Goodbye Elsevier, Goodbye Tet Lett etc
I’ve decided to stop refereeing for, and publishing in, Elsevier journals. I was just asked to review for Tet Lett again, and sent notice that I’m out:
“Apologies, but I have decided to stop refereeing for (and publishing in) Elsevier journals because of 1) the lack of a positive policy towards open access (to all content, not just individual articles) and 2) Elsevier’s aggressive commercialism, in particular its sponsorship of the Research Works Act in the United States which would unquestionably harm science. Please remove me from your list of referees.
If Elsevier were, in the future, to decide to support full open access to the academic literature I’d be delighted to resume refereeing duties.”
Over the last few years my interest in open science has grown, and inevitably I’ve had to confront the power of open access literature, which is a necessary condition for open science if we are to avoid the absurdity of research conducted in the open disappearing behind a subscription once it’s done. My doubts about contributing to a system of closed access journals, which totally dominate organic chemistry, were becoming overwhelming when Tim Gowers’ post came along about the need to declare publicly that we would no longer support the system.
I’m starting with Elsevier. The tipping point was the ridiculousness of the Research Works Act – a squalid little affair that was very little to do with the greater good or the benefit of science. I have been irritated by all the pompous talk of the “value” Elsevier adds to the process of peer review. Over the last ten years or so I have had experience of the peer review system operated by 3-4 organic chem Elsevier journals. I’d like someone to point out something about this “value” that is innovative or surprising and which might need some hefty R&D budget. Is it perhaps the case that simply publishing an article written and reviewed by scientists has become fairly straightforward in this modern age? I have been an editor at PLoS One for a while now – ironically a journal that some people still think has no peer review system. The peer review I have managed for papers there (managed by scientists, backed up by editorial staff) has been rock solid, lengthy and rigorous. I have zero data to back this up, but it feels as though more people reviewing for PLoS One care about what they’re doing than do those reviewing for some of the Elsevier org chem journals. PLoS One is also trying hard to innovate in the area of article-level metrics.
As a chemist, parting company with Tet Lett in particular causes mixed emotions. The journal has a weak reputation amongst my co-workers and colleagues these days, but of course there are classic, beautiful papers in there, like Corey’s PCC paper, or seminal reports of Sonogashira couplings and Weinreb amides. My last paper there from 2009 has been cited 20 times already. My first paper was published there. I feel like holding a wake. But good science is not the product of a journal, it’s the product of hard work by people. The last thing we should be doing is paying anyone over the odds to access it back or giving anyone copyright over it. A sad day, but times change which is why times are interesting.
If you want to join the boycott, you can declare yourself here. You’d be in very good company, in case you think this is just a list of naïfs.
Eventually I will have to take the same stance on other publishers, with the American Chemical Society looming large. I need to consider the welfare of the students in my group, and their CV’s. It’s really very tough in chemistry – people expect papers in certain places. The ACS is technically a learned society, and has a healthy contribution to the blogosphere etc, but something about its control of the literature just doesn’t feel right. If the data in Scifinder were donated to the public domain chemistry would have its Human Genome Moment.
My last two papers were in ACS journals because these were the most appropriate places for the students’ work, and because the prestige of the journals helps my students. They were both thoroughly reviewed and published quickly. But this just can’t go on, and I suppose I must soon stop interacting with the ACS too. And, I guess the RSC. One step at a time. With the bigger journals that deal with significant papers and publish items beyond research articles the sense of “value added” is perhaps clearer, too, and the discussion becomes economically more complex. Yes, I’m talking about you, Stuart – if Nature Chem went author-pays, it’d be ($ a lot) per article, I seem to remember.
I’d be interested to hear from other chemists. It feels our discipline is the most traditional, and almost completely beholden to closed access publishers. It feels we care less about open access than scientists from other disciplines, and that we’re too comfortable with out lot. Comfort is the death knell of academia. We perceive the transformative benefits of open access to data too little, in particular the re-use and mining of large open data sets: the immense power of tinkering, re-mixing, playing. The lack of unrestricted play with the accumulated knowledge of chemical reaction outcomes is one of the key weaknesses of the way we are doing organic chemistry today. For that we need open data. That means open access to the literature.
antonywilliams 12:46 am on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Mat…do you know the RSC’s position on Open Science? Your comments welcome: http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/OpenScience/FAQ.asp
Peter Murray-Rust 3:05 am on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Tony, in answer to your question…
As far as I can see authors can pay 1600 GBP for “RSC Open Science” http://www.rsc.org/images/GeneralLicence-OpenScience_tcm18-64482.pdf. This licence is nowhere near BOAI compliant and requires depositions in a specific repository for non-commercial purposes. It would, for example, prohibit Chemspider from re-using any part of it (before Chemspider became part of RSC). It contains phrases such as:
> the Owner grants to the RSC the exclusive right and licence throughout the world to edit, adapt, translate, reproduce and publish the Paper
>The Author(s) may make available the accepted version of the submitted Paper via the personal website(s) of the Author(s) or via the Intranet(s) of the organisation(s) where the Author(s) work(s)
>Persons who receive or access the PDF mentioned above must be notified that this may not be further made available or distributed.
