The blogosphere has been abuzz lately with news of the boycott against Elsevier and its unexpectedly quick impact. Indeed, the fact that the Research Works Act was shelved is a triumph for the forces of good.
It’s hard to not to catch the revolutionary fervor, but I do want to raise several points. The boycott is led by a stellar group of mathematicians who, generally speaking, individually satisfy at least one of the two following properties:
- Being Tenured. Or winning the Fields Medal. Typically both.
- Working in fields where Elsevier journals are not considered essential. For example, the statement of purpose of the “Cost of Knowledge” initiative mentions several top mathematics journals, and says that “none of Elsevier’s mathematics journals is generally considered comparable in quality to these journals.” A similar situation exists in theoretical computer science, where as far as I know the top journal among the ones published by Elsevier is the Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS).
In contrast, here is my point of view:
- I am untenured. Very much so. In fact, when I joined CMU half a year ago I received a formal letter from the department that so far I have 0 years of service, and therefore my tenure decision will be made in 2020. Rub it in, why don’t you?
- I work in fields where Elsevier journals are held in high regard. The journal Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), published since 1970, is generally considered to be the most important journal in AI (but see below regarding JAIR). In economics, Games and Economic Behavior (GEB) is the premier game theory journal, and historically has played a crucial role in facilitating the interaction between computer science and economics.
So an obvious conclusion from 1 and 2 is that the professional cost varies across different people, but this is a minor issue — point 1 is just my self-deprecating humor at work. The point I want to focus on is this: it is difficult, perhaps even morally “wrong”, to boycott Elsevier if you work in a field that has been significantly advanced by journals that happen to be published by Elsevier. It’s not only the historical aspect, it’s also the many great people who have invested their time and effort in these journals.
Therefore, I think the current initiative, by its nature, would have to exclude many fields. So what should we do? AI is an interesting case study. AIJ’s main competitor is the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), published since 1993, which nowadays is comparable in prestige although perhaps still a notch below AIJ. Notably, JAIR is an open access journal. The rise of JAIR has inevitably made its mark on AIJ, which since 2008 has had a rather impressive open access policy. First, all articles become free after four years. Second, anyone can gain immediate access to all articles by signing up (for free) as an “IJCAI associate”. It seems though that someone (AAAI?) is picking up (some?) of the tab for the latter policy.
I think everyone agrees that open access will be the norm soon; the only question is how soon (two years? five? ten?), and whether it would happen “naturally” through new open access journals and initiatives. The zeitgeist is Facebook’s motto of “move fast and break things”. An interesting recent article in the New York Times contrasted this approach with Bell Labs’, whose motto might have been “move deliberately and build things”. You get the point. (OK, this paragraph reads like I’m 90.)
One example of the constructive approach (which no doubt was brought about by the boycott) is the Federal Research Public Access Act, which “proposes to make manuscripts reporting on federally funded research publicly available within six months of publication in a journal.” A petition supporting the bill is available. Apparently if the petition gets 25,000 signatures by March 10, it will be reviewed by President Obama. After I signed it on Saturday it had 799 signatures, and now it has 898, so there is a chance of reaching the astronomical number of ONE THOUSAND signatures. Hold on… Bummer.
Turing's Invisible Hand 
Some good points, but I’d have liked it better if the title were “Why I am not boycotting Elsevier, but perhaps you should.”
Not signing out of self-interest is a reasonable decision, but as you point out this boycott is just one of many actions possible. Not even thinking seriously about the issue (obviously this is not describing Ariel but seems to describe far too many from my limited sampling) is not an acceptable act of a professional researcher, in my opinion. Not taking small low cost steps in the direction of open access is also unacceptable. For example, a substantial number of CS researchers don’t even put copies of (“final” versions of) papers on their own website, or the arXiv, despite being legally allowed to by even Elsevier. More generally, they don’t push back hard against commercial publishers and test the limits of copyright. I recommend this article from March 2012 AMS Notices:
http://dx.doi.org/10/1090/noti808
A blog like this might discuss to what extent the prevalence of double-blind refereeing contributes to this hiding of work, along with other features of the field that differ from those in, say, mathematics and natural sciences. I agree with Michael on the title of the post.
Although it would be dishonest to completely ignore self-interest, as I wrote above it is a minor issue for me (based on some quick soul-searching). The bigger issue is whether the boycott is the right answer in some fields, and whether there are reasonable alternatives.
So, I did not intend the post to read “why I am not boycotting Elsevier, but perhaps you should”, but rather “why I am not boycotting Elsevier, and I don’t know about you, but here are some other things to consider”.
