
Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier - geospeck
http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-review-for-or-publish-with-elsevier-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/
======
nacc
I always wonder why some disciplines are more open than others [0]. As someone
in biology: the state of publication is very sad. We have to pay thousands to
_submit_ a manuscript, and then:

\- get rejected right away, or

\- the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for
free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or

\- we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets
rejected, or

\- The editor does some proof-reading and publish the paper behide a paywall.
I lose all the rights and I may need to ask the journal for permission to use
part of it in my thesis, otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing.

Sometimes when I read preprints in computer science/physics/bioinformatics
etc. I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family, and we
biologists are locked in a prisoner's dilemma because we can't communicate.
Then we fight each other and the publication companies are selling tickets for
others to watch.

[0]: [http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-
business-...](http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-
models-fund-open-access-journals/)

~~~
devoply
The whole publication industry seems like a conspiracy that's hiding in plain
sight for anyone to see. Yet it seems to be difficult to get rid of... and yet
no one quite knows why.

~~~
taneq
I forget the exact wording of the quote I want, but it was something along the
lines of "It is almost impossible to get someone to notice something if their
continued employment depends on them not noticing it."

~~~
adrienne
It's Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

~~~
taneq
That's the one, thanks!

------
Oatseller
Elsevier was also recently awarded an "Online peer review and method" patent
which earned the August, 2016 "Stupid Patent of the Month" from the EFF [0].

[0] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-
el...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-elsevier-
patents-online-peer-review)

------
dkarapetyan
The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much
for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure
for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last
resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me.

What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the
entire enterprise of scientific publishing in so many scientific disciplines?

~~~
Balgair
Its because most PIs could care less about the actual research, but rather
only care about their 'rank' in the pissing contest that is academia. The
internet should have, and in some more lucrative and distributed areas of the
ivory tower it actually has like Archiv, made journals redundant and
pointless. Only peer review should have remained. One would naively think this
based on the idea that the academy is about knowledge. However, PIs can
commonly be vain, narcissistic, and only promoted based on previous
accomplishments. These are the people that got through via the random sieve
that is modern schooling with nothing but A+s from kindergarten through grad
school; they only know rankings and nothing else. As such, a barrier of luck
under the guise of effort must then again be invented, this being the journal
process. The reason is that there is not enough money for all the grad
students out there to become PIS. Publish or perish is not a bug, but a
feature that keeps out people from un-well connected labs and PIs. Remember,
~50% of all papers are _never_ read (0) and ~50% of all papers have such large
issues with their stats, that they can be considered noise (1). That means
~25% of papers are even relevant to the world in any meaningful way. Couple
this with the average time for papers to appear from the submission to 'print'
is ever increasing for 'new' authors (2), and you have what could be
reasonably considered to be a concerted effort to keep out competitors.

(0) [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-
studi...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studies-are-
never-read-more-three-people-180950222/?no-ist)

(1)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/)

(2)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4533968/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4533968/)

[http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematics-of-science-s-
brok...](http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematics-of-science-s-broken-
reward-system-1.20987) (good overview of the issues)

~~~
ztakeo
While I agree that some of the blame falls on the PIs, it should fall on the
university system as well. My PI recently read his mid-tenure review to our
group, noting that there are explicit publishing metrics evaluated by the
department which play a major role in his performance review. Things like
ranking of journals published in (ref. Reuters InCites), # citations etc. I
understand a department's desire for a quantitative evaluation metric, but at
the same time as long as this mechanism is in place the system will not
change.

------
jack1243star
My alma mater will drop subscription to Elsevier in 2017, stating that they
have been increasing the fee 4% each year.

~~~
a3_nm
I think this is great news. More unsubscriptions are a good thing because (1.)
publishers get less money; (2.) researchers in these universities realize that
subscriptions should not be taken for granted, in the frequent case where they
have never thought about the issue; (3.) these researchers realize that not
having subscriptions isn't such a big deal (you can find most recent papers
online anyway, or ask your friends, the authors, use Sci-Hub, etc.); and (4.)
researchers who don't publish open-access version of their works realize that
they are losing potential readers in other universities (and citations, if
they care about this).

------
jimmytidey
I would argue that currently "academic publishing" is a misnomer.

If you write up some work you can easily show it to your colleagues or put it
on your blog. You can place it on a pre-print server if you are doing science.
In my field (design), and the wider humanities, you can also look to
Medium.com, theconversation.com, Twitter, a think tank etc.

Once your work is formally published you're rights to show it people have
gone. It's quite possible that it will reach a much diminished audience.

In my institution many people haves published in journals that the university
has not purchased access too; on a strict interpretation of the law those
people can no longer show their research to the person who sits next to them.

"Publishing" can often mean less people seeing it. "Academic validation" or
similar would be a more appropriate.

The whole thing is a racket. The public sector has a vampire squid sucking the
blood out of it; no single institution has sufficient incentive to sort it
out.

------
MaxfordAndSons
There's a real gem tucked in here, not specific to Elsevier, but about
corporate social misbehavior and its apologists in general:

> For what it’s worth, I think the “fiduciary responsibility” argument–which
> seemingly gets trotted out almost any time anyone calls out a publicly
> traded corporation for acting badly–is utterly laughable. As far as I can
> tell, the claim it relies on is both unverifiable and unenforceable. In
> practice, there is rarely any way for anyone to tell whether a particular
> policy will hurt or help a company’s bottom line, and virtually any action
> one takes can be justified post-hoc by saying that it was the decision-
> makers’ informed judgment that it was in the company’s best interest.

~~~
inimino
Yes, this argument as used against any and all ethical claims is a pet peeve
of mine.