>No deposited Paper, whether in an Institutional Repository, Funding Body Repository or personal website, may be forwarded to any website collection of research articles without prior agreement from the RSC.
In other words the RSC has complete control over the re-use and distribution of the paper.
It effectively denies *anyone except the RSC* the right to:
re-use diagrams from the paper
translate spectra into something useful
translate parts of the paper into a foreign language
text-mine the paper
and even download it from the author’s repository and print it (that is unauthorised distribution)
The licence is RSC-specific (not Creative Commons) so there is an additional overhead in reading it.
This is not Open Access according to BOAI.
Please correct me if the facts are wrong. I am not offering my opinions 🙂
.
Ross 7:05 am on February 1, 2012 Permalink |
Hi Peter,
I think the RSC uses pretty standard copyright permissions which are typical of most publishers but they do allow authors to freely reproduce figures from their work. See their blog post (http://blogs.rsc.org/rscpublishing/2011/12/20/rightslink-and-permission-requests/ )
Peter Murray-Rust 1:28 am on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Matt,
It’s not just pricing, grooty journals, arrogance, etc. It’s about our ability to do what we like without research. My group has built software which can extract a large percentage of reactions out of Tet. Lett and Tetrahedron. If I try to do this I’d be sued within minutes. We could build a system that would make CAS and Reaxsys look 10 years out of date (which they are). But the University of Cambridge would be cut off by Elsevier laywers. Elsevier have treated me with total arrogance, disdain and I … words fail me.
There is a better future and it doesn’t include current publishers. We shall have to build it ourselves. It’s hard but possible.
Rich Apodaca 3:40 am on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Mat – you’re an inspiration. Bravo!
I’m curious – given the needs of your students to find work after graduation, which chemistry journals do you currently see as being: (a) most prestigious; and (b) most consistent with free scientific discourse?
Also, don’t forget that prestige is fickle. Fannie Mae used to be one of the world’s most respected companies. Apple used to be a joke.
‘Author-choice’ journals don’t solve the problem, IMO. ACS and RSC – this means you.
The future belongs to publishers who can innovate (yes, actually do something different and risk failing) to reduce costs, trim bloated, top-heavy organizations, effectively use information technology, and deliver value to the scientific community – while paying the bills.
Despite plenty of hot air from publishers, I’ve not found a single one that in any way explained to the scientific community how they’ve done all of the above and still can’t:
1) let authors keep copyright to their works; and
2) let readers freely distribute and repurpose all journal articles
Strangely, I see journals like Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (http://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/home/home.htm), which does both of the above and has been running for many years now.
mattoddchem 2:39 pm on January 28, 2012 Permalink |
Rich – In my field it’s all closed – JACS, JOC, Org Lett, Inorg Chem (for some of my stuff), as well as Angewandte, Chem Eur J, Chem Commun, the new Chemical Science as well as Nature Chem, of course (which is publishing a much smaller number of consistently cool papers). PNAS is very good, and as far as I know more committed to open access (after a delay?). The Beilstein journal is excellent – open access and no fee to submit – amazing. I published there (http://dx.doi.org/10.3762/bjoc.5.67). The current open access journals in my field are finding it difficult to get traction, but are trying hard – Chem Central J, for example. PLoS ONE will take chemistry, but the uptake by the community is slow. I’m on the board of the very new ChemistryOpen from Wiley, and we will see how that goes. For me the ability to pay something to make one article open just won’t do it – the rest of the journal is closed – I’m really interested in the bigger point about the ability to mine and re-use data freely as a spur to innovation. The journal becomes a formal repository – very useful and important as a portal to organised data.
Rebecca Guenard 6:16 am on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Wow, good for you! That’s huge!
Heather Morrison 10:02 am on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Bravo! As for past papers, a reminder that Elsevier is green for self-archiving – please liberate your works, get them to your local IR for open access!