Sorry, my DOI pointer was wrong – I copied it from the paper version of the Notices. Try http://www.ams.org/notices/201203/rtx120300436p.pdf
Some of us who are considerably older than Ariel have been fed up with price gouging and other malfeasance by commercial publishers for many years. I don’t think there is much chance of (essentially free to publish, and to read) open access becoming the dominant mode of publication in the near future without a concerted effort to bring it about. Amazingly, many scientists are rather conservative, especially those who have tenure and edit journals. The incentives as they stand mean that librarians are the ones who feel pain, not the researchers themselves who perpetuate the current system.
Another point that has always bothered me is: who says that GEB is the premier journal, etc? I find this kind of statement very annoying. First, it implies that anyone who doesn’t know that is an outsider, and not our kind of person. Second, it has been well established that the correlation between overall quality of journal and of individual articles is quite weak. Statements such as the above perpetuate lazy evaluation of researchers. Article-level metrics are quite well established and getting better. Overall, the entire research publishing enterprise needs a huge overhaul, and if we don’t start now by such measures as this boycott, it won’t improve for a very long time – until Ariel starts to sound like he’s 120, for example.
While I understand the grievances of the boycott, and agree with them, I can not understand its aims. Are the new changes announced by Elsevier sufficient to end it? Is there anything that Elsevier can reasonably do that would?
The way I see it, the problem is with the core business model of commercial academic publishers which is incompatible with the advancement of science today. Elsevier can not really answer the real demands of the boycott without becoming extinct, at least in its current form. I believe that indeed this will happen, as it will for most other commercial academic publishers. Hopefully, and likely, the people and the skills in these publishing houses will find employment in ways that advance science today, but finding these new ways takes time. I would hope that this extinction happens gracefully and slowly and gives them this time while maintaining their honor. They have served science well for a long time.
Very well put Noam.
At the risk of making myself (more of) a nuisance, why post such a comment anonymously? What does it add? Let’s act like adults and stand up for what we believe in (yes, I am a little scared at the idea of having to sign my name to a negative referee report on a paper by someone famous, for example, but not scared enough to run away). I am disturbed at how apparently lacking in courage many academics of my acquaintance are – anything controversial that may affect their income in the short term seems to trump considerations of intellectual honesty. Perhaps I am particularly unlucky in my choice of local colleagues, but I doubt it.
I promise this will be my last comment on this post. Thanks to Ariel for at least saying something and trying to put forward a principled reason for not joining the boycott.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it. Let’s say I decide not to shop at SuperFoodMegaMart anymore, instead buying my food elsewhere. Is there some moral issue about this? Do I need to be consistent about these decisions? Is it “unfair” if that food vendor tries to address some of the reasons that I decided to shop elsewhere and I don’t come back? No, it is not, because the relationship is asymmetric. I am the customer, I choose where to buy food based on my own criteria, which include “those guys have been a-holes to me in the past” as a perfectly good reason to not shop somewhere.
The publishers seem to have lost sight of the basic relationship here. The scientific community is the customer. The publisher provides a service. We are allowed to shop around, and we are allowed to take our business away from some particular publisher without giving them N chances to mend their ways and sixteen mulligans and a fair trial-by-jury with appeal mechanism. We can simply choose to take our business elsewhere, and they don’t have any right to complain. We can do it simply to make an example of a particular publisher in order to scare the others into line, should we so choose. We’re the customer, we can choose.
And we should.
I agree that business models are going to have to change, possibly to something like publication charges and preferably to a model more like SCOAP3 (http://scoap3.org). However, I see very little chance that Elsevier will go extinct in the process.
As for the aims of the boycott, everyone involved agrees that what Elsevier is doing now is not acceptable, but there is less agreement about what should happen in the future. I think that’s fine: it’s their responsibility to solve their problems, not ours. If they can ever make a compelling case that they’ve changed, many people will re-evaluate their positions on the boycott, but we have no obligation to specify in advance what would be required.
And I strongly disagree that Elsevier has served science well. Maybe that was true a hundred years ago – I haven’t studied their history carefully. However, in recent decades they have served science exceptionally poorly. Even aside from the scandals and lack of ethics (which are a huge deal), they have extracted as much money as they possibly could from academia, while offering as little as they could get away with in exchange. Many Elsevier employees are honorable people, but Elsevier has not proved itself worthy of our respect, and it has not given its employees the opportunity to serve science that they deserved.
Mostly just reiterating what has been said by others here:
Reed Elsevier is a large company with many revenue streams (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Elsevier). In the view of many, if not most, academics (not to mention the public who mostly pay for the research), selling research publications at very high prices should not be one of them. There is no reason they can’t focus on services like Scopus, conference organization, trade magazines, etc, and will be in no danger of extinction. If they unload all their journals or switch to an affordable system (perhaps pay-to-publish but very cheap) they will gain a lot of goodwill if nothing else.
