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German universities take on Dutch publishing giant Elsevier

473 points| sohkamyung | 8 years ago |chemistryworld.com | reply

149 comments

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[+] karllager|8 years ago|reply
Best of luck. Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again).

To the average decision maker these "new models" will sound perfectly fine. The EU want to make all research public by 2020? Elsevier and other have very deep pockets, so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.

[+] karllager|8 years ago|reply
> so my guess would be 2025 at the earliest.

And since we are in guessing mode, here is another one: In a few years we will have multiple sci-hubs and pirate edu sites so by the time the public arrives at completely free research, it won't even be a victory any more - just a symbol of the wretchedness of their fight - which, by then, will make everybody wonder, why it took so long.

[+] denzil_correa|8 years ago|reply
> Elsevier and other giants are putting significant resources in mimicking free and open structures in their portfolio to hide the infamy of their business model (selling a few bytes of publicly funded research over and over again)

This is the key aspect here which everyone needs to address. Just moving from a subscription model to "open access" where you still pay 2000$ per article won't solve or alleviate the problem.

[+] IshKebab|8 years ago|reply
This is great, but I don't know why the governments and universities don't just fund their own totally free open access journals. Journals can't be expensive to run. You basically just need a few admin people to poke reviewers, and a trivial website to host papers.
[+] lorenzhs|8 years ago|reply
Many hiring decisions in academia still rely strongly on the reputation of journals where applicants published. This may be less accentuated in computer science, where most research is presented at conferences and preprints are often available on the arXiv, but it's a very important factor in many other disciplines. It's also the primary reason why researchers don't boycott these journals: most of them are simply not in a position where they can afford to without seriously damaging their career prospects.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_anarchy - a system can get stuck in a terrible state where everyone's best move is to keep going. A much better equilibrium could be constructed (Price of Stability), but how do we get there?

[+] karllager|8 years ago|reply
The research system is kind of ill[1] and this illness (ratings, prestige, grants, publications, metrics) is very much in line with the interest of publishers. So both the researcher and the business man have a shared interest - and this is why it is hard for universities or other public entities to compete.

[1] http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...

[+] quickben|8 years ago|reply
It's like trying to launch open Facebook or Google after these established the network effects.

Although the university base is far smaller, so this will be interesting to observe.

[+] kuschku|8 years ago|reply
Because that's illegal.

The government is not allowed to compete in the free market, so they can't just make their own. Even subsidies or support for an independent open one could be sued against by Elsevier.

[+] dschuetz|8 years ago|reply
Elsevier in its core is a bunch of managers/investors trying to get rich from exploiting scientific achievements for profit. They do not have in mind what's best for science, they've made that perfectly clear.
[+] notyourday|8 years ago|reply
That's because absolutely no one cares about it except for whining about Elsevier.

We have a perfect way of distributing papers - it is called "Publish it on your blog". If your blog is the most awesome blog or even just more awesome than the lousy blogs, the concerned scientists would go there.

Why isn't it happening? Because the content of the papers published on the blogs suck and no one cares.

[+] im3w1l|8 years ago|reply
I used to think that Elsevier et al were just rentiers, and that bringing them down would be a pure win. But I'm not so sure anymore. When money left journalism we saw a big big quality drop. We now have lots of problems with fake news. It makes me think: what if the same thing will happen in science?

I guess the affiliation of the researchers will still be there, but it still leaves me a bit uneasy.

[+] hatmatrix|8 years ago|reply
A salient point. However, NPR shares an interview with a person (Justin Coler) who was responsible for generating a lot of fake news during the US election campaign last year [1]: "Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait."

Academics tend to be left-leaning and overall they operate on a principle of self-regulation (with a few rogue fabricators that make it into the spotlight periodically), so this may not be as a big of a concern as you fear.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503...

