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Elsevier has its profits:other publishers are run by secretaries
In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)
Thank you for this interesting debate. From my experience about other publishers, which are often called predatory, or just about at the border with predatory, the question is proliferation of email spamming, robots finding (weak) reviewers, fast publication, all this is against quality. Many journals are run by secretaries, not scientists.
See about MPDI for example https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publi...
Regards
Mike
Elsevier has its profits:other publishers are run by secretaries
In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)
Thank you for this interesting debate. From my experience about other publishers, which are often called predatory, or just about at the border with predatory, the question is proliferation of email spamming, robots finding (weak) reviewers, fast publication, all this is against quality.
See about MPDI for example https://paolocrosetto.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/is-mdpi-a-predatory-publi...
Regards
Mike
Excellent piece of text John.
In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)
Excellent piece of text John. My Editor experience is very limited but I see many common patterns. One that I keep seeing more and more lately is that selfish reviewer that does not give a useful review and goes on to list a large number of papers (all of which have him/her as a co-author) for the authors to cite. I have decided to keep a list of these people and provide it to our journal manager to ban them as reviewers. For the moment, only from our journal; I tried banning them from all Elsevier journals but this is apparently not possible.
See you soon in Vancouver
Emilio
John,
In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)
John,
Thank you very much for your great service to the community and for sharing your experience and thoughts as a researcher, author, reviewer, and EIC. There is a lot for us to learn from your experience. But also very importantly, your efforts and insights to push back the increasingly concerning conductions (i.e., unreasonably high subscription cost where the community is doing all the work; pursuing higher publish volume blindly) by the publisher is much appreciated and inspiring, and many including myself will agree that it is valuable to think as a community on how to shape future publishing for equitable and sustainable access of publications.
As a side note, my home institute UW, as part of a regional consortium, recently initiated a contract renewal negotiation with Elsevier, hoping to make the renewal more affordable such that researchers can access more journals. They pointed out that "The Elsevier contract is larger than all of our other consortial journal package contracts combined", and "The Alliance institutions collectively have more than 180,000 students and thousands of faculty. Their Elsevier journal subscriptions represent a significant investment for members and currently represent a cost in excess of $7 million annually. Our hope is that through positive engagement and mutual understanding, an improved and sustainable model for the dissemination of scholarship can be achieved. " The negotiation was considered successful, but compromises were made. For instance, we lost access to some impactful and relevant journals in our field, including FINEL.
Best,
Xiang
please tell me more about JTCAM!
In reply to Thank you very much, @John E.
Vladislav,
Thanks so much for reading my post and your comments.
I was wondering if you might say more about JTCAM. In particular, I wonder what it costs to publish OA in the journal. If it is free, then I wonder how the journal is supporting production costs. Any comments you have around this would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much, @John E.
In reply to Lessons Learned from 14 years as an Editor-In-Chief (for Elsevier)
Thank you very much, @John E. Dolbow, for sharing your experience as EIC with Elsevier! I especially appreciate that you shared your frustration about pushing "to publish more and more papers, regardless of whether or not submissions had increased."
I also liked your comment: "How is it that we have allowed an organization that is not staffed by academics and scientists to have such a vital role in disseminating science? Personally, I think our community is long overdue to have a serious conversation about these basic questions."
I absolutely agree with you that a good discussion among institutions and academics is needed. It would be great if we could have more control over scientific publishing and the public money it involves.
France has just signed a new "transformative agreement" with Elsevier for 135 M€ for 4 years; this agreement also includes unlimited publication with Gold OA. I'm afraid that it will only deepen the problem, increase the publication pressure, increase inequalities between countries, and further postpone such a global discussion on the needed changes.
Personally, along with many colleagues, I'm involved in a young Diamond Open Access publication initiative, JTCAM (Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics), which promotes Open Science principles (quality review process with Open Reviews published along with the papers) and also reproducible science (data and software are also published, and the authors are aided by a Data Editor).
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