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:<p>- get rejected right away, or<p>- the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or<p>- we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets rejected, or<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-models-fund-open-access-journals/" rel="nofollow">http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-...</a>
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].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-elsevier-patents-online-peer-review" rel="nofollow">https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-el...</a>
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.<p>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?
I would argue that currently "academic publishing" is a misnomer.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>"Publishing" can often mean less people seeing it. "Academic validation" or similar would be a more appropriate.<p>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.
There's a real gem tucked in here, not specific to Elsevier, but about corporate social misbehavior and its apologists in general:<p>> 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.
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.
What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem?<p>Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?