Elsevier is going the wrong way
Tags: Elsevier, interview, open access, open standardPosted in Getting published, Web 2.0
Summary
Reed-Elsevier’s daughter Elsevier has introduced as an experiment a new way of publishing science. The “paper” is now basically a website, in which the idea of a linear text is abandoned. The web interface implements access to text fragments, graphs, supplementary material, interview with an author, through hyperlinked tabs and mundane hyperlinks. In my opinion this development is a step backward and scientist should avoid publishing their material this way.
Reed-Elsevier’s daughter Elsevier has introduced as an experiment a new way of publishing science. The “paper” is now basically a website, in which the idea of a linear text is abandoned. The web interface implements access to text fragments, graphs, supplementary material, interview with an author, through hyperlinked tabs and mundane hyperlinks. In my opinion this development is a step backward and scientist should avoid publishing their material this way.Elsevier’s solution to a non-existing problem
Scientist agree that way too many papers are being published. In addition commercial publishers keep on launching new journals in an already overcrowded market. The desktop-publishing innovation has radically improved the productivity of scientists. There are many factors that hamper the progress of science, but the alleged inadequacy of present-day science publishing is not one of them.
Scientist agree that way too many papers are being published. In addition commercial publishers keep on launching new journals in an already overcrowded market. The desktop-publishing innovation has radically improved the productivity of scientists. There are many factors that hamper the progress of science, but the alleged inadequacy of present-day science publishing is not one of them.Elsevier and the InternetFor about ten years, until 2002, I have been an editor of the Elsevier journal Physics Letters. I have good memories of that time. Capable journal publishers with full scientific training and a journal with a beautiful
typography. In those days Elsevier was lagging behind as far as using the Internet for its communication with authors, referees and editors was concerned. I remember vividly that I warned them regularly to take the world wide web seriously. I am sure many of my fellow Elsevier editors uttered the same anxiety. I couldn’t understand why Elsevier did not react. This lack of perception on my side shows my ignorance about how multinational companies cope with major technological advances: they do not reinvent the wheel, no they just buy it. I do not know how many web-developing companies Elsevier Reed acquired, but it must have been quite a number. All the back-issues of their journals were scanned and put online. As a result Elsevier has a reasonable web performance. My respect for the management of Reed Elsevier.
typography. In those days Elsevier was lagging behind as far as using the Internet for its communication with authors, referees and editors was concerned. I remember vividly that I warned them regularly to take the world wide web seriously. I am sure many of my fellow Elsevier editors uttered the same anxiety. I couldn’t understand why Elsevier did not react. This lack of perception on my side shows my ignorance about how multinational companies cope with major technological advances: they do not reinvent the wheel, no they just buy it. I do not know how many web-developing companies Elsevier Reed acquired, but it must have been quite a number. All the back-issues of their journals were scanned and put online. As a result Elsevier has a reasonable web performance. My respect for the management of Reed Elsevier.I say reasonable, because it is still not great. The interface of the Elsevier portal ScienceDirect is clumsy and ugly. And if you really want to see a distasteful page, it is here: the official Elsevier web page for the press.
Elsevier and Dutch reportersEvery Dutch journalist gets a bitter taste in his mouth when the discussion comes to Elsevier. One of Reed-Elsevier’s daughters,Dagbladunie, once owned a few high-quality Dutch newspapers with a return on investment of about 13%. This return on investment was considered to be too low by the management of Reed Elsevier in 1995. The publishing company was used to higher returns with science publishing, So the company sold the Dutch newspapers. From then on these Dutch newspapers did not fare well as far as their finances were concerned. Amongst other mishaps they suffered from a raid by private equity firm APAX.
Problem 1 for science publishers: open access
The open access movement is gaining ground. The general public is getting interested in
the issue. Why should public scientific libraries pay a fortune to get access to papers in which results are is reported of research financed by the tax payer? It is useful to make a distinction between journals, like Nature, which are published by pure commercial publishing houses and journals, like Science, that are published by learned societies or other not-for-profit publishers. I must add that some learned societies, for instance the Optical Society of America, are in their behavior not any longer discernable from pure commercial enterprises.
