8 ms·

Opinion: Elsevier are corrupting open science in Europe

244 points by slbenfica 8y ago

DanielleMolloy 8y ago
The business model of these large publishing companies is not selling access, it is peer review. Science and Nature keep their reputation despite Elsevier because it is notoriously hard to pass their peer review process, and the academic world trusts it. We may live in a better academic world if rigorous peer reviewing was a full-time paid job. Presumably it would not be difficult to do better than 90% of the current peer reviewing by letting people with full-time experience (and the overview of the state of science that comes with it) do it. It may also solve a couple of other problems with anonymous peer reviewing. (eventually with ever-more complex methodology and involvement of complex programming routines and tools we still have to get rid of the scientific paper as the main form of communication)
dougmccune 8y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that none of this, even when it comes to Elsevier, is black and white. Yes, Elsevier has been one of the staunchest opponents of the move to Open Access. And yet simultaneously, Elsevier has made one of the most aggressive pushes into OA publishing. They are likely the largest OA publisher by article volume today. Yes, they have the most to lose with a big shift to OA, but they also have the most to gain. And OA publishing has proven that it can be very very profitable, particularly for Elsevier. The argument in the piece is largely that Elsevier is a bad actor in the larger academic publishing space, so therefore they shouldn't be given the contract/power to produce reports for the EU about the movement to open access. But even if you hate Elsevier, they are indeed in a position to have a lot of the data needed. Elsevier isn't just a publisher, they're a data company as well. They compile a database of all journals and citations (as do a few others, like for-profit Clarivate and non-profit Crossref). They have bought up a number of analytics companies (Mendeley, Plum), as the article makes note of. So like it or not (and I assume most people don't like it), they do indeed have a huge amount of the data needed for a project like the EU Open Science Monitor. The argument about conflict of interest is a valid argument, but feels like it's getting overblown in this context. The author argues that Elsevier's CiteScore metric (a competitor with Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate) is biased toward Elsevier content. Except CiteScore isn't being used at all in the Open Science Monitor [1]. They're only using total citation counts that come from a variety of sources. So the author manufactures a conflict of interest to bolster his point that isn't backed up by the facts. Plum analytics is mentioned as a conflict, except the only data from Plum that's being used is Twitter mentions, so I don't see what the perverse incentive is - nobody would be inclined to use Plum Analytics, they'd just be inclined to game Twitter. The use of Mendeley readership stats I do find bullshit. That's a clear case of Elsevier pushing the use of their product, and I think that should be removed as a metric entirely. I think most "social" signals should probably be removed, like Twitter mentions, because IMO they're not good indicators of quality at all. What we really need is some set of metrics that can quantify real-world impact of scientific findings. For social science this would be something like the effect on public policy and societal outcomes. For medicine, something like the number of people in the global population positively impacted. These are really hard things to measure and quantify, but I do think there's a need for something more than citation-based impact metrics. Disclaimer: I'm a family owner and director of Sage Publications, a private for-profit publisher that does a lot of both paywall and open access academic publishing. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/open_science_monitor_methodological_note_v2.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/open_science_moni...
- dmitriz 8y ago
  > And yet simultaneously, Elsevier has made one of the most aggressive pushes into OA publishing. They are likely the largest OA publisher by article volume today. Yes, they have the most to lose with a big shift to OA, but they also have the most to gain. And OA publishing has proven that it can be very very profitable, particularly for Elsevier. They made the push into their version of OA, the hybrid OA, where they can charge exorbitant rate on top of the subscription, that no author would pay, whereas many journals such as the members of the Free Journals Network https://freejournals.org/ https://freejournals.org/ do not charge at all. And yes, it is obviously very profitable, so why would they not push it? > But even if you hate Elsevier, they are indeed in a position to have a lot of the data needed. Their date will reflect their own interest, where conflict of interest is obvious. > They compile a database of all journals and citations (as do a few others, like for-profit Clarivate and non-profit Crossref). Except that their database excludes many independent journals.
eveningcoffee 8y ago
It looks to be a major miscalculation by the European Commission and they should fix it.
- Yaa101 8y ago
  It is not a miscalculation, by design the European Commission is proprietary and almost always make proprietary decisions that often have to be corrected by the relative toothless European Parliament.
  - dmitriz 8y ago
    Any reference proving this statement?
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    This us by far the biggest criticism that I have of the structures within the EU: far too often the Parliament takes up a position that is friendlier to the citizens themselves, but they are not heard or overpowered in the decision making process by the Comission or the Council of Ministers. Complex processes also help direct attention away from this. If anything, I wish that the EU structures are reformed into something that resembles a "standard" modern democratic government with a clear balance of powers. But it seems people are preparing to tear it all down and plunge Europe into the next war instead of fixing it. Oh, and just to finish my rant: even RMS calls for the dismantling of the EU! His argument is exactly that it is too friendly to corporations in his opinion. I came close to walking out of the room in anger when I heard him advocate for that. Don't throw good things away as long as there is a chance to fix them.
    - lhopki01 8y ago
      Remember that the leader of the Commission is chosen by the parliament. This is a recent development which massively increases the power of the parliament.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      > Don't throw good things away as long as there is a chance to fix them. It's like the NIH syndrome, but for politicians. > I didn't build it, so it sucks. Let's start from scratch, with me building it!
afandian 8y ago
This contract is causing outrage in the open science corner of the world. Many people think this is a conflict of interest. And many are unhappy that closed, private infrastructure is being used. In the broader context, hardly a day goes by without a story about problematic public infrastructure contracts. Organised commercial companies always have an advantage over open, transparent, community projects. Here's my take on the collection of some of this kind of data: https://blog.afandian.com/2018/05/five-principles-altmetrics/ https://blog.afandian.com/2018/05/five-principles-altmetrics...
