Boycott of Elsevier Exceeds 8000 Researchers

kkleiner writes with an update on the boycott of Elsevier started in January. From the article: "Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free — well, more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier's backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act. Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research."

Comments

Seriously

[WiiVault]

How fucking greedy can you get? You want OUR tax dollars to sell us what we payed for back at a profit. Fuck off Elsevier!

Re:Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Also note that the peer reviewing process, which can be very time consuming and har labor, is all done free of charge by the researchers who end up paying for access to the journals who vitally relie on that process.

Re:Seriously

[Fluffeh]

they were the rudest bunch of people i've ever met for interviews. was told i'd be contacted for a second interview, but it never came. ..... but i was expecting to either hear that i was turned down, or given an offer to turn down myself.

I don't think that this is indicative of just this company, but a trend of many companies who are mismanaged. If the senior management is not able to ensure that senior staff are higly motivated and proactive, then this sadly cannot be passed further down the structure. I have noticed this happening in a number of companies and think it is a case of focusing too much on the unimportant (but visible/KPI-able) things and not worrying too much about the actual business/greater good. I see more and more governments/politicians/businesses thinking short term, tracking their KPIs and really having no-one at the helm or taking strong leadership. I think this trend in the last few years has become more and more visible where the measure of a person's ability to do their job is split up into little bite size chunks that can be measured - and people work on making them look good, but the overall business/government/etc suffers as there isn't really a simple KPI to measure overall performance.

I also think that this same problem lies with Elsevier. Too much focus has been placed on making sure that profits go up each quarter and too little is placed on long term viability. Being jerks like this, in the short term will generate more money as people will have less and less options to get access to data/journals, however in the long term, they are alienating their users and by the looks of it, the folks that are publishing these papers. I would bet that if you looked at individual KPIs for the folks at Elsevier, they are all meeting their targets and look fantastic on paper even though they are potentially killing the company.

Re:Seriously

[shutdown -p now]

America doesn't have any more greedy people than any other nation. The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries. Greedy people tend to be more successful, and hence both more visible and more influential, shaping the corporate culture you observe.

Re:Seriously

[shutdown -p now]

It stands to reason that citizens of countries with well-developed universal social welfare to care for the needy are less likely to give to charity - after all, they have already paid their (larger) taxes.

What if you compare numbers for charity + welfare taxes between U.S. and other countries?

Re:Seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Have any of them done as much as people have done for free? Is it the businessman that is responsible for the awesome convenience of telecom or a bunch of free notions given generously by Sir Isaac Newton, et al? How much do the efforts of underpaid US steel workers building infrastructure in the early part of the 20th century contribute the overall success of even modern electronics companies? The effect of a century of rail, etc? Even Locke understood that future generations are given enormous estates by the current one. I am not so quick to credit businessmen for our success. I believe many hands in many places contributed, and I think it far more likely that Newton has done more for our economy than any other individual. Certainly the mathematicians/physicists provided the most rare and necessary contributions. And, I think very few of them profitted that handsomely. So, I flatly disagree. The global charity that was the scientific revolution seems far more giving than all the businessmen put together, to me.

Re:Seriously

[blind biker]

On the other hand, I recall reading a news story about a wealthy European businessman disparaging private charity and insisting that government was the appropriate instrument for helping the poor.

And he's abso-fucking-lutely right. Most EU countries (probably all) have universal healthcare, and apart from egregious exceptions like the UK, higher education is free or very close to free.

Compare that to the USA, where *millions* of children don't have healthcare coverage. All that charity doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you have children living without healthcare. You're just a fucking 3rd world country.

Re:Seriously

[Securityemo]

Probably. One of the nice things about living in a "welfare state" (sweden) is that the welfare isn't dependent upon the whimsy of any particular person. It helps break the bonds between individuals so that no one is dependent on anyone for base survival. Receiving monetary help (not loans) from a person in an emergency situation would feel creepy since I'd then be seriously indebted to that person in an unspecified way.

A system dependent on individual charity is also, well, unsystematic. People should receive help in a reliable manner and in proportion to their needs.

Public is Public

[deweyhewson]

It should be simple: what the research funded fully, or even partially, by the public? Then all the results from it should be fully available to the public. If researches don't like that, they can be free to seek private funding, in which chase a reasonable restriction would be that all privately funded research becomes available to the public after ten years, since knowledge is a public good.

This whole mentality of taking the public's money but then hiding the knowledge behind paywalls, even to the researchers themselves, is counterintuitive to the progress of the human race, and is not acceptable.

Re:Public is Public

[Takionbrst]

Researchers don't like this any better than you do-- it's indescribably frustrating to have to email colleagues at another university with a better, more comprehensive literature subscription. And that's before you acknowledge the fact that the researchers do everything up to printing the journal (generating the work, reviewing the work, revising the work), and yet the journal receives the profits. Trust us, we'd all like open access journals.

Re:Public is Public

[DragonWriter]

It should be simple: what the research funded fully, or even partially, by the public? Then all the results from it should be fully available to the public. If researches don't like that

Researchers do like that, which is why the boycott of Elsevier by researchers is happening.

Certain scientific publishers (e.g., Elsevier) don't like it, but that's not the same thing as researchers not liking it.

Re:Public is Public

[Daniel Phillips]

Holding research behind a paywall hurts the researcher even more than the public by preventing the kind of widespread exposure that comes from being freely accessible and being indexed by all the search engines. For example, a lot of research in computer graphics is held behind paywalls owned by ACM. But for every article on a given topic behind a ACM paywall, there tends to be three publicly available. Which get more citations? Which do more for the author's reputation?