The open access movement is gaining ground. The general public is getting interested in
the issue. Why should public scientific libraries pay a fortune to get access to papers in which results are is reported of research financed by the tax payer? It is useful to make a distinction between journals, like Nature, which are published by pure commercial publishing houses and journals, like Science, that are published by learned societies or other not-for-profit publishers. I must add that some learned societies, for instance the Optical Society of America, are in their behavior not any longer discernable from pure commercial enterprises.The non-commercial companies have much fewer problems with open access as the commercial ones. However all publishers realize that full open access will become a fact of life.
Problem 2 for science publishers: open standards
Standardization is always a hot issue in a market economy. The market leader likes to impose his standards on the market. From the moment on
that the company has succeeded i
t will start to continuously change its standard, making it very cumbersome for their competitors to get a market share.These lagging companies will complain and ask governments to interfere and are continuously trying to to influence public opinion. But as soon as the situation is reversed, and one of the plaintiffs gets dominance over the market he would start to behave exactly in the same way in protecting his own standard.
Standardization is always a hot issue in a market economy. The market leader likes to impose his standards on the market. From the moment on
that the company has succeeded i
t will start to continuously change its standard, making it very cumbersome for their competitors to get a market share.These lagging companies will complain and ask governments to interfere and are continuously trying to to influence public opinion. But as soon as the situation is reversed, and one of the plaintiffs gets dominance over the market he would start to behave exactly in the same way in protecting his own standard.Adobe is an admirable company. It has been in computer graphics and typography right from the start. It has produced postscript, a computer language to drive laser printers. Postscript was a revolution in desktop publishing. As postscript was not open-source, companies making laser printers had to pay Adobe a license fee to be able to use postscript in the firmware of the laser printer. These licensing fees made the company Adobe big.
But Adobe also introduced – in 1993 – the portable document format(pdf). An absolute blessing for science. This format can easily deal with graphs, figures, mathematical formulas, chemical formula’s etc. Its linear and inter-page independency makes for very fast web viewing. Although Adobe still holds patents for the pdf standard it is now officially an open standard. A pdf file is by the way the only file format that can be reasonably protected with encryption and passwords. In this respect it is superior to all Microsoft Office products.
All scientific papers are these days available as pdf files. A “reprint” of a scientific paper is identical to a pdf file copy. A publishing company that starts a new journal will have to supply its articles in pdf format. Submitting authors regularly have to submit their paper, including figures, list of references, supplementary material as a pdf file. Referee reports are sent as pdf files. This free exchange of scientific information through pdf files is an ideal situation for scientists. But it is a nightmare for companies like Elsevier. Monopoly seekers would like to control the scientific market and they would like to impose their own standard and get rid of the pdf standard. In the present experiment Elsevier still supplies the pdf version of the paper. But for how long? This new effort of Elsevier, if successful – which god forbade - would mean you cannot send reprints around any longer. You will have to supply your colleague with a web address of a commercial company, with – in the future very likely – paid access to be able to access the “web-paper”.
Context of discovery
Scientists are human beings. Some get heir inspiration in church, and others while watching a ball game, or by going to a conference. One can write novels about the life of a scientist. Richard Feynman wrote amusing books about his life. By reading such literature one can learn a lot about
the psyche of a scientist and the sociology of the scientific community. These activities are part what is called the context of discovery. The proof of Fermat’s last theorem made John Wiles famous and a cult figure, featuring in many tv programs. All these accounts will never make it into a physics, chemistry or biology journal. And happily so. But Elsevier’s experiment is an attempt to compromise the hard core of science. Any scientist can give an interview. The next thing is a scientist talking about his religious feelings as an explanatory introduction to his paper.
Scientists are human beings. Some get heir inspiration in church, and others while watching a ball game, or by going to a conference. One can write novels about the life of a scientist. Richard Feynman wrote amusing books about his life. By reading such literature one can learn a lot about
the psyche of a scientist and the sociology of the scientific community. These activities are part what is called the context of discovery. The proof of Fermat’s last theorem made John Wiles famous and a cult figure, featuring in many tv programs. All these accounts will never make it into a physics, chemistry or biology journal. And happily so. But Elsevier’s experiment is an attempt to compromise the hard core of science. Any scientist can give an interview. The next thing is a scientist talking about his religious feelings as an explanatory introduction to his paper.Context of justification
The body of accepted knowledge, that is the content of scientific papers when reproduced, when survived many challenges, and when finally widely accepted as true, belongs to the context of justification. Progress in science concerns increase of this knowledge. Brilliant scientific discoveries are part of this context. An interview with a scientist is not.