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > In the broader context, hardly a day goes by without a story about problematic public infrastructure contracts. Organised commercial companies always have an advantage over open, transparent, community projects. Can you clarify whether you mean if the open public infrastructure is broken, or has trouble getting contracts? Because if you mean the former, I'd say that arxiv.org has been running just fine for ages.
  - afandian 8y ago
    I was drawing wider parallels with processes for public contracts outside scholarly publishing, the "Big four" style government contracts. An endless stream of stories and comments appear here. Eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740428 Edit: not comparing Elsevier to McKinsey per se, but the power imbalance of proprietary vs open.
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      Thank you, that helped me make sense of your arguments and links :)
Luc 8y ago
This is what the finest lobbyists at the highest level can buy you... https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog/status/1005064249763385344 https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog/status/1005064249763385344
- erispoe 8y ago
  That's a bit misleading. Lobbyists have to be registered and controlled in the European Parliament. Of course Elsevier is going to talk to MEPs and try to influence them. I would much rather that process happened under public scrutiny than not.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Havoc 8y ago
Does it matter? I get the impression that big journal has essentially already lost the war. The open line of reasoning seems to align well with scientists so I don't a version where it doesn't slowly take over the world.
BrandoElFollito 8y ago
I do not really understand the outrage. Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals. Just publish it in a blog, where there will be comments. Out of these you make your choice whether the publication makes sense. The ones to blame are univesities and grant commitees which use the impact index as The Universal Science Ruler. It is akin to blaming Oracle for closing their databases. You do 'ot like it, move to Postgres, mysql or something else. Yes, quality of publications will suffer for some time. Yes, papers (blog posts) will be more difficult to get to but it will settle down. Until we have open source science.
- visarga 8y ago
  > I do not really understand the outrage. Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals. Scientists are people too, and as people they need to think of their careers. Say you publish in open journals and your colleagues publish in "reputable" closed journals like the ones peddled by Elsevier. Then they're going to get ahead of you. So you need to compete on the same level with them. How would you solve this problem? The interest of the individual is in conflict with the interest of the field on the whole.
  - BrandoElFollito 8y ago
    Yes, you are correct. This problem exists everywhere, except that there are places where people actually try to react instead of whining because the ugly big corporation is not nice to them by making them pay for the journals. We had exclusively commercial, proprietary software and then the open source mouvement started. We have a choice now and the ugly companies must adapt and do not have a monopoly anymore. We had women in the kitchens and at church, they reacted and they are slowly getting equity. What I am trying to say is that academia is not making efforts to change the paradigm. The Professor God, The TA Semi-God etc. Revered Grant Commissions. All that. I know all of that, I used to be part of this until the day I said good bye and moved on. I still have a lot of friends in academia and this subject comes back from time to time. And every time the arguments are the same as yours, plus the whining.
- Vinnl 8y ago
Cenk 8y ago
Every student I know already uses Sci-Hub anyway, either directly or through Citationsy Archives (https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/ https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/). All this does is push everyone further into piracy.
- nonbel 8y ago
  Why do I need to sign up to something to use that software? It makes it seem like a scam. For example, look at this: https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ There I just download it...
- geezerjay 8y ago
  That may be a short-term solution but that also does nothing to tackle the rentism problem created by these multinationals. They still own and control the communication chanels and researchers are still obliged to serve the rentier's self-interests to see their papers published for the sake of their career.
DrBazza 8y ago
Elsevier have always been like this, it's just that now, with cheap internet globally available and having seen what Napster did to the record industry (indirectly creating Spotify, Apple music, etc.) they're fighting to protect their monopoly with whatever (dirty) tricks they can muster. As far as I can see, the only things they now provide that hasn't been replicated as a 'free service' is matching editors and referees to submissions, and journals of repute, i.e. publish in Nature and it's a bona fide article, publish on your blog and no-one knows who you are or whether your work was refereed. To be clear Sci-Hub merely provides copies of work that has been accepted for publication in a journal, it's not a free replacement for the full 'service' that Elsevier and other publishers provide.
- gh02t 8y ago
  The biggest thing Elsevier does that requires actual work is final typsetting and editing of your article. They have someone take your preprint submission and take care of the formatting for the final article. I don't think this justifies their ridiculous fees and business practices, but it is a service they provide that costs money.
  - forrrealman 8y ago
    I have published with Elsevier and Springer. Every single time they proof my article it comes back as unreadable garbage. Sometimes a non-native English speaker has 'corrected' my grammar by adding incorrect articles everywhere, sometimes they fail to wrap formulas that are wider than the page, sometimes they make tables or figures so small they are entirely unreadable. Elsevier and Springer and others hire the worst bottom-dollar outsourced 'proofers' they can find and every single time it takes so long to get across to them what they've done wrong and to pore through the paper to find all the errors that it would have been better for everyone if they just told me how they wanted the paper and I supplied the PDF! Anyway I don't disagree with what you've written but I had to get the rant out. Has anyone NOT had this experience??
    - dmitriz 8y ago
      Indeed, their "typesetting" is mostly done by people with no subject expertise who is more likely to introduce a mistake than correct something that matters.
rdlecler1 8y ago
We wanted free news and look where that got us. Hopefully the open source research model also doesn’t go in that direction eventually.
- ethelward 8y ago
  The whole difference is that free news implies that you need new models to remunerate the writers. Here, the writers are already remunerated _before_ publishing their papers. What we need is a new way to quickly assess a scientist's worth.
  - rdlecler1 8y ago
    There is value in curation but this doesn’t seem to be playing well with the HN crowd.

