Talk:Elsevier/Archives/2019

RELX referral to EU competition authority

I'm not going to reference this in the article, but I'm leaving a note for future consideration:

Jonathan Tennant, & Björn Brembs. (2018, October 26). RELX referral to EU competition authority. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1472045

Given the amount of publicity it already got, I expect some reliable sources to come up. --Nemo 09:40, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Meanwhile I see that something was added to the article. [1] shows the perspective of Elsevier friends. Nemo 20:02, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

Strange unilateral behaviour by Elsevier

I read an article that described how Elsevier unilaterally withdrew a paper that they had peer reviewed and published on the recommendation of an unnamed reader.

This seems like a very strange behaviour from a scientific publisher.

I am not quite up to speed with the topic or the case and have no desire to edit this page but was wondering if this had been missed because I could see no confirmation of it on the page here when I came to do some fact checking.

They mention that it has happened more than once

“The same happened for a paper published in Vaccine and a Letter published in Toxicology, both Elsevier journals,”

Anatomy of a science study censorship

Idyllic press (talk) 22:33, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

• That piece is one of the best hatchet jobs I've seen in a long time. Antivaxxers, need I say more? --Randykitty (talk) 22:59, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

The issue is whether the story is picked up by reliable sources, I cannot find any at the moment. -- I am not sure I understand what Randykitty means, plainer language would be welcome. Sylvain Ribault (talk) 13:14, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

It's a skilfully written suggestive piece of what happened, written by some antivax conspiracy theorist. --Randykitty (talk) 17:28, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

I'll comment only the paragraph "Dear Dr. Luján, [...] Pick your poison. You remove it, or we remove it." If the quotation in italics is real, the actual story here would probably be how the thing got published and why Elsevier was pushing for withdrawal rather than retraction. This would be https://retractionwatch.com/ material but there's always too much to write about. Nemo 21:58, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

Elsevier loves Wikipedia <3

Check it out! Wikipedia is a major part of Elsevier's imagining of the future of research!

• Elsevier Community (12 December 2018). "The information system supporting research". Elsevier Connect.

See especially the "infographic" section where a Wikipedia collaboration is at the top. If anyone has more information about Elsevier's relationship with Wikipedia then please post here.

The Wikipedia community has a bias to report on projects of interest to Wikipedia. If anyone identifies third-party sources or someone other than Elsevier discussing this then please share what you find. Information might go in Wikipedia, or it might go more in our administrative space about referring editors to resources. Thanks. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:09, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

Is that the same thing which was reported at Special:PermaLink/839093937#Wikipedia and then removed by someone as insufficiently notable product? Nemo 19:29, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

That seems like a separate effort. Perhaps there should be a page at meta:Elsevier for listing what various collaborations exist between Elsevier and Wikipedia. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:53, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

I don't see any indication of a "collaboration" existing. Nemo 11:24, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Recent IP additions

An IP added this to the lead

Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, said that "We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices." Even though most scholarly pursuits are funded by public grants and donations, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics - and all non-academics - across the world.

This isn't suitable for the WP:LEAD, but the material may be worth including in a different section. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:46, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

