gain. And OA publishing
has proven that it can be very very profitable, particularly for Elsevier.

The argument in the piece is largely that Elsevier is a bad actor in the
larger academic publishing space, so therefore they shouldn't be given the
contract/power to produce reports for the EU about the movement to open
access. But even if you hate Elsevier, they are indeed in a position to have a
lot of the data needed. Elsevier isn't just a publisher, they're a data
company as well. They compile a database of all journals and citations (as do
a few others, like for-profit Clarivate and non-profit Crossref). They have
bought up a number of analytics companies (Mendeley, Plum), as the article
makes note of. So like it or not (and I assume most people don't like it),
they do indeed have a huge amount of the data needed for a project like the EU
Open Science Monitor.

The argument about conflict of interest is a valid argument, but feels like
it's getting overblown in this context. The author argues that Elsevier's
CiteScore metric (a competitor with Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate) is
biased toward Elsevier content. Except CiteScore isn't being used at all in
the Open Science Monitor [1]. They're only using total citation counts that
come from a variety of sources. So the author manufactures a conflict of
interest to bolster his point that isn't backed up by the facts.

Plum analytics is mentioned as a conflict, except the only data from Plum
that's being used is Twitter mentions, so I don't see what the perverse
incentive is - nobody would be inclined to use Plum Analytics, they'd just be
inclined to game Twitter.

The use of Mendeley readership stats I do find bullshit. That's a clear case
of Elsevier pushing the use of their product, and I think that should be
removed as a metric entirely. I think most "social" signals should probably be
removed, like Twitter mentions, because IMO they're not good indicators of
quality at all.

What we really need is some set of metrics that can quantify real-world impact
of scientific findings. For social science this would be something like the
effect on public policy and societal outcomes. For medicine, something like
the number of people in the global population positively impacted. These are
really hard things to measure and quantify, but I do think there's a need for
something more than citation-based impact metrics.

Disclaimer: I'm a family owner and director of Sage Publications, a private
for-profit publisher that does a lot of both paywall and open access academic
publishing.

[1]
[https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/open_science_moni...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/open_science_monitor_methodological_note_v2.pdf)

~~~
dmitriz
> And yet simultaneously, Elsevier has made one of the most aggressive pushes
> into OA publishing. They are likely the largest OA publisher by article
> volume today. Yes, they have the most to lose with a big shift to OA, but
> they also have the most to gain. And OA publishing has proven that it can be
> very very profitable, particularly for Elsevier.

They made the push into __their version of OA __, the hybrid OA, where they
can charge exorbitant rate on top of the subscription, that no author would
pay, whereas many journals such as the members of the Free Journals
Network[https://freejournals.org/](https://freejournals.org/) do not charge at
all. And yes, it is obviously very profitable, so why would they not push it?

> But even if you hate Elsevier, they are indeed in a position to have a lot
> of the data needed.

Their date will reflect their own interest, where conflict of interest is
obvious.

> They compile a database of all journals and citations (as do a few others,
> like for-profit Clarivate and non-profit Crossref).

Except that their database excludes many independent journals.

------
rdlecler1
We wanted free news and look where that got us. Hopefully the open source
research model also doesn’t go in that direction eventually.

~~~
ethelward
The whole difference is that free news implies that you need new models to
remunerate the writers.

Here, the writers are already remunerated _before_ publishing their papers.
What we need is a new way to quickly assess a scientist's worth.

~~~
rdlecler1
There is value in curation but this doesn’t seem to be playing well with the
HN crowd.

------
BrandoElFollito
I do not really understand the outrage.

Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals. Just publish it in a blog,
where there will be comments. Out of these you make your choice whether the
publication makes sense.

The ones to blame are univesities and grant commitees which use the impact
index as The Universal Science Ruler.

It is akin to blaming Oracle for closing their databases. You do 'ot like it,
move to Postgres, mysql or something else.

Yes, quality of publications will suffer for some time. Yes, papers (blog
posts) will be more difficult to get to but it will settle down. Until we have
open source science.

~~~
techphys_91
I don't think this could work for a few reasons.

1\. Blogs aren't peer reviewed. Anything that is going to be referenced later
needs to be reviewed by other people.

2\. It is easy to change the content of a blog after the initial publication.
This causes issues for referencing, and removes the "story" of how things were
developed which is very important. Hundreds of ideas might end up being wrong
before the right idea is found. We shouldn't be able to "delete" the ideas
which were wrong from history. This is a part of the reason that papers don't
reference websites (with some exceptions e.g. links to software tools or
result databases). This is even taught to first year undergrads who try to
reference blogs in their lab reports.

3\. The journal acts as an independent trusted third party, blogs wouldn't
have this. How do I know whether I can trust a blog owner?

There are probably more reasons. All in all I'd like a more diverse group of
distributors but I don't think self-publication could replace journals.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
Then how is the Apache web server peer reviewed? Or LaTeX? or some other open
source software?

By means of people evaluating it (good, bad, knowledgeable or yahoo people),
then you read their reports and you make up your mind.

When the subject is one I am an expert in, I will use it and tell everyone it
is fine.

When the subject is not one I am an expert in, I will look at what others say
and find out the ones who I can trust. This is how, say, Stack Overflow works.
And it woks really fine.

The fact that the content is going to change is good. It means that there is a
place where the knowledge is updated. Heck, it may become one day the ultimate
reference. If it is handled properly it will have updates which keep track of
the past.

I have a PhD in physics and had my fair share of publications in the medieval
system of "peer reviewed, high impact journals". I am now in industry and I
much more prefer to have multiple independent sources of truth and decide on
my own. Not a single one is in a journal, all are in places which either state
good stuff or are lost in a corner of Internet.