Research still needs to be disseminated, and the information organized somehow. I see no reason why the few employees who actually know and care about scientific publishing can’t find jobs in other less greedy publishers (such as university presses?). If there is no real need for these people’s skills any more, then that is how creative destruction works, and we shouldn’t apologize for it.
The key point is that we need to change the way we do things, and Elsevier is only getting away with such huge profiteering because we let it. I think you are many years ahead of most of (y)our colleagues in your appreciation of the issues around scientific publishing. Actions such as this long overdue boycott serve to raise the consciousness of the amazingly conservative and self-absorbed masses of researchers.
Check out the discussions at publishing.mathforge.org (where Henry is a leading contributor). It is a bit math-centric but I think it would suit your interests. The big issues as I see it revolve around replacing the impact-factor metric with much better ways of evaluating the quality of research and researchers. There is still a lot to do before we reach a saner situation there.
Noam – I am glad you commented, because given your many excellent posts on the topic of journals, etc, I wondered why you hadn’t signed up to the boycott. It has been explicitly stated by Gowers that it is essentially impossible for Elsevier to do anything to satisfy him. The petition is more of a declaration of independence than a set of demands.
Many people including me are not nearly as confident as you that a replacement for the current journal system will appear easily, not least because of strong resistance and dirty tricks from the likes of Elsevier. Elsevier’s actions as detailed on the have shown scant regard for the integrity of science and the scientific community. It may be that they employ some people who are useful and have some honour. I personally haven’t seen any evidence, and in any case I think they should be looking for a job somewhere else.
Basically, mathematicians (and others) have been complaining about Elsevier and the like for over 15 years, and we are seeing an outpouring of frustration that these companies, who are rather parasitic and somewhat damaging to science, still have so much influence. I think we all need to play our part in improving the situation – for a start, making all our papers available online, pushing back at publisher copyright grabs, and (for those in the academic stratosphere) moving editorial boards away from commercial publishers.
Hi, Ariel. It’s not clear from your article whether you’re saying “I’m not tenured, so boycotting Elsevier would hurt me too much”, or “I’m not tenured, so my boycotting Elsevier wouldn’t make any difference.”
If it’s the former, then of course that’s your choice to make; but if it’s the latter then I think you should reconsider: ALL authors, reviewers and editors are important to for-profit barrier-based publishing, irrespective of academic status. You can make a case that a fairly recent new professor with 30 years of scholarship ahead of him is a MORE significant boycotter than a tenured big name who’s well into his career already. A boycott is a democratic thing.
Noam Nisan asks: “Are the new changes announced by Elsevier sufficient to end it? Is there anything that Elsevier can reasonably do that would?” Obviously different boycotters will have different answers, but for me the answer is no. I didn’t sign the boycott to force Elsevier to do something; I signed it because I’m done with them. They don’t make a contribution to the things I care about (progress of science, visibility of my work) so I don’t want to give my time and effort to them, any more than I would to, say, GM or Exxon. It’s that simple.
I meant the former, i.e., that when you are untenured you have to think more about the professional cost of your actions (regarding the “making a difference” argument, while I would not have as much impact as Gowers, I completely agree). However, in the post and in my comment above I tried (quite unsuccessfully, it seems) to emphasize that the professional cost is *not* what is driving the decision. In particular, I feel that Elsevier do make a contribution to the things I care about, or at least the people behind a couple of journals (e.g., AIJ, GEB) that happen to be owned by Elsevier do.
Perhaps you should talk to these people and ask them why they can’t run their journals like JAIR, for example does, or ACM TEAC, or any one of several other much cheaper and easier to access ones, which still have high quality. I doubt they have a good reason – Elsevier is simply sucking profits out of libraries and the money could be better used for other things. Even if you don’t sign the boycott petition, there is much you can and should be doing, as should we all. Those who have more seniority and more personal contacts with senior people have more responsibility.
My cursory look at game theory journals reveals that the two best known seem to be GEB and IJGT. Both are run by the International Game Theory Society and published by Elsevier and Springer respectively. In your position, I would be asking decision-makers at IJGT some hard questions about why – what do these publishers actually add that Open Journal Systems for example would not give, and is it worth the cost. Switching to a small fee of the order of $100 or less per paper to cover costs, if and only if necessary, would likely yield a seriously better deal for the community.
The editorial boards make a difference. Elsevier doesn’t.
If the editorial boards chose to, they could turn the journal into an html file that links to accepted versions of papers that are hosted on arxiv.org.
Elsevier would be out of the picture, and we wouldn’t have lost anything.
True. Many journals run by non-profit societies have switched publishers in recent years, usually away from the likes of Elsevier. Commercial publishers should not own these journals, which are often more prestigious than their main ones, and used as bait for the bundling offers.
From the perspective of someone not in any position of influence such as an editorial board, but who would be very willing to work if he were, I feel that senior researchers need to show more leadership. Get together, use the professional societies, develop a standard method for pressuring a journal publisher to lower prices and leave them if they don’t give you what you want. (Some good discussions are going on at publishing.mathforge.org on this topic right now).
