Should we publish in Elsevier?
An interesting article in Ars Technica:
Elsevier has long be recognized as a ruthless pursuer of profit in the realms of scientific publishing. However, over the past decade, Elsevier's desire for profit corrupted the scientific publication process.
It concludes:
It would be nice to think that Elsevier will listen to scientist, but I suspect that this will not happen until scientists start getting a little more strident. If you are scientist, publish your work in society journals rather than Elsevier journals. Try to avoid citing work published in Elsevier journals. Elsevier lives by a combination of pricing and impact factor, and scientists have direct control over only one of these-impact factor. Librarian could start looking at Elsevier journal usage patterns; perhaps they can follow Cornell's example, and subscribe to just a few Elsevier journals.
Myself, I am far from being happy about Elsevier publishing garbage in too many of their journals; as far as I am concerned, some of them should be just closed down. But on the other hand, then all this crap 'research' will be submitted elsewhere, which would affect all who tries to publish decent research in decent journals, which would be overwhelmed and thus introduce draconian prescreening.
Also, I kind of like Chem.Phys.Lett. - not that it is the best journal, but there is no other one like that in the physchem/chemphys field, where we can publish relatively short relatively important papers. Plus, the reviewing wasn't that bad there last time I submitted a paper there (I mean, the reviewer actually read the paper and offered some useful criticism).
Elsevier has long be recognized as a ruthless pursuer of profit in the realms of scientific publishing. However, over the past decade, Elsevier's desire for profit corrupted the scientific publication process.
It concludes:
It would be nice to think that Elsevier will listen to scientist, but I suspect that this will not happen until scientists start getting a little more strident. If you are scientist, publish your work in society journals rather than Elsevier journals. Try to avoid citing work published in Elsevier journals. Elsevier lives by a combination of pricing and impact factor, and scientists have direct control over only one of these-impact factor. Librarian could start looking at Elsevier journal usage patterns; perhaps they can follow Cornell's example, and subscribe to just a few Elsevier journals.
Myself, I am far from being happy about Elsevier publishing garbage in too many of their journals; as far as I am concerned, some of them should be just closed down. But on the other hand, then all this crap 'research' will be submitted elsewhere, which would affect all who tries to publish decent research in decent journals, which would be overwhelmed and thus introduce draconian prescreening.
Also, I kind of like Chem.Phys.Lett. - not that it is the best journal, but there is no other one like that in the physchem/chemphys field, where we can publish relatively short relatively important papers. Plus, the reviewing wasn't that bad there last time I submitted a paper there (I mean, the reviewer actually read the paper and offered some useful criticism).