I have so much respect for the editors who were willing to make this jump.
I've wondered if there is some cognitive dissonance between the strong feelings I have that scientific journals should be open access and my willingness to buy and use closed source software (even though I run an open source software foundation). But I don't think so.
Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. If they want it to be used and available as widely as possible, they should publish it under an open source license and in an open source journal. But when for-profit companies like Elsevier control the journals in which publication is necessary for getting tenure, they are restricting information flow and harming science with no countervailing benefits. Furthermore, many journal articles are supported by government grants, and it's just appalling to me not to have access to the results of research that I am paying for. (If not for https://sci-hub.tw/ obviously.)
I'm optimistic that the author-pays model of funding copy editing will work out and that for-profit journals will be seen in another couple decades as akin to leeching and phrenology.
Aaron Schwartz would be pleased to see this.
Elsevier, Springer etc. are just syndicates sitting between researchers and consumers.
They have no place in today's world.
Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques recently published a breakdown of their costs hosting an open journal. Approx. $100 per annum ;)
The same thing happened with “Topology”, now “Journal of Topology”. After some years it was bought by Wiley and is no longer free...
A journal is not an easy task to manage.
> Rooryck, who was editor of Lingua and now leads Glossa, said the most challenging aspect of starting a new open-access journal is securing funding to ensure it survives. He said Glossa is doing well and has more submissions now than Lingua did. Lingua has been described as a “zombie” journal by some scholars, but it continues to receive hundreds of submissions.
Is there a list of "zombie journals" somewhere? Would be interesting to see them all laid out.
So, as an academic myself, I have been wondering. Why don't some tech-savy people (the kinds that roam around HN) create an open-source publishing platform and offer journals to use their services for free / cheaply? Something like a GitLab for publishing papers. I wouldn't be surprised if the German government would agree to fund such a thing these days. This would make such a jump for willing editorial boards much easier.
Hurra, Elsevier are a band of crooks, they have way more profit margin than giants like google and apple, science does good by moving away from them.
The board's letter is linked in the article.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5683932-Resignation-...
There appear to have been multiple complaints:
1. Ownership of the journal is non-negotiable.
2. Article Publishing Charges (APC) are non-negotiable. APC is the charge paid by an author to get an article published under the journal's current Open Access policy.
3. Unwillingness to participate in an initiative to freely publish article citation data (I4OC): https://i4oc.org
Many journals have instituted author-pays Open Access policies. In my view, this model is just as unsustainable as reader-pays (or more accurately, library-pays).
The crux of this entire problem is that nobody knows how much it really costs to run a journal in the digital age. Or at least they're not telling. I'm not talking about costs excluding unpaid volunteers. I mean the full cost.
I suspect the board of JOI will find out for sure. It will be interesting to see: (a) whether it charges APCs; and (b) if it does, how they compare to those Elsevier charges.
This is awesome.
I'm working on something that would VERY much benefit from open access journals:
With Polar you maintain all your research in one place and can annotate and share with other users.
One thing I want to add is the ability to sync up with open access sources to fetch PDFs, get metadata for them, find related PDFs and research, etc.
Going to go heads down into this today.
Making academic journals more accessible is a problem that I’ve been working on the last few years with my project, Scholastica. We provide software that allows journals to manage their entire toolchain from peer-review to publication.
Homepage
Two journals that use our software: https://www.surveypractice.org (OA journal published by American Association for Public Opinion Research)
https://discreteanalysisjournal.com (arxiv overlay journal started by Fields Medal winner Tim Gowers)
There seems to be an even more effective solution to closed journals than just telling scientists that if they take money their paper needs to be in an open journal.
Also tell them that when they apply for funding only scientific research which is available in open journals will be considered.
You'd then get people not only submitting new research in open journals, but making all their backlog available as well to increase their odds of getting funding.
That would chip away even more at the moat of companies like Elsevier since presumably much of their funding is from universities who'll need access to historical research for a long time.
If you have the means to do so, can I suggest you sponsor one paper that you like to support for open access? It's $600m, which is a significant sum, but if you feel that your career has been helped in a significant way by research performed by others that freely available to you, and if you have the means to do so, this would be a good way to start giving back to the community. Now I just wonder if any of the journals allow such individual contributions.
JOI is a great journal. I hope they manage to keep QSS top tier.
I had a crooter approach me about a software position at Elsevier once. I told her no, and that you can't spell Elsevier without E-V-I-L.
As a shameless plug, we are hiring right now (we’re a small remote team) working on this exact problem - neliti.com/careers
Imagine if they had signed the ubiquitous non-competes we have in the tech-world outside California.
Elsevier has editors?
This is great.
this is a bold move for something that as controversial in the academic community about publications. I think this puts into perspective that there are certain biases on which studies gets published aka if you have money you can certainly get published on this paid publications.
Not too long ago, I had communications with Elsevier's technology team, and through that experience, I also spoke with some of their directors. Let me say that the experience was kind of mind-boggling and surreal.
My impression is that Elsevier is a company locked into the past by a couple of decades. The leadership that I spoke with seemed to have worked in publishing for a very long time. And, probably because of that, they had an old-school publishing mentality with regards to how to reach their customers, provide value, and create revenue.
I sensed that many in the technology team seemed frustrated with their leadership. They had new visions for how to evolve the publishing model to reflect the rise of sci-hub and changes in the industry. However, they were stymied by a very bureaucratic, well-entrenched, and siloed organization.
I expected that the leadership would have some strategy for dealing with this, but it seemed like they were aloof, probably grown fat from decades of near-monopoly. They had a net profit margin of 37% in 2017! Talk about a business ripe for disruption.
Elsevier has been around a very, very long time (wikipedia says 1880), and it shows. I can't imagine getting anything done within that company. So, it's no surprise that some of them are finally leaving to try out a new model. Let's hope for the best.