Is there a comprehensive archive, with references, of Elsevier's many sins against scientific progress? @albertcardona@brembs The lead authors of a paper I played a small role in want to submit to Cell 🤢 and I would like to dissuade them.
Follow-up Q: I have a vague vibe that, although the entire traditional publishing system needs to die in a fire, NPG are not quite as scummy as Elsie. Is that vibe justified or not really?
If given the amount of data out there on #RELX (and Springer Nature) the authors remain intent on submitting to their journals, there’s not much you can do. At this point throwing data at such authors doesn’t work anymore. Instead, you could try telling them about Robert Maxwell https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science , about how journals don’t have to be expensive to be respectable https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ and drop some shade, with comments like “do you think your grant funder will be happy to see the work published there?”. It’s not like they don’t know – they can’t not know –, it’s that they are still calculating impact towards career advancement as a function of journal impact factor. And sadly, for many institutions, they aren’t wrong.
At least try to get them to send to Science or PNAS, which are meant to be societies for scientists rather than an unapologetically exploitative business.
@jni @albertcardona@brembs
They're in the same business with the same business model, so for effects on scientific publishing they are the same, but no they dont have as sweeping a portfolio of human rights abuses as RELX does
@jonny@albertcardona@brembs Indeed the basic “all ‘legacy’ journals must die” premise is assumed correct in the question and includes NPG, but I am trying to be realistic about how much I can get in this battle — the authors list is overwhelmingly traditionalist and wary even of preprints. 😞 I'll push for eLife but even that is a stretch. Is it worth steering from Cell to Nature & co? I think so, but I'm worried it's just exposure bias. Profit margins at least seem lower at NPG. (26 vs 38%)
@jni
You know the situation better than anyone else does, ofc, but if that was the choice ya id do what you can to not pay RELX. I dont even know what to say to folks still skeptical of preprints aside from "literally why" so u are on ur own there lol
Add comment