[+] llukas|8 years ago|reply
Elsevier doesn't pay for review nor to the authors.
[+] askmike|8 years ago|reply
Researchers are not paid for the research, just the publishers. I can only see quality going up without them moderating and filtering with their misaligned incentives.
[+] madez|8 years ago|reply
The money for the research does not come from Elsevier nor the journals, at least not in Germany. If they could get rid of Elsevier and go open access, they would have more money for the science.
[+] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
Fake news have been in newspapers for a very long time. Most newspapers have a political bias and have been heavily digesting the news-feed.
[+] idiot900|8 years ago|reply
Scientists publishing original research in academic journals are not paid by the publishers, and neither are the quality control measures such as reviewers.
[+] eecc|8 years ago|reply
My minuscule contribution to the debate is lying on github [1].

The idea is to distribute papers over a P2P network. Uploads and metadata are digitally signed with PGP and you get to filter out all rubbish that is not originated from your WOT. You get "peer reviewed" when enough people of type "recognized reviewer" in your WOT publish a signed metadata "reviewed" stamp.

It still needs a whole lot of work, I only ever managed to make it work over to machines on a LAN, it is OOM prone, GUI is fugly, and I could (should) probably re-start from scratch.

But if you like the idea and feel like helping, do ping me... we can save the world! ;)

[1]: https://github.com/ecausarano/heron

[+] OliverJones|8 years ago|reply
Aaron Swartz's influence on open publishing is still unfolding more than four years after his untimely death. The forces arrayed against open publishing are formidable: governments and big business.

It's good to see a nation's universities working together on this.

[+] plaidfuji|8 years ago|reply
Governments are actually in a bit of a gray area. On the one hand, a politician can score cheap points with the public by saying "we should all be able to read what our tax dollars pay for!", and on the other hand, the government would ultimately be footing the bill for open access in the short term because their grant money would funnel to publishers by way of pay-to-publish open access fees. So there's significant incentive for the government to figure out an open access solution that involves as little publishing fees as possible. They just don't want to be the ones who pay for it and administrate it.
[+] agussell|8 years ago|reply
If scientists continue tolerating the monopolies of big editorials, this situation is not going to change. It is time to embrace open access journals. Meanwhile, I use SciHub.
[+] Dolores12|8 years ago|reply
they will find out soon that they are fine on their own without Elsevier...
[+] hetspookjee|8 years ago|reply
How did Elsevier acquire the wierd position it is in? What added value does Elsevier provide?
[+] twanvl|8 years ago|reply
Before the internet, publishers actually printed journals on actual paper. This cost a lot of money, and it makes sense that universities payed for subscriptions to physical journals.

Today, the cost of these subscriptions hasn't changed much. But the added value is much less since everyone reads papers online.

[+] JMCQ87|8 years ago|reply
They bought up a bunch of academic journals. Added value is arguably negligible now, but some of the publications have the highest profile in their fields for years.
[+] nomercy400|8 years ago|reply
Added value: Reputation. You get your paper published in an Elsevier journal, your reputation amongst you peers rises. Usually this means more funding and better career prospects.

Think similar to Fitch and Moody's in the financial sector (right?).

[+] tankenmate|8 years ago|reply
1) Largely through mergers and acquisitions

2) Network effect (although with newer technology (social media, cheap hosting, cheaper devops, etc) this value is dropping precipitously)

[+] nomercy400|8 years ago|reply
If the German consortium is so big and influential worldwide, why bother with other journals like Elsevier? They might as well start their own open-access journal. Or isn't the Consortium that big/influential?
[+] kuschku|8 years ago|reply
Because they only decided to band together in 2014, and didn't want to spend their time and money on creating something new (which might even be illegal, the government can't compete with private companies)
[+] socrates1998|8 years ago|reply
Why do they even need that company? How hard could it be to just make everything open source and free?

For real, this is like the easiest problem to solve. Just stop giving that corrupt company any money and do it themselves.

[+] kutkloon7|8 years ago|reply
Good for them. I never understood why people are paying Elsevier anyway. It seems like everything they do can be done for free.
[+] dragandj|8 years ago|reply
It's not people directly, it's the institutions who are paying.
[+] Angostura|8 years ago|reply
They are prestigious gatekeepers
[+] dilemma|8 years ago|reply
This is like a university taking on the evil computer manufacturers or something. Sure, you can do it yourself, but you have to put in the work and the money to do so. Distributors and publishers exist for a reason.