First, a comment about “gaming the system.” It is far from clear that a decision not to publish in a top for-profit journal would be a bad career move. Gowers might like you more, and you could tell your dean “I chose not to publish in {AIJ,GEB, OtherPrestigiousAlphabetSoup}, that is why all my papers appeared in {PerhapsSlightlyLessPrestigiousAlphabetSoup}, but you should consider them as if …”
More seriously, in most top departments if a tenure decision is negative it is not because of a single point, like lack of a paper in a particular top journal.
In the more substantive point, it is unclear that the current commercial science publishing model can be sustained. Elsevier has been a bad partner in Theoretical CS and many of the top editors have resigned from its journals,and better journals, (from ACM, SIAM, and community-initiated free journals) were strengthened.
Disclaimer / potential conflict alert: I am the editor of CJTCS, a free electronic journal of Theoretical Computer Science.
I am not qualified to speak about other sciences, but none of good mathematical journals published now by Elsevier are created by Elsevier. Elsevier bought them during the last 20-30 years, and managed to noticeably lower their level (it takes 10-20 years in mathematics, which is a very slow science). The most famous case, the Pergamon Press “Topology” was driven by Elsevier to the non-existence: the entire editorial board resigned few years ago over the Elsevier’s polycies and was not replaced. Most of the other good Elsevier publications in mathematics are former Academic Press publications. I don’t see any reason to be grateful to Elsevier for his ability to buy jornals, entire publishers, etc. and then to turn them into much more expensive and noticeable lower level publications.
The whole argument about the prestige is circular. If you will continue to believe that Elsevier’s journals are the most prestigious in your field, you and your colleagues will submit there your best papers, and journals will remain the most prestigious. If you and your colleagues join the boycott of Elsevier, there will be no good papers there, and Elsevier will be irrelevant long before your 2020 tenure review.
Why I am boycotting Elsevier
For a very simple reason. Why should I do voluntary work for a profit
oriented organization? I quote from my article
“One More Revolution to Make: Free Scientific Publishing”,
(at that time the name `open access’ did not exist yet)
Communications of ACM, 44(5), pp. 25-28, 2001:
“We entrust publishers with the dissemination of
our work but most of the commercial publishers view
our publications as just another commercial product.
This is not what we meant. Am I wrong here? Would
you do voluntary work for Microsoft? How about
Coca Cola? After all, we also rely on their products.”
In 1999 I resigned from the Editorial Boards of two journals because of their excessive prices.
See my resignation emails in http://homepages.cwi.nl/~apt/click.html .
Both are now Elsevier journals. Over the years I refrained from publishing in Elsevier journals (with one
exception: an article published in a journal issue dedicated to the memory of Amir Pnueli)
and – sorry to say – it was not difficult. The truth is that in Computer Science the
Elsevier journals (with one or two exceptions) became average or even mediocre.
Why: because they preferred quantity over quality – it yielded larger profits.
Ariel, I understand your considerations why you did not sign the boycott.
But publishing journals is for Elsevier a huge business.
So when you are asked to referee a paper for an Elsevier journal, do not be a sucker
and ask for money. I think 100 $ would be a modest price for a referee report. And inquire why
you can’t get paid when you publish with them. These are not ridiculous questions.
They earn money, so do the Editors-in-Chief and sometimes the editors, as well.
(I can quote figures if somebody prompts me.) So why not the authors and the referees?
Now, I am against the model in which money is involved in publishing scientific papers and feel
better when avoiding companies that treat my papers as commercial products.
Yes, someone is picking up the cost of making AIJ articles freely available. But it is not AAAI. AIJ is overseen by IJCAI, and the profits Elsevier make from it that are returned to IJCAI (a six figure sum) are thmselves returned to the AI community via grants. There are regular announcements about this process. Mike Wooldridge is currently in charge of the IJCAI grant committee. IJCAI also pays Elsevier for open access …. If many people signed up who already had access via their university, it would eat into the grant income …
It has attempted to show that complexity classes P and UP are different, making proving the existence of one-way functions and responding to the problem of P versus NP millennium. See it in post “P versus UP” at the address:
http://the-point-of-view-of-frank.blogspot.com/
Dear brother
Your respect to the people running the journals and pushing your field is respectable. However, those people are not Elsevier employees, but scientists paid by public funding. One simple solution that will quiet your mind is for the entire editorial board to open a new free access journal and leave Elsevier. Thus immediately you have a new free access prestigious journal. Maybe after you get your tenure, ask CMU for some funding and create a free access journal, pulling all the big shots in your field to the editorial board. (Or maybe you shouldn’t wait and thus get an editor position before your tenure 🙂 )