'Too greedy': mass walkout at global science journal over 'unethical' fees
More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the "greed" of publishing giant Elsevier.
The entire academic board of the journal Neuroimage, including professors from Oxford University, King's College London and Cardiff University resigned after Elsevier refused to reduce publication charges.
Academics around the world have applauded what many hope is the start of a rebellion against the huge profit margins in academic publishing, which outstrip those made by Apple, Google and Amazon.
Neuroimage, the leading publication globally for brain-imaging research, is one of many journals that are now "open access" rather than sitting behind a subscription paywall. But its charges to authors reflect its prestige, and academics now pay over £2,700 for a research paper to be published. The former editors say this is "unethical" and bears no relation to the costs involved.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 10, @10:29AM (5 children)
These journals still expect academics to peer review articles for them, completely voluntarily, without paying them a dime.
If you're getting £2,700 per article, surely you can shell out a few hundred for the people who will be determining whether the article in question should be published at all. And no, you shouldn't be penalizing them for saying "no".
But they don't care. Why should they, when they can make big bucks simply by having control over whether young academics will have careers?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by esperto123 on Wednesday May 10, @10:52AM (4 children)
I found it all very abusive, these editors are "paid" in prestige, of being able to put in their curriculum that they are an editor or are associated with so and so journal, while elsevier rakes a shitload of money.
I find it absurd that that still happens, that this journals don't pay their most important staff, they these days don't even have printing and shipping costs, a lot of time double dip (charge the scientist that want to publish AND the readers) and all of that is paid mostly with public money, as both the research money and the readers are usually mostly or entirely public funded.
With how cheap it is to host a webserver (usually free at universities) I still don't understand why editors from all this journals just don't leave en masse and create their own journal (with blackjack and hookers) with completely free (or very small fee) access to the papers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 10, @12:15PM (3 children)
There are a variety of "self-hosted" journals.
APS (US) runs Physical Review series, Institute of Physics and Royal Society (UK) runs various journals. I am sure there are others not in physics. And there are preprint servers like arxiv.org. The preprint servers are free at point of use; the "self-hosted" journals work out reasonably expensive.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 10, @12:29PM (1 child)
Really, what the journals are selling to academics is "My work has been published in $PRESTIGIOUS_JOURNAL, you should give me tenure".
(And of course the tenure committee will probably respond to that with "no", regardless of the quality or lack thereof of the academic's work, but because there's an ongoing effort by mostly-non-teaching administrators to eliminate tenure as a concept in academia, replacing professors making good professional incomes with desperate adjuncts making $16K a year if they're lucky.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday May 10, @12:39PM
Sure, but for example PRL is probably the most prestigious physics journal and is run by scientists as a not-for-profit. Nature Physics (for profit) is higher impact factor but not necessarily higher impact, and above that are the cross-field journals like Science (AAAS, not-for-profit) and Nature (for profit).
So GP says "why don't scientists organise themselves", to which the answer is "they have" (at least in my field).
(Score: 1) by arubaro on Wednesday May 10, @09:54PM
In maths there were some "walk-outs and make another journal with the ancient editorial board¨ , and lots of established researchers boicot jounals edited by elsevier springer et al.
There are also some open journals (electronic) of good quality. french mathematicians put a lot of effort in that
but but but..
if you are a young researcher in search of a position (pun intended) the pressure to publish in an "established" journal is huge.
on the other hand: arxiv.org is great in order to make your work known, but since it is not peer reviewed, good luck to make your papers there as "published": you will be evaluated by looking where you publish and by counting papers. another avatar of bean counting i guess.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday May 10, @11:00AM (1 child)
Prestige scientific journals business model is now pure parasitism, actually helps nothing in science, only attends barrier to entry into certain privileged caste.
What was functionally important in 18.-19. centuries at then society tech level is now a useless burden, for everyone.
There are plenty of non-profit organizations out there for innumerable funny political motives and technical goals, why scientific journals can't be just like that?
Are scientists too lazy or stupid to organize themselves better?
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 11, @04:55PM
Too idealistic, I'd say.
In a perfect world, scientists wouldn't have to worry about politics. There's a general sense that science is so hard that scientists need to be relieved of extraneous concerns such as politics. There's also the notion that because so many political issues arise from ignorance, the bogus ones are so easily refuted that teaching how to deal with that is unnecessary and beneath higher education. Any educated person ought to be able to figure such things out on their own, no need for coursework on that.