• Maybe the beginning of "Relationship with academic institutions"? Could also be a place where to mention "ScienceGuide now has it on good authority that, in an attempt to sway editors to stay with the publisher’s journal, Elsevier now turns out to be willing to pay editors thousands of euro’s per annum" https://www.scienceguide.nl/2018/12/elsevier-willing-to-compensate-editors-to-prevent-them-from-flipping/ Nemo 15:30, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
  • I have right now no time to read the Scienceguide piece, but as far as I know, Elsevier has paid its editors for decades, sometimes significantly more than "thousands of dollars" (depending on how many submissions a journal gets). In fact, every decent publisher pays its editors-in-chief. So nothing new there. --Randykitty (talk) 19:26, 3 January 2019 (UTC)
    • There were such claims before, including by a user in 2012 who claimed that he was paid thousands of dollars as editor-in-chief (by Wiley?) and that he knew others who were paid 20k or more (by Elsevier?), see User_talk:Guillaume2303/Archive_11#Elsevier_3. However, no reliable sources were found to back up the claim, so the article has since settled on a more neutral wording. Now Tom Reller of Elsevier has said things about payments but we still don't have any transparent "official" data nor reliable third party sources. Nemo 12:47, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
      • You'll likely not find anything specific, because editors' contracts are confidential, just like the remuneration of most employees of most companies are not public (in contrast to CEOs and such). In any case, Reller's statement is absolutely correct. The ScienceGuide article also mentions editorial boards. These are, AFAIK, very rarely paid. But then, they very rarely do anything significant for the journal apart from giving occasional advice. SG also mentions free access to scientific meetings, but that is exceedingly rare. I only know about this for some very large society journals like the European Journal of Neuroscience, where the EICs have a travel budget to attend meetings of FENS member societies. Of course, very little of this is ever published and if it is, in primary non-independent sources. That doesn't make it less true, however, and the ScienceGuide piece seriously wrong. As an aside, I find it amusing that SG cites Elsevier's profit margin of 36.8%, a figure often cited to support the movement towards OA. In fact, the most profitable academic publishers (by percentage) is not Elsevier, but OA publisher Hindawi, regularly posting profit margins in excess of 50%... --Randykitty (talk) 12:57, 5 January 2019 (UTC)
        • Finding something specific is indeed unlikely, but not impossible in principle. Aggregate numbers are not protected by privacy and even individual compensation can be subject to freedom of information requests in some jurisdictions (for instance, in Italy such a compensation to a full time researcher may require an official act granting a nihil obstat if not explicitly permitted by law). Nemo 20:04, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
• Another data point: https://archeothoughts.wordpress.com/2019/04/29/what-do-commercial-publishers-actually-contribute-to-scholarly-publishing-an-interaction-with-mrgunn/ Nemo 19:57, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Suggested updates to Pricing section

Currently, the Pricing section makes a number of assertions about Elsevier’s behaviour that are out of date (mostly from 2004) and inaccurate. It would improve the accuracy of the article as a whole to include some of the following points, based on more up-to-date and independent sources:

Elsevier’s stated policy is to make sure the effective price for customers is below that of other major publishers on a per unit or per transaction or per citation basis.

A 2017 study of 24 universities in the UK, showed that between 2011 and 2014, expenditure on Elsevier journals increased 8.6%, the least of the seven major publishers, some of which increased 33% and 38% over the same period.

This is backed up by Jisc, the UK body which negotiated on behalf of British universities, which in November 2016 said that "Elsevier provided above average quality for below average cost" and that Elsevier would “continue to deliver exceptional value to subscribers”

In the US, a 2014 study into the value of commercial publishers was published in the Proceedings of the National Association of Sciences which concluded: “Of the major commercial publisher bundles, Elsevier’s is the most cost-effective”.

I think these third parties provide a more accurate representation of what has happened in the past decade than some of the current vague assertions.

As I'm an employee of RELX, I'm posting these suggestions on the talk page to get the thoughts of other editors before making any changes. Thanks Francophile9 (talk) 11:45, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

UK was a special market given the "mandatory" gold OA, PNAS arguably has a financial interest in the matter and the seekingalpha is just a blog for self-published financial musings. Surely you can find better sources? Nemo 12:12, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi Nemo,

1. The study cited was for 2011 to 2014, before the Finch Report, which in any case did not mandate Gold Open Access. The Jisc description was from 2016, and covers the subscription model not Open Access.

2. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was established in 1914 and is one of the world’s most cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals. If you say PNAS cannot be cited on this subject, then arguably no academic journal should be cited, since by your argument all have a financial interest in the matter. If you take some time to read the article you will find it is an excellent piece of work and is by no means uncritical of commercial publishers. Please read Wikipedia’s entry on PNAS which says it was the second most cited scientific journal between 2008-18, and has been variously described as prestigious, renowned and high impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proceedings_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences_of_the_United_States_of_America

3. SeekingAlpha is a crowd-sourced content service for financial markets with 3m registered users. My understanding is that Wikipedia likes crowd-sourced content services, since it is one itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeking_Alpha Francophile9 (talk) 10:06, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

The Jisc statement is promoting a deal with Elsevier, and is hardly neutral. I would agree however that the PNAS article is a reliable and relevant source. However, Francophile9's quote should be read in the wider context of comparing commercial with nonprofit publishers: "Comparing Tables 3 and 4, one sees that for research 1 universities, even with price discounts for big deal bundles, the for-profit publishers charge substantially higher prices per citation than do the nonprofits. Of the major commercial publisher bundles, Elsevier’s is the most cost-effective. However, for research 1 institutions, the cost per citation of the Elsevier bundle is more than twice that for the full sample of nonprofit journals and about three times as high for a research 1 institution that chooses nonprofit bundles selectively for cost-effectiveness. The cost per citation of the Springer bundle is slightly higher than that of the Elsevier bundle, whereas those of the Wiley, Sage, Emerald, and Taylor & Francis bundles are much higher." Sylvain Ribault (talk) 19:24, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