244 points by slbenfica 8y ago

The business model of these large publishing companies is not selling access, it is peer review. Science and Nature keep their reputation despite Elsevier because it is notoriously hard to pass their peer review process, and the academic world trusts it. We may live in a better academic world if rigorous peer reviewing was a full-time paid job. Presumably it would not be difficult to do better than 90% of the current peer reviewing by letting people with full-time experience (and the overview of the state of science that comes with it) do it. It may also solve a couple of other problems with anonymous peer reviewing. (eventually with ever-more complex methodology and involvement of complex programming routines and tools we still have to get rid of the scientific paper as the main form of communication)

dougmccune 8y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that none of this, even when it comes to Elsevier, is black and white. Yes, Elsevier has been one of the staunchest opponents of the move to Open Access. And yet simultaneously, Elsevier has made one of the most aggressive pushes into OA publishing. They are likely the largest OA publisher by article volume today. Yes, they have the most to lose with a big shift to OA, but they also have the most to gain. And OA publishing has proven that it can be very very profitable, particularly for Elsevier. The argument in the piece is largely that Elsevier is a bad actor in the larger academic publishing space, so therefore they shouldn't be given the contract/power to produce reports for the EU about the movement to open access. But even if you hate Elsevier, they are indeed in a position to have a lot of the data needed. Elsevier isn't just a publisher, they're a data company as well. They compile a database of all journals and citations (as do a few others, like for-profit Clarivate and non-profit Crossref). They have bought up a number of analytics companies (Mendeley, Plum), as the article makes note of. So like it or not (and I assume most people don't like it), they do indeed have a huge amount of the data needed for a project like the EU Open Science Monitor. The argument about conflict of interest is a valid argument, but feels like it's getting overblown in this context. The author argues that Elsevier's CiteScore metric (a competitor with Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate) is biased toward Elsevier content. Except CiteScore isn't being used at all in the Open Science Monitor [1]. They're only using total citation counts that come from a variety of sources. So the author manufactures a conflict of interest to bolster his point that isn't backed up by the facts. Plum analytics is mentioned as a conflict, except the only data from Plum that's being used is Twitter mentions, so I don't see what the perverse incentive is - nobody would be inclined to use Plum Analytics, they'd just be inclined to game Twitter. The use of Mendeley readership stats I do find bullshit. That's a clear case of Elsevier pushing the use of their product, and I think that should be removed as a metric entirely. I think most "social" signals should probably be removed, like Twitter mentions, because IMO they're not good indicators of quality at all. What we really need is some set of metrics that can quantify real-world impact of scientific findings. For social science this would be something like the effect on public policy and societal outcomes. For medicine, something like the number of people in the global population positively impacted. These are really hard things to measure and quantify, but I do think there's a need for something more than citation-based impact metrics. Disclaimer: I'm a family owner and director of Sage Publications, a private for-profit publisher that does a lot of both paywall and open access academic publishing. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/open_science_monitor_methodological_note_v2.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/open_science_moni...