It suggests that money is the highest value and to think otherwise is
impossible. It is corrosive to the foundation of shared values on which
society depends.

------
IshKebab
Without reading the article, I presume his reason is that they are as close to
pure evil as a scientific publishing company can get.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
You should read the article :) It's very well written and I found it quite
informative. I knew nothing about Elsevier other than that I have used some of
their textbooks when I was in school. They were very expensive.

The only thing in the whole article that I feel qualified to comment on was
his assertion that Trader Joe's mistreats their employees. It must be a
regional thing, because the TJ's around here are excellent places to work
(anecdotally and based on my long chats with employees, as a frequent
shopper).

~~~
tetrep
> ...his assertion that Trader Joe's mistreats their employees.

He's not asserting that, he's using it as a hypothetical example:

"If I were to boycott, say, Trader Joe’s, on the grounds that it mistreats its
employees (for the record, I don’t think it does)..."

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Ah, you're correct. I misread it. Tired eyes....

------
eva1984
What value does Elsevier provide comparing to something like arxiv.org? Just
curious.

~~~
remus
Basically, reputation.

Arxiv isn't peer reviewed and thus you get a lot of crap on there (just have a
look for proofs of goldbach's conjecture). Because the barrier to entry is low
you dont get any kudos for publishing there, and the performance of academics
in many institutions is essentially based on the kudos they get for publishing
in big journals.

~~~
a3_nm
Fortunately, many fields also have fully open-access journals and conferences
which provide the prestige without making your papers hard to access. (In my
field, e.g.: the ICDT conference, IJCAI, ICALP, LICS; the LMCS and JAIR
journals.)

The reason why these haven't completely taken over is because prestige has a
lot of inertia, and publisher-run titles retain their prestige (and still
attract quality submissions and reviewing). But it's not true that you have to
publish with closed-access publishers to get reviews and prestige.

------
grigjd3
While I very much abhor the practices of Elsevier, one has to be really
careful how one acts to push back. Even without getting into the result that
not interacting with Elsevier has on careers in the biomedical sciences, it's
easy to fall into traps with other publishing firms. For instance, PlosOne is
a pay-to-publish "alternative". However, the motivations here are backwards.
PlosOne makes money for each accepted publication and thus limits their
motivation to do serious peer review. I'm not saying that means PlosOne
articles are necessarily bad, the very nature of their publishing model
suggests something could be wrong - and it's pretty hard to get recognition
for publications through them. I personally prefer when the professional
organizations, like APS, handle their own mainstream of publishing. The Phys
Rev journals have a strong motivation to promote the best research, because it
speaks well of the industry overall, but because they are beholden to their
membership, they are less likely to promote the kind of unethical practices
used by Elsevier.

~~~
bumblebeard
> Even without getting into the result that not interacting with Elsevier has
> on careers in the biomedical sciences...

The author of the article addresses this concern in the "What you can do"
section. He says he's noticed no ill effects from avoiding Elsevier journals
and that most people are likely to have the same experience.

As for PLOS ONE's business model, it's possible that it sets up some perverse
incentives, but fortunately there are choices other than PLOS ONE if this
model bothers you.

If it really is impossible for you to avoid publishing in an Elsevier journal,
that's fine, but anybody who can avoid it should for the reasons presented in
this article.

~~~
rspeer
What are the other choices? PLOS ONE is the only open-access journal I know of
that has a good reputation, isn't limited to a narrow field, and isn't just a
trash-heap of unpublishable nonsense.

This reputation, at least, is an incentive for them to do good peer review.

~~~
sndean
Scientific Reports
([http://www.nature.com/srep/](http://www.nature.com/srep/)) is pretty broad
and is open-access. Some really good articles have been published there over
the past few years.

~~~
grigjd3
Broad is part of the problem. It's very difficult to get qualified reviewers
when you haven't narrowed the scope. One of the primary problems with PLOS ONE
is that it exasperates problems already seen in other journals that cover too
much. Why would you expect a specialist in awake single neuron experiments to
be able to review and MRI study? Sure, there are some really good people out
there, but for the most part, such reviews are going to be arbitrary.

------
lordnacho
What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination
problem?

Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?

~~~
advisedwang
This essentially happend in the linguistics field. The Elsevier journal
"Lingua" has been abandoned in favour of Glossa. However it took the Lingua
editorial board resigning en masse to really make this happen.

Even after this, Lingua is still going fairly strong. Completely dropping a
journal requires some researchers to go against their own interest (publishing
in a worse journal or not at all).

[https://www.wired.com/2015/11/editors-of-the-journal-
lingua-...](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/editors-of-the-journal-lingua-
protest-quit-in-battle-for-open-access/)

~~~
alkonaut
Universities should just collaborate by banning their researchers from
publishing to unserious journals and conferences. Problem solved and
researchers no longer face a difficult dilemma.

If universities (and on a higher level, governments funding universities)
demanded that all research be publicly accessible, that would surely also hurt
Elsevier et.al.

------
herbcso
Is it just me, or does Elsevier sound like something out of Skyrim?

------
overcast
For the rest of us, what is the TLDR of what Elsevier is?

~~~
AceJohnny2
They're a large publisher of scientific journals, who have repeatedly been
caught behaving unethically.

Note that _don 't_ own the most prestigious journals, like Science, Nature, or
New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

~~~
dekhn
They publish Cell, which has a high impact factor. And a lot of their other
ones have high IFs: [https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-
and-j...](https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-
journals/elsevier-announces-2013-journal-impact-factor-highlights)

------
datavirtue
I ordered the first one on the list last week for my son and I to read. Great
minds think alike.