I don't think it's my imagination: the number of recent graphics papers with substantial contributions behind ACM paywalls seems to be dwindling fast.

Open Access and Old Business Models

[Adrian Lopez]

Aside from the peer-review process, what do these journals offer the scientific community that they can't get for free on the Internet? What prevents the scientific community from conducting it's own peer review process, at minimal cost, and publishing results for free on the Internet?

No wonder Elsevier seems worried about the future of its business model.

Re:Open Access and Old Business Models

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientists always try to publish to the best journal, on a particular topic, that they can. They would be shooting themselves in the foot to publish to anything else. Moving to open-access publishing is going to take a long time, as it takes time to build the reputation of those journals.

Re:Open Access and Old Business Models

[betterunixthanunix]

You don't understand the academic journal market. You don't publish articles in prestigious journals for the sake of publishing, or to make money, you publish articles in prestigious journals so that others read your work.

That's a great theory, but in practice people publish in prestigious journals because those journals are prestigious, and it looks good on a CV, during tenure review, etc. People reading a researcher's work often comes secondary to people reading the list of journals where a researcher has published their work.

Really though, your argument is specious. If the goal of publishing research was truly to get as many readers as possible, why not make use of the global nature of the Internet, and set up a system where publications happen entirely online? Peer review is already done by volunteers, so I cannot imagine there would be much of a problem with the peer review process. Journals were a way to reach a wide audience 30 years ago; times have changed, and we need to change with the times.

The academic journals deliver an audience of readers, and that is what you want - you want other prestigious academics to read your work.

This could be done by way of a mailing list. Journals are not necessary if that is the goal.

And a big part of how professors are judged for tenure is how many good articles did they publish in prestigious journals.

Bingo -- that is why it is hard to get researchers to stop feeding these monsters. Prestigious names look good, plain and simple; we live in a publish-or-perish world, and publishing in a big name journal is better than publishing on arXiv.

Re:Open Access and Old Business Models

[the gnat]

While I am not advocating for the "old school" business model, publishing trustworthy, referable papers is not cheap. Try an "Open Access" journal to see their rates.

The rates aren't actually that unreasonable. PLoS ONE is less than $1500 - quite affordable if you're an academic group used to paying $900 for a tiny vial of polymerase or $40,000 for a protein purification system, and they'll waive it for people who couldn't otherwise afford to publish there. Several other considerations:

1. Publishing open-access with a commercial publisher is insanely expensive by comparison. I think I read something like $7000 per article for Nature, which hardly anyone bothers with. (I wouldn't - since I'm funded by the NIH, everything I do will end up being open-access after a year whether I pay Nature for the privilege or not. Of course, I'm very unlikely to be publishing in Nature for other reasons.)

2. The economics of dealing with commercial publishers only make sense if you create an artificial wall between university libraries and university research labs. The libraries are paying so much to the publishers for journal access that any savings the labs might get by not paying to publish open-access are lost. Of course the overhead paid out of grant money to the university probably goes in part towards funding the library's access, but the scientists never have to bother with details like this - they only see the university skimming a certain percent off the top of their funds.

3. Going the commercial, non-open-access route can be expensive too. Ever hear of charges per-page, or color fees? These are standard practice at many journals and can easily amount to more than the cost of publishing with PLoS ONE, and the article will still be paywalled. The color fees in particular are absolutely fucking insane in a world where most researchers never even see the print copy of any journal other than Science or Nature. (I don't even print out the PDFs any more - either I read the online version or I download the PDF to my iPad. The last time I saw one of my own articles in dead tree form was 2007.)

4. Dealing with commercial publishers often sucks for other reasons. All of that fabled private-sector efficiency is meaningless when you're dealing with an entity whose review process is dependent on workaholic volunteers. I have a rule of thumb when dealing with Elsevier journals: don't send anything there unless you're willing to wait three months for reviews. The professors (or their postdocs, or sometimes even their students) who receive your manuscript don't give a shit. Why should they? They're not getting a share of Elsevier's 30%-plus profit margin.

I'm not arguing that the open-access journals are the perfect alternative - they're still based on the same rules and regulations, minus the evil, and there is still too much bureaucracy and politicking involved. I don't think that preprint servers like arXiv are the solution either, for that matter, due to the lack of quality control and any form of peer review. These issues are largely a distraction anyway, however. We could certainly do a lot better than the current paradigm of scientific publishing, but even that wouldn't be so bad if not for the parasites which feed upon it. Fuck Elsevier.

Re:Slashdot tragically late to the story as usual.

[Microlith]

It's obvious that their goal is to monopolize the distribution of information paid for by the public, and if they back down now it's only because they intend to try again later when the public eye is off of them, much like the RIAA/MPAA and their attempted purchase of SOPA/PIPA.

So mentioning of an irrelevant, temporary detail is pointless.

It's not only your right but your duty

[presidenteloco]

to liberate and openly publish scientific research articles, wherever you find them.

Science is a joint co-operative human activity with its main goal the creation of new knowledge for the benefit of all, and its intellectual products by all rights belong in the public domain by their very nature. If you want to charge me money for binding and a glossy cover, so be it, but as to the raw content, you don't own it. A huge tree of giants standing on each others shoulders created it and humanity owns it jointly.

America also GIVES more than any other nation.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the greatest philanthropists of this and the last century are AMERICANS.

Yeah, they were all back stabbing go for the throat capitalists (except possibly for Warren Buffet).

But the rest of the wold doesn't hold a candle in philanthropy (dollar wise) to Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Andrew Carnegie, Howard Hughes . . . and the list goes on and on.

Re:America also GIVES more than any other nation.

[shutdown -p now]

The rest of the world has public welfare to take care of its poor.