Friends Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals

I wish I could avoid publishing in Elsevier journals, but in my field (psychology/neuroscience), several of the major journals are part of Elsevier. As a young researcher, I can’t afford to not submit to those journals, or even to stop reviewing for them. Any other solutions?

From the Guardian:

The first fun thing to emerge in the Australian case is email documentation showing staff at Merck made a “hit list” of doctors who were critical of the company, or of the drug. This list contained words such as “neutralise”, “neutralised” and “discredit” next to the names of various doctors.

“We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live,” said one email, from a Merck employee. Staff are also alleged to have used other tactics, such as trying to interfere with academic appointments, and dropping hints about how funding to institutions might dry up.

There have been allegations of interference with academic appointment in the past. If they can document this, it is really important.

There’s no actual passive voice construction in that quotation. See, e.g.,
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1227
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1242
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1246

Has the time come to switch over to peer-reviewed internet publication?

Even the “normal” business model of journals has always been a scam. Content acquired for LESS than free in some fields (i.e. page charges), all editorial and reviewing services provided by volunteers- no costs at all but physical printing and distribution (an obsolete technology for quite a while now), and yet they get scholars to pressure libraries into paying humongous subscription fees which must surely generate obscene profits given how limited their expenses are. I’ve been wondering for years how they’ve gotten away with it for so long.

Interesting to note that Elsevier is also the publisher of the peer-reviewed journal Homeopathy.

For cash-strapped departments, 0ne of the biggest attractions of publishing with Elsevier is the lack of publication fees. It’s very easy to think of other uses for those few hundred dollars or euros charged for internet or learned society publication.

The list of economics journals published by Elsevier is depressingly long. I estimate that (excluding policy-oriented or Australian local journals) at least half of my publications have been in Elsevier journals, and that’s probably typical of economists, except maybe those at a university with its own journal. But, at least for sole-authored papers, I am going to try very hard to find non-Elsevier outlets from now on.

And libraries are always short of money (right now, in Australia, desperately so), so a plausible reason for cutting some of their most expensive subscriptions will be welcome in a lot of places.

Another thing we can do is start raising this question within any professional associations we belong to that publish journals via Elsevier. Contracts are typically multi-year so switching publishers can’t happen quickly, but why not get the ball rolling.

I’m sure if we combined efforts, we could come up with a list of social-science journals whose Elsevier contracts are up for renewal in the next year.

http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html

Ted Bergstrom, econ prof at UCSB, has been on a mission to get people (at least tenured ones) to boycott Elsevier and other over-priced for-profit academic publishers for some time. He was motivated by the pricing and the latest incidents only make it worse. His many writings on the topic are at the link. I don’t know what success he has had but you may find some of his research and arguments helpful if you decide to go this route.

Their profile in political science is not large. Alas, however, they do publish the premier journal in my subfield.

In fact, just now I owe them a review and am finishing up an article I was planning to send to them. Sigh…

Persuade your university library to get into open access publishing and take your work to the open access journals that exist. There are now thousands of them, and they need eminent scholars to write for and review for them.
At least two university libraries in Sydney, where I work, have taken on this challenge and are moving into academic publishing online, and print-on-demand. It has the virtue of making the research that their academics do, which is publicly funded after all, available to the general public, reducing their costs for expensive subscriptions and using their infrastructure and staff in a really productive way. It will be a slow process, but Elsevier and the others are genuinely alarmed, and they should be. Antics like this latest one might be evidence, I think, that they are seeking funding elsewhere.

Open Journal System, from the Public Knowledge Project, is just one of the publishing options. There are now installations at the University of Sydney library and at the University of Technology, Sydney. You can see the full list of OJS titles at the site, but I can’t seem to put another link in this post.

Matt, for philosophers working in cognitive science the opportunity costs are much bigger. Trends in Cog Sci, in particular, would be a big loss.

Some journals generate income for the academic associations that publish them. ISA at one point got a six-figure stream from Blackwell for ISQ.

For anyone in the position to foment a rebellion at a journal or scholarly society, SPARC has a useful list of resources to help you pull off an open access digital version of the Labor/Labor History shift.

It’s a little unfair to good people who serve as editors for perfectly respectable journals that just happen to be published by Elsevier. On the other hand, Elsevier has been notorious recently for a significant drop in quality accompanied by extortionate subscription fees. Maybe a boycott would send a message, even though it would hurt honorable people who worked hard for many years. University libraries across the country will be forced to cancel subscriptions in the current budget crisis, and I would imagine that canceling Elsevier subscriptions would give the biggest bang for the buck.

