Elsevier = Evil

[boredguy8]

Very interesting to see Darrell Issa (R - CA) as a sponsor on this bill, given how eloquently he's spoken out against SOPA in the Judiciary Committee. Here's the copy of the email I just sent his office: I'll try and contact his office by phone tomorrow.

  Hello,

  It's been with great pleasure that I've been able to watch Representa-
  tive Issa speak out against SOPA in the Judiciary.

  However, I'm concerned at seeing him offer "H.R.3699 -- Research Works
  Act" as such an act is a major blow to scientific openness.

  As you may well be aware, in many nations it's a requirement that re-
  search receiving federal funds (i.e. research at taxpayer expense) be 
  made available for free to the public. The recent policy proposal by 
  the NIH would move the US towards a similarly open policy and would 
  help foster the openness of research that made this country such a 
  leader in science and technology for so long.

  Unfortunately, companies like Elsevier have increasingly treated pub-
  lishing as a private cash cow, banking (in part) on the burgeoning 
  costs of a university education to widen its coffers. The journals 
  published by Elsevier cost colleges and universities millions of 
  dollars each year and burden students with growing debt (and for 
  others, preclude the possibility of higher education at all).

  I ask that Representative Issa revisit his stand on this issue. 
  Thank you.

[patio11]

FWIW, since people don't seem to know this: Dead tree letters >> phone > fax >>> email >>>>>>> any online petition, in terms of how motivated staff are to convey your sentiment up the totem pole. (Anecdotal from brothers' service with a few congressional reps.)

[Edit: Sorry, checked on my screen but didn't realize my resolution was too high to show me if it broke lines.]

[guelo]

Issa is a sponsor of the OPEN act which is almost as bad as SOPA/PIPA.

[kevinchen]

Is there a searchable list of supporting representatives / organizations as there is for SOPA?

[pm90]

Elsevier itself has a pretty bad reputation (for overcharging)...Donald Knuth protested about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editori...

excerpt:

At the end of 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower priced publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth.

The actual letter (pdf): http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf

[tylerritchie]

Really all NIH and NSF grants should come with open access requirements. I would suggest that all raw data be made available no later than 1 year after initial collection and all publications be open-access upon publishing with curated data also available upon publishing.

The "1 year after initial collection" allows slower writers to get publications in the pipeline before unleashing their data to the hounds of "competing" scientists.

Scientific publishing is broken. Industry and government have limited access to modern, relevant academic research. Utilizing the best science for science, management, construction and business decisions shouldn't be a daunting task that I usually chose to overcome by contacting current individuals in academics with access to publications.

[mrlase]

What is really frustrating about scientific research? Working in a research lab, looking up something you've found from your research in the literature, and then not having access to the article without paying for it. $30 is way too much to be spending on an article that might not even have the content you're looking for as it might not be mentioned in the abstract. (I'm working in a virology lab with a professor at a smaller university and this can be a frequent occurrence, meaning we have to wait for the library to go and get the article for us, hindering our progress).

I found out about a pretty cool project called "Total-impact". They're basically tying together metrics from a vast number of social networking/online sources into one view about a specific scientific article to understand how far this research is reaching as well as the overall impact of how many people are talking about it. You can view it at http://total-impact.org/, and there is a sample collection at http://total-impact.org/collection/MqAnvI.

I'd also recommend looking at Science 2.0's FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0, as it contains some pretty interesting content.

I really hope that the "open science" movement gains more traction in the immediate future.

[pork]

In response to your suggestion on data being made available, there are often issues of proprietary datasets that cannot be made public (for legal or ownership reasons). It is a frustrating situation, but one that is not likely to change anytime soon, so I would be happy with just the open-access publication requirement.

[stevenbedrick]

Depending on what you mean by open access, all NIH grants already do come with such requirements. Any publications resulting from NIH-funded research must be deposited, in full text, including figures, into PubMed Central.

[speleding]

"Since Elsevier's obscene additional profits would be drained from America to the company's base in the Netherlands"

I agree the proposed act is bad, but the author does not do himself any favors by quoting such bone headed nationalism. Surely anyone with a mild grasp of the way world works knows that the profits go to the _shareholder_, not to the headquarters.

Elsevier's shareholders are all over the map. Their headquarters are based in the Netherlands for tax reasons but it does not mean they don't pay tax in the US on profits made there.

[raphman]

Minor correction: Elsevier's headquarters are in Amsterdam for historical reasons, not for tax reasons.

[obtu]

Here is an in-depth report on how the Netherlands is a tax-haven for multinationals: http://somo.nl/html/paginas/pdf/netherlands_tax_haven_2006_N... . IKEA (the world's largest charity) is an egregious example. A participation exemption allows corporate income and dividends to be channelled to a country with very low tax.