Egon Willighagen 4:18 pm on January 27, 2012 Permalink |
Good luck! (Organic) Chemistry is not particularly know for caring about any of this (nor semantics, nor computing)… but I second Rich’ pointer to the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. And there is Chemistry Central too. What other gold OA options are there for chemists? There is Molecules as ChemComm replacement… others?
Tyrosine 4:21 pm on January 28, 2012 Permalink |
It’s a pretty easy decision for an org chemist to dump Elsevier. Tet Lett and Tetrahedron are not the journals they once were, and there’s plenty of quality competition. I’m not publishing there ever again. Opting out of ACS and RSC is a much bigger call. Who knows maybe BJOC will be the new JOC one day – and getting in early is a good thing.
Jan Jensen 8:04 pm on January 28, 2012 Permalink |
“My last two papers were in ACS journals because these were the most appropriate places for the students’ work”
I have been thinking a bit about this lately. With journals like PLoS ONE and the fact that most people find articles through search engines, what do we as chemists mean by “appropriate journals”? Why not send everything to PLoS ONE? I don’t do this myself, but why not?
The only fundamental issue that I see is the prestige factor. But once the paper is not in JACS or Nature Chemistry or 1-2 more, I don’t really see the any real gain in prestige. I am not an organic chemist, but is Inorg Chem and JOC really considered more prestigious than PLoS ONE? Or is it that most chemists think the latter is that new “like” button on Google? 😉
mattoddchem 8:21 am on January 29, 2012 Permalink |
Yes, it’s a nebulous idea “prestige”. I guess it comes down to where people i) trust, ii) browse and iii) are likely to publish, or have published, related work. For those last two papers from my group the journal had recently published related work, which we cited, meaning that those authors are likely to read our paper too. It sounds ludicrous when I say it, but it’s like a common area for a reading group. Before impact factors I think this was even more important – people would submit to the journal that had published the most relevant work recently. There is no need for this today. And yes, why not just submit everything to PLoS ONE? I don’t know.
One of the things that bothers me about journal hierarchy is that it’s essentially a time-saver for the reader/assessor. If a paper is published in a certain journal we, as a reader, can form an opinion about the likely importance of the paper without having read it. Usually a paper in a top-tier journal has been refereed by 2-3 people. For something like Angewandte, I know from experience that a good report and a mediocre report is enough for a rejection. So let’s say two people will be responsible for a paper getting into a top-tier journal. Is the kind of reassurance we need about a paper’s quality? Have we not all read papers in big journals dealing with a very specialised area and thought “How did THAT get in?” because we are outside that field, perhaps? So we are relying on two people we don’t know, to judge something we are not familiar with and who may have very human political reasons for their decision, and yet we still somehow form a judgement of quality. It’s odd. Nevertheless the brand of certain journals provides us with an opinion of an individual paper. I suspect that will continue, because we as a species like labour-saving devices. So yes, some “top-tier” places will remain and thrive while other journals expand their efforts at article-level metrics and other devices for assessing an individual paper’s importance, rather than having to inductively judge that from an impact factor.
Jan Jensen 5:54 pm on January 29, 2012 Permalink |
I agree with you. But that’s top-tier journals like JACS and Angewandte. And I would submit that a CV filled with only such publications would be impressive.
But what about the journals where *most* chemists publish *most* of their articles? JOC, J Phys Chem, etc? Do they really add more prestige to a CV than PLoS ONE? That’s one question I am struggling with. (The other is whether it is disingenuous to semi-boycott non-open access journals). Any thoughts?
Imagining my publication list where all non-top tier publications have been published in PLoS ONE, I am left with another gut reaction: narrow research scope. Generally, publication in a diverse set of journals signals multidisciplinarity. However, this is a non-issue for PLoS ONE.
mattoddchem 9:23 pm on January 29, 2012 Permalink |
Sure, that’s what I was struggling to say. Devil take the hindmost – the top tier journals have the least to fear from open access, but time passes and times change. PLoS Biology/Medicine etc have huge impact factors. PLoS One’s impact factor is, I believe, higher than JOC’s at the moment. It’s a difficult transitional period for open access. Some new journals are coming along that might spur things along a bit. But it is still the case that panels looking at applicants scan paper lists for journals in order to save time – quite reasonable thing to do if there are 100 applicants for a job. I have no doubt this occurs when assessing people submitting grants, too – lower-ranked journals gives one a quick excuse to rate the grant badly. Now imagine we just had one journal. The articles would need to be assessed for importance, not the journal.