Dear Elsevier,

No doubt you are aware of the allegations made against Elsevier, specifically that you are publishing phoney journals, including but not restricted to The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine. For a summary and opinion comment on the allegations, see here:

https://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/11/friends-dont-let-friends-publish-in-elsevier-journals/… Read more

I am dismayed by such allegations, not least because as a co-editor and contributor to a recent (March 2009) special issue of Utilities Policy, I am concerned that I may have allowed my adademic integrity to be used (as Henry puts it) “to add cover and credibility” to unethical practices.

Accordingly, I wish to speak to the executives responsible to hear their assurance that the allegations made against them are false, and that in the event that they are not false, to hear what measures Elsevier intends to take to reverse any damage to my academic reputation.

Yours faithfully,

Lindsay Stirton (Dr)

Bloix, I misread the quote last night the passive voice bit is reported speech but doesn’t come under the quotation marks. But in “This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place,” using ‘practice’ as the subject achieves the same thing as a passive voice construction, i.e. not making who was responsible clear.

Finally, I am quite attracted to the idea of registering disapproval when one cites to work that has been published in Elsevier journals.

You’re probably going to want to put a grandfather clause in there, since Galileo and Descartes published with Elsevier. (‘Although the Law of Fall was first published in a book published by Elsevier, the company responsible for deliberately publishing pseudo-journals such as The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that that particular result is problematic.’)

Hansen’s statement contains the following sentences:

“our Australia office published a series of sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures.”

so the passive voice was in the original. But ironically, on the question of what people usually are complaining when they talk about “passive voice,” the full statement does specifically say who’s responsible — the Australia office; instead of obscuring the agency it pins it quite squarely on a fall guy.

[Really, I think it’d be useful to have a term for things like “this was an unacceptable practice” that aren’t grammatically passive voice but have the same function of obscuring the agent; perhaps we could just call them “passive formulations.”]

Hell, didn’t notice Matt W’s post before making my own. So just ignore mine, and look at his instead.

Anyone know the names of the other pseudo”journals” published?

You’re probably going to want to put a grandfather clause in there, since Galileo and Descartes published with Elsevier.

There is no direct succession from the 17th C. Elzevir family and the decreasingly relevant Reed Elsevier publishing group.

Wikipedia: “The family ceased printing in 1712, but a contemporary publisher Elsevier takes its name from this early modern business.”

The most troubling thing about Elsevier is that they control access to the archives of their journals. In my field it’s easy to get new (or new-ish) papers online for free, but if you want to read something important from the 70s or 80s, chances are you’re going through the Elsevier website to get to it.

(There is the “walk to the library, find the bound volume, OCR the article and upload it to…” option. If you want to get medieval, or at least 18th century, on them.)

Check out also the saga of ‘Topology’ -> ‘Journal of Topology. Shorter: Elsevier journal editorial board gets fed up with price-gouging, complain to no avail, jump ship en masse to set up rival journal on the web.

There’s a remarkably cool open access journal here:
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal
[Interest to declare – I’ve reviewed for it and published in it]

The directory of open access journals is here:
http://www.doaj.org/
4000+

Is Elsevier the only publisher to be doing this sort of thing ? Or just the only one to get caught ? Or maybe the first one to get caught ?

(disclaimer: I’m not involved in any sort of academic work, just an interested bystander)

Katherine at post 36 is right. Going rather beyond what she said, and contemplating the collapse of traditional journal publishing arrangements with equanimity:

The papers are the important thing. What do journal titles add?

1. Access to a peer review service. We could organise that outside the context of established journals.

2. Knowledge that there has been reputable peer review. We could deal with that problem by publishing the names of reviewers. I know that’s not traditional, but I don’t see the problem. We are happy to be named in criticisms of other people’s papers after their publication, when we write papers demolishing other people’s arguments.

Why do 1. and 2. matter?

A. They give some quality control over the allocation of taxpayers’ money that takes place when it is decided who gets a job. It helps to have published in the right journals. But reports from named referees could do just as well.

B. They direct our attention to what we really must read in order to keep up. Read the top journals, and you’re probably OK. But an informal rumour mill (“Have you seen X’s great new paper?”) could do that job. Most things would get looked at by someone, and once two or three people you respected had told you about X’s great new paper, you would go and read it. Come to think of it, one could set up an Internet-based voting system, and viewers could decide whose votes they wanted to be taken into account in generating recommendations for them.