Scientists Organize Elsevier Boycott 206
An anonymous reader writes "The academic publisher Elsevier has attracted controversy for its high prices, the practice of bundling journals for sale to libraries and its support for legislation such as SOPA and the Research Works Act. Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers decided to go public with a blog post describing how he'll no longer have anything to do with Elsevier journals, and suggesting that a public website where mathematicians and scientists could register their support for an Elsevier boycott would further the cause. Such a website now exists, with hundreds of academics signing-up so far. John Baez has a nice write-up of the problem and possible solutions."
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some sort of backwards-ass sympathetic magic? You don't get picked to referee unless you're solid in your field, so there's an irrational fear that they'll stop being a big deal if they stop refereeing (even though refereeing is anonymous)?
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will referee? (Score:3, Insightful)
Refereeing allows you to scrutinze your competitors, preventing them from getting publications on subject you yourself are also working on, delaying them and/or at least making sure they acknowledge your own work. Even with double-blind reviews it is often clear to the reviewer who the author is and in many cases even vice versa, especially in small fields where this is even predicable.
Will referee? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't as much as refereeing for Elsevier journals, but to referee for well established and respected journals. Being invited to be a referee of one of those journals is seen as a sign of respect by the scientific community and a public acknowledgement of one's technical and scientific mastery. After all, if a community has to choose who will edit the scientific work done by their own community, they will choose the best in their field, not a snotty-nosed clueless newbie.
Then, the real problem is that Elsevier managed to control the publication and access to journals which are seen as humanity's forum for specific scientific areas. So, Elsevier manages to get that "magentic allure" by proxy, not for the company's own merit. As soon as journals are published elsewhere, Elsevier will lose any prestige they might have, and although scientific papers will continue to be published, the world will be a better place for not being forced to shelve 40 euros for individual papers or thousands of euros for a subscription. Let's hope this boycott represents the tipping point.
Re:Will referee? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:2, Insightful)
Trade associations. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the process for choosing reviewers is a lot less about respect than you think. You can get picked for a review by just having published a bit in the same field, by being named by someone else who is too busy to do the review himself, or because the editor knows you personally and he asks you to do the review as a favor.
Yes, picking leaders in the field is preferred, but they are often unavailable! Reviews take time.
--PM
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of journals is the value of their reputation. A well respected scientific journal is useful because they've repeatedly put their name on the line publishing scientific papers, and when the vast majority of those papers are valid and well reviewed, you can have some hope of trusting an as yet unread paper. "Censorship" in the form of verification and peer review, is one of the driving mechanisms of science, because not all ideas are made equal.
It's not the dead trees that make journals valued, but the credibility they help maintain. Having well-respected scientists be widely opposed to your journal is a deadly circumstance, as trust is all you have.
Referee != Scientist (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a referee is part of being a scientist.
Being a human being with integrity is ALSO part of being a scientist.
If one wants to think one being worthy to be known as a SCIENTIST one must at least have the integrity to know that keep on feeding leeches such as Elsevier does the scientific community a dis-service
Restricting the access to information is an antithesis to scientific principle.
Re:Impact Factor is the point, not publishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds kinda like digg for scientific research.
Which quite honestly scares me...
Re:Impact Factor is the point, not publishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and 'sign' those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your 'worth' goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
The problem with that is that you have to persuade other people — tenured professors, associate professors, funding agencies, etc. — that it's worth buying into your system. Once they buy in, it will work fine (modulo teething problems, of course). But if people don't believe that it counts towards your academic career, it most certainly doesn't count. Maybe that doesn't matter so much for someone with a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize as they've already shown that they merit tenure (or equivalent) anywhere in the world, but for someone earlier in their career it matters hugely.
People want to publish in top rank journals because that's how they show they are doing top ranked work. Competition is ferocious (if usually polite).
Re:Referee != Scientist (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not likely. Being a reviewer is a PITA, and generally doesn't advance you in any way. I once applied for a grant that asked how many papers I'd reviewed in the past year, but they just wanted a number, completely unsubstantiated, so I doubt they put much weight on it.
Scientists do peer review because it's a duty. Not publishing with a journal you don't like is an easy choice. Refusing to participate in peer review with them just means they'll get someone else to do it, and poor papers may slip through.
Re:Market pull [Re:academia is highly competitive] (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Referee != Scientist (Score:3, Insightful)
[...] but one often has to take the bad with the good.
Only for as long as you choose to, and as long as everybody thinks like you the bad will just get worse.
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:4, Insightful)
Journals are a filter. They're supposed to prevent some things from getting published - the low quality, scientifically dubious and shoddily done research. It's hard enough keeping up with the reviewed, edited and published work, never mind some kind of free for all "scientific" networking site that would probably be 90% drug and equipment supplier spam within a week and the other 10% long papers espousing crackpot theories.
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Insightful)
...Refusing to participate in peer review with them just means they'll get someone else to do it, and poor papers may slip through.
Thus degrading the quality of the journal and after about 10 years people will learn to treat it as one of the trashier neighborhoods. The problem is the impact (factor and public) that the article will have in the transition period. Also, the editor will have to keep hitting up the scientists who don't refuse until they burn out. This can actually be a feedback loop where the reviewing scientist decides that they must get asked to review because they publish so often in that journal, so picking a journal with a lower review load may be worth looking into. Forgoing review is a nasty and dirty type of boycott which definitely flirts the line between dereliction of duty and the need to advance science by publishing in a public forum (which country-club nit-picky-HOA Elsevier is not). Most of those journals are good, and often the sale to Elsevier was to free up their editorial board and professional staff for the real work on the journal. This problem has been building for years and there's not much that will solve it outside of legislation and possibly international treaty. Even the US legislation which says papers written on research performed with public money should be free to access (perhaps with a 6 month delay) has too many loopholes for it to work well.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Replacing an abandoned journal is rather different from trying to displace a journal by force. Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one. Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review. If you aren't open access and aren't affiliated with one of the big publishers (see below) you will have a hard time getting people to read your papers.
It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software (we do pay for some more specialised software out of our own budgets but windows, office, matlab, endnote and so on are all covered centrally). Those things are paid for centrally as part of block subscriptions. If academics actually had to pay the prices that are shown to the general public I suspect there would be a very quick move towards open access journals.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one
That's why you need buy-in from a few established name. In most fields there are a dozen or so people that almost all of the community respects. If these people are the board for your new journal, then it is instantly credible. In the case of JOT, having Bertrand Meyer as the editor does this, and if you look at the board you'll see a list of names of people at the top of the field.
Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review
Reviewers are sometimes paid, but most of the time, for academics, this money just goes into their grant fund or, in some cases, into a general department fund. It's not really a motivating factor. I've never received money for reviews I've done for journals. Again, using JOT as an example, they don't pay reviewers, nor do they charge authors.
It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software
That depends. If the journal is in one of the bundles that your institution subscribes to, then it is 'free' to the end user. If it isn't, then you pay $30 or so, and this comes out of your grant, which means filling in extra paperwork. I've been in exactly the situation that I outlined in another post: papers that I wanted to read were in an Elsevier journal and my institution only had the subscription for the latest few issues - if I wanted older papers I had to pay. As a PhD student, doing this meant getting approval from my supervisor, filling in a form, getting him to sign it, and so on. As a lazy PhD student, this meant just reading papers that cited the one I was interested in that were published in open access journals, and citing them instead...