My understanding is that Wikipedia likes crowd-sourced content services, since it is one itself. This isn't true at all - see WP:SPS. Wikipedia is definitely not a reliable source! SmartSE (talk) 20:18, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Here's another source for the Jisc agreement: The Bookseller. The articles says: "The UK's higher education digital services body Jisc has signed what is being described as a "landmark" agreement with publisher Elsevier, giving academics access to research "at costs lower than the industry average"." https://www.thebookseller.com/news/elsevier-and-jisc-low-cost-uk-deal-429686 Francophile9 (talk) 10:31, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

And research by Sparc, published in April 2019, shows that Elsevier's revenues per article were below those of Springer Nature and Wiley ($4,089; $4,386 and $5,431 respectively). page 25 https://sparcopen.org/our-work/landscape-analysis/ The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. Francophile9 (talk) 10:30, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

That has nothing to do with whether Elsevier prices are average or not, given prices tend to vary depending on the discipline and the composition of the respective publications. SPARC doesn't make any claim in that regard. The number was widely circulated elsewhere as a possible guidance for revenue-neutral transformative big deals, not for other uses. Nemo 10:53, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

So if I understand correctly, Nemo, you are saying that the data published by SPARC on March 28 2019 can only be used for guidance for revenue-neutral transformative big deals, but can't be used for any other use? That's even though the data backs up two other independent studies cited above, and Jisc, which negotiated the UK's deal with Elsevier, that Elsevier provides better value than other leading publishers? Francophile9 (talk) 12:38, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

In my view, the price per article is not very significant. Any large commercial publisher will publish junk articles and journals, in addition to valuable articles and journals. The junk articles and journals only sell because they are part of big deals. You can always decrease prices per article by publishing more junk. Comparing prices between large publishers, without regard for quality, is close to meaningless. Sylvain Ribault (talk) 18:48, 10 April 2019 (UTC)

That might be true if Elsevier was systematically publishing junk, but Elsevier's strategy is to provide above average quality at below average prices. Elsevier publishes 18% of scholarly literature and 26% of citations. You can see that here on page 29: https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/investors/relx-overview-april.pdf On page 30 you can see that just 5% of its journals are in the bottom 50% measured by Field Weighted Citation Impact, an indicator of quality. So while your assertion might be valid generically, I would argue it isn't relevant to Elsevier. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Francophile9 (talk • contribs) 09:13, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, citations are a poor proxy for the quality of an article, even worse for a journal, and hopeless for a large publisher. Guess who cooked up and computes the Field Weighted Citation Impact, which supposedly shows that Elsevier journals are of relatively high quality? There is no known way to reliably measure quality, this is why small differences (say less than a factor 2) of prices per article are meaningless. On the other hand, differences in APCs between open access journals are meaningful. Sylvain Ribault (talk) 19:42, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Although there is some truth in what you say, counting citations is, like it or not, the accepted way of comparing researchers and journals. Over thousands of articles and dozens if not hundreds of journals, this actually arguably has some validity. I also see no reason to doubt the figures given by Francophile above. Having said that, it would be nice if we had independent sources for that. --Randykitty (talk) 16:01, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

References

Suggested changes - Relationship with academic institutions

Hi - A few deals have been signed this year which aren't yet reflected in this section, so would it be possible for someone to take a look at updating those? (I'm an employee of RELX, hence suggesting them here and not making the changes myself)

Norway: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/04/23/norway-new-model-elsevier-agreement

Hungary: https://www.infodocket.com/2019/10/31/hungarian-electronic-information-service-national-programme-eisz-and-elsevier-agree-to-a-new-pilot-license-for-research-access-and-open-access-publishing-in-hungary/

Sweden: https://www.su.se/english/library/about-us/press-information/2.42247/new-agreement-with-elsevier-100-percent-open-access-1.463601

https://blog.ki.se/rektor/nytt-avtal-klart-med-elsevier

https://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/kungliga_biblioteket/pressreleases/new-transformative-agreement-with-elsevier-enables-unlimited-open-access-to-swedish-research-2946642

many thanks Ryoba (talk) 10:20, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

Sure, the sections should be updated. It's just a bit hard to find non-recentist sources before all the contracts have been signed and published so that secondary sources can write on them. Right now we're still mostly in the stage of press releases and primary sources. Nemo 20:45, 25 November 2019 (UTC)