dmitriz 8y ago
> And yet simultaneously, Elsevier has made one of the most aggressive pushes into OA publishing. They are likely the largest OA publisher by article volume today. Yes, they have the most to lose with a big shift to OA, but they also have the most to gain. And OA publishing has proven that it can be very very profitable, particularly for Elsevier. They made the push into their version of OA, the hybrid OA, where they can charge exorbitant rate on top of the subscription, that no author would pay, whereas many journals such as the members of the Free Journals Network https://freejournals.org/ https://freejournals.org/ do not charge at all. And yes, it is obviously very profitable, so why would they not push it? > But even if you hate Elsevier, they are indeed in a position to have a lot of the data needed. Their date will reflect their own interest, where conflict of interest is obvious. > They compile a database of all journals and citations (as do a few others, like for-profit Clarivate and non-profit Crossref). Except that their database excludes many independent journals.

eveningcoffee 8y ago

It looks to be a major miscalculation by the European Commission and they should fix it.

Yaa101 8y ago
It is not a miscalculation, by design the European Commission is proprietary and almost always make proprietary decisions that often have to be corrected by the relative toothless European Parliament.
- dmitriz 8y ago
  Any reference proving this statement?
- gmueckl 8y ago
  This us by far the biggest criticism that I have of the structures within the EU: far too often the Parliament takes up a position that is friendlier to the citizens themselves, but they are not heard or overpowered in the decision making process by the Comission or the Council of Ministers. Complex processes also help direct attention away from this. If anything, I wish that the EU structures are reformed into something that resembles a "standard" modern democratic government with a clear balance of powers. But it seems people are preparing to tear it all down and plunge Europe into the next war instead of fixing it. Oh, and just to finish my rant: even RMS calls for the dismantling of the EU! His argument is exactly that it is too friendly to corporations in his opinion. I came close to walking out of the room in anger when I heard him advocate for that. Don't throw good things away as long as there is a chance to fix them.
  - lhopki01 8y ago
    Remember that the leader of the Commission is chosen by the parliament. This is a recent development which massively increases the power of the parliament.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    > Don't throw good things away as long as there is a chance to fix them. It's like the NIH syndrome, but for politicians. > I didn't build it, so it sucks. Let's start from scratch, with me building it!

afandian 8y ago

This contract is causing outrage in the open science corner of the world. Many people think this is a conflict of interest. And many are unhappy that closed, private infrastructure is being used. In the broader context, hardly a day goes by without a story about problematic public infrastructure contracts. Organised commercial companies always have an advantage over open, transparent, community projects. Here's my take on the collection of some of this kind of data: https://blog.afandian.com/2018/05/five-principles-altmetrics/ https://blog.afandian.com/2018/05/five-principles-altmetrics...

vanderZwan 8y ago
> In the broader context, hardly a day goes by without a story about problematic public infrastructure contracts. Organised commercial companies always have an advantage over open, transparent, community projects. Can you clarify whether you mean if the open public infrastructure is broken, or has trouble getting contracts? Because if you mean the former, I'd say that arxiv.org has been running just fine for ages.
- afandian 8y ago
  I was drawing wider parallels with processes for public contracts outside scholarly publishing, the "Big four" style government contracts. An endless stream of stories and comments appear here. Eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740428 Edit: not comparing Elsevier to McKinsey per se, but the power imbalance of proprietary vs open.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    Thank you, that helped me make sense of your arguments and links :)

Luc 8y ago

This is what the finest lobbyists at the highest level can buy you... https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog/status/1005064249763385344 https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog/status/1005064249763385344

erispoe 8y ago
That's a bit misleading. Lobbyists have to be registered and controlled in the European Parliament. Of course Elsevier is going to talk to MEPs and try to influence them. I would much rather that process happened under public scrutiny than not.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Havoc 8y ago

Does it matter? I get the impression that big journal has essentially already lost the war. The open line of reasoning seems to align well with scientists so I don't a version where it doesn't slowly take over the world.

