On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 10:31:59PM +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:
On Thursday 1. September 2016 20.04.58 Mike Leimon wrote:
Greetings all,
One of my friends brought this new open access journal to my attention this morning. Apparently, it is just starting up now and looking for an initial call for papers.
It's interesting to know that Elsevier think it's worth "taking a punt" on something like this, even though they publish books and journals on anything and everything. It may help to get attention from a wider audience.
Personally, I have a low opinion of journal publishing, having seen the brand obsession that pervades academia: publish a good article in a suitable journal that random assessors of the described work don't already know and there's no recognition to be had; get in amongst the authors on an article about someone else's work that gets into a "brand name" journal and suddenly you did something worthwhile after all.
Combine that with "publication points" and other "productivity measures" introduced to academia to make it more like the world of business and the actual priorities of research and sharing knowledge take something of a back seat.
And there are the long-disliked aspects of the peer-review process, which in this case involve paying $500 to Elsevier ($100 special initial offer!) per submitted article and then presumably having your work reviewed by people who are doing the reviewing for free. The positive side of this is that the copyright of articles seems to be retained by the author - unlike a lot of journal publishing - and that the licences are mostly standard Creative Commons ones (CC-BY and CC-BY-NC-ND):
https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/open-access- licenses
This applies to the select few Elsevier publications that are open-access. Indeed what most peaple have against Elsevier is that most of their content is not open-access.
PLOS will typically charge you even more. E.g. if your article managed to get published into PLOS ONE, you'd have to pay $1500[1]. This is because it's their only source of funding: they are a respectable open-access non-profit.
https://plos.org/publication-fees - even more for some of the others.
https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/copyright
Elsevier, of course, gets additional rights. How else would they make all that money?
http://theoryofcomputing.org/crisis.html
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/academic-publisher-elsevier-hit-with- growing-boycott-1.1166665
Again, this is an open-access Elsevier publication. Not the typical Elsevier publication.