[kiba]

For every evil bills that is on the public consciousness, another bill slip by. It's basically a game of whacking a mole.

[tstegart]

Ha, but our Congress is so inept they can't write bills faster than we whack them. So it pays to be vigilant.

[hokua]

Im not sure why scientists are still publishing in Elsevier journals nowadays. Pre-internet, OK, but now I think journals should be following the model used by the Journal of Machine Learning Research, open on the internet.

[pedrobeltrao]

Scientists still publish Elsevier because of the so called "impact factor" of some of these journals. As a young researcher currently looking for tenure-track positions in academia I can tell you that it is still extremely important to publish in some of these journals (ex Cell). Unfortunately there are still very few (or none) open access journals that have the same perceived impact. I try to publish in PLoS journals or other open access journals as much as I can but given the chance to publish in higher impact journals I have to take it or risk not having a job in the future. Once you have the job you need to secure funding and so there is always pressure to publish in the "best" possible journal. The ridiculous thing about this situation is that would be fairly easy to create a new open access and highly prestigious journal in any field if everyone would switch to publishing in these new journals at the same time. You would probably just need to convince some of the leaders in the field to do it. This was how PLoS was born in fact. Unfortunately for the PhD students and postdocs it is hard to do anything about it.

[Homunculiheaded]

Exactly. The only thing holding academics back is themselves. The current state of academic publishing is ridiculous. I recently submitted something that I had to perform full copy-editing and formatting for. I know this is standard practice in engineering, but that's what publishers used to get paid for.

In the end I'll have done the research, the writing, the editing and the formatting but of course the end product will in all likelihood be behind a paywall (this is sort of my own stupidity for rushing to get something published under the advice of a prof). There's no reason individual academic communities can't decide that they should establish there own reputable and open access journals.

[billswift]

Academia is mostly about signalling, not entirely, but mostly (see Robin Hanson's http://www.overcomingbias.com posts on academia). Making it difficult and expensive to publish increases the signalling effect and helps keep out the riff-raff.

[RK]

Maybe the silver lining is that a large scale uproar could incline more people to publish in open access journals in the first place (so-called "gold" open access). </wishful thinking>

[jedbrown]

Counter-point: http://scienceinthesands.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-defense-of-...

[notahacker]

Seems easy enough for the NIH to counter by changing their funding policy to exclude all "private sector research works", leaving academics and universities to decide whether they'd rather carry out research nominally under the auspices of some public sector organisation that handles distribution or not take the funds. If they really wanted to they could even introduce their own peer review process for final publications too...

It's remarkably short-sighted and pointless legislation, unless the real objective is to start suing authors for forwarding PDF copies of their work and related documents to interested parties without journal access.

[zeeed]

Elsevier (or any other company) that uses lobbying or gives money to politicians is just using the system in their favor. That's not evil. It's evil that the system allows for this to happen.

[mjwalshe]

Thats a very naive view - laws are often drafted by lawyers / polaticians - and what makes non corporate actors in lobying any better or worse they are just lobbying for their constituents.

With your model extremist churches or other organisations could lobby to reduce employment rights for women/LGBT etc. For example returning to the 50's wheer women who got married had to resign like they did at one compnay I used to work for.

A company with progressive views on employment issues say Google would be banned from lobbying against this.

And you would have od position where say the UAW could put their views on a bill concerning the Auto industry but Alan Mulally could not - not teribly fair.

[tomjen3]

Would somebody please do a startup to provide an alternative to these evil people? It shouldn't be difficult to disrupt them, as you literally need a printer and a webserver.

[abrahamsen]

You don't need a printer, online only is fully acceptable.

However, what you do need is an "impact rating" calculated by Web of Science(TM). That rating is based on the number of citations articles in your journal gets from other rated journals.

Since your journal is new, it won't have an impact rating, meaning scientists won't publish in it, meaning you won't get an impact rating.

But the alternatives exists, e.g. Bentham and Hindawi are both running spamtastic marketing campaigns for 100s of open access journals, most with none or negligible impact ratings.

There are good and successful ones too. PLoS have very high quality open access journals. Expensive, though.

[adrianN]

What you need above all else is a reputation and that is much harder to get than a printer and a webserver.

[mcrider]

Try the Public Knowledge Project -- http://pkp.sfu.ca (disclaimer: I work for them). We create open source publishing software for journals and conferences (among other things). Our unofficial list of journals is steadily growing (over 11,000) and we are seeing more and more highly reputable journals going open access (whether or not they use our software). The tide is slowly turning...

[Natsu]

Like http://arxiv.org/ ?

[zerostar07]

How about another "Protest" for Open Access? How would that go though, maybe OA advocates could refuse to do article reviews.

[ez77]

Please change title to "Elsevier == Evil".

[rbanffy]

"=" as a comparator is valid BASIC.