BrandoElFollito 8y ago

I do not really understand the outrage. Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals. Just publish it in a blog, where there will be comments. Out of these you make your choice whether the publication makes sense. The ones to blame are univesities and grant commitees which use the impact index as The Universal Science Ruler. It is akin to blaming Oracle for closing their databases. You do 'ot like it, move to Postgres, mysql or something else. Yes, quality of publications will suffer for some time. Yes, papers (blog posts) will be more difficult to get to but it will settle down. Until we have open source science.

visarga 8y ago
> I do not really understand the outrage. Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals. Scientists are people too, and as people they need to think of their careers. Say you publish in open journals and your colleagues publish in "reputable" closed journals like the ones peddled by Elsevier. Then they're going to get ahead of you. So you need to compete on the same level with them. How would you solve this problem? The interest of the individual is in conflict with the interest of the field on the whole.
- BrandoElFollito 8y ago
  Yes, you are correct. This problem exists everywhere, except that there are places where people actually try to react instead of whining because the ugly big corporation is not nice to them by making them pay for the journals. We had exclusively commercial, proprietary software and then the open source mouvement started. We have a choice now and the ugly companies must adapt and do not have a monopoly anymore. We had women in the kitchens and at church, they reacted and they are slowly getting equity. What I am trying to say is that academia is not making efforts to change the paradigm. The Professor God, The TA Semi-God etc. Revered Grant Commissions. All that. I know all of that, I used to be part of this until the day I said good bye and moved on. I still have a lot of friends in academia and this subject comes back from time to time. And every time the arguments are the same as yours, plus the whining.
Vinnl 8y ago

Cenk 8y ago

Every student I know already uses Sci-Hub anyway, either directly or through Citationsy Archives (https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/ https://citationsy.com/blog/new-feature-citationsy-archives/). All this does is push everyone further into piracy.

nonbel 8y ago
Why do I need to sign up to something to use that software? It makes it seem like a scam. For example, look at this: https://www.zotero.org/ https://www.zotero.org/ There I just download it...
geezerjay 8y ago
That may be a short-term solution but that also does nothing to tackle the rentism problem created by these multinationals. They still own and control the communication chanels and researchers are still obliged to serve the rentier's self-interests to see their papers published for the sake of their career.

DrBazza 8y ago

Elsevier have always been like this, it's just that now, with cheap internet globally available and having seen what Napster did to the record industry (indirectly creating Spotify, Apple music, etc.) they're fighting to protect their monopoly with whatever (dirty) tricks they can muster. As far as I can see, the only things they now provide that hasn't been replicated as a 'free service' is matching editors and referees to submissions, and journals of repute, i.e. publish in Nature and it's a bona fide article, publish on your blog and no-one knows who you are or whether your work was refereed. To be clear Sci-Hub merely provides copies of work that has been accepted for publication in a journal, it's not a free replacement for the full 'service' that Elsevier and other publishers provide.

gh02t 8y ago
The biggest thing Elsevier does that requires actual work is final typsetting and editing of your article. They have someone take your preprint submission and take care of the formatting for the final article. I don't think this justifies their ridiculous fees and business practices, but it is a service they provide that costs money.
- forrrealman 8y ago
  I have published with Elsevier and Springer. Every single time they proof my article it comes back as unreadable garbage. Sometimes a non-native English speaker has 'corrected' my grammar by adding incorrect articles everywhere, sometimes they fail to wrap formulas that are wider than the page, sometimes they make tables or figures so small they are entirely unreadable. Elsevier and Springer and others hire the worst bottom-dollar outsourced 'proofers' they can find and every single time it takes so long to get across to them what they've done wrong and to pore through the paper to find all the errors that it would have been better for everyone if they just told me how they wanted the paper and I supplied the PDF! Anyway I don't disagree with what you've written but I had to get the rant out. Has anyone NOT had this experience??
  - dmitriz 8y ago
    Indeed, their "typesetting" is mostly done by people with no subject expertise who is more likely to introduce a mistake than correct something that matters.

rdlecler1 8y ago

We wanted free news and look where that got us. Hopefully the open source research model also doesn’t go in that direction eventually.

ethelward 8y ago
The whole difference is that free news implies that you need new models to remunerate the writers. Here, the writers are already remunerated _before_ publishing their papers. What we need is a new way to quickly assess a scientist's worth.
- rdlecler1 8y ago
  There is value in curation but this doesn’t seem to be playing well with the HN crowd.