The body of accepted knowledge, that is the content of scientific papers when reproduced, when survived many challenges, and when finally widely accepted as true, belongs to the context of justification. Progress in science concerns increase of this knowledge. Brilliant scientific discoveries are part of this context. An interview with a scientist is not.
Didactics
If a proof of a theory is known and accepted it often can be simplified.
Initial mathematical derivations can take tens of pages and after a couple of years simplified proofs can be produced that take only a page or two. This simplification can be part of the context of justification. But didactics, defined as expressing the same thing in a simpler form without adding any new science, is not part of the context of justification. If the content of a paper could indeed have been better presented and explained as being done in the paper itself the authors wrote the wrong paper. Explaining the content of a scientific paper for lay people is not part of the context of justification and should be kept separate.
If a proof of a theory is known and accepted it often can be simplified.
Initial mathematical derivations can take tens of pages and after a couple of years simplified proofs can be produced that take only a page or two. This simplification can be part of the context of justification. But didactics, defined as expressing the same thing in a simpler form without adding any new science, is not part of the context of justification. If the content of a paper could indeed have been better presented and explained as being done in the paper itself the authors wrote the wrong paper. Explaining the content of a scientific paper for lay people is not part of the context of justification and should be kept separate.Mathematics has no video
I recently bought a new wireless router. I like the brand Linksys, but this company has been acquired by Cisco, so now the brand is Linksys-Cisco. The contribution of Cisco is certainly that the “improved” and more “timely” manual has become of terrible quality. The manual is extremely modern, so it is not just a simple pdf file that I could read and use to install my router. No the manual has become modernized: it is a video. I had to run this video maybe twenty times. The reason was that something in the vido was unclear, at least to me. So I had to go through the whole video over and over again. Oh I would loved to have had a linear text. With a linear text I would just have gone to the specific location in the text and read it, may be several times. That would be done in seconds in stead of the rerunning the video costing me half an hour.
I recently bought a new wireless router. I like the brand Linksys, but this company has been acquired by Cisco, so now the brand is Linksys-Cisco. The contribution of Cisco is certainly that the “improved” and more “timely” manual has become of terrible quality. The manual is extremely modern, so it is not just a simple pdf file that I could read and use to install my router. No the manual has become modernized: it is a video. I had to run this video maybe twenty times. The reason was that something in the vido was unclear, at least to me. So I had to go through the whole video over and over again. Oh I would loved to have had a linear text. With a linear text I would just have gone to the specific location in the text and read it, may be several times. That would be done in seconds in stead of the rerunning the video costing me half an hour.
The ultimate dull linear text is a pure mathematical treatise. This is a sequence of lemma’s and proofs. No interview with the author. No video.
What is wrong with linear text?A virtue of a linear text is its extreme inflexibility. The first sentence is supposed to be the first sentence and the whole text is a serial line of arguments and presentations. Inflexibility can be a great virtue. On toll ways in France there are almost no exits. This inflexibility makes transport along these toll ways very effective. In my country, the Netherlands, every village requires its highway exit and gets supported by Parliament. As a result maximized flexibility but speed zero.
Technical problems
Present day (x)html rendering is still poor. This is easily seen in theexperimental text of Elsevier. I will give just one example. The web text of the Cell paper uses tens of times the chemical formula “Ca2+”, whereas the pdf version tells us that it should be “Ca2+”. As you can see in this post the superscript is possible in html but then ugly varying line spacings are introduced.
Present day (x)html rendering is still poor. This is easily seen in theexperimental text of Elsevier. I will give just one example. The web text of the Cell paper uses tens of times the chemical formula “Ca2+”, whereas the pdf version tells us that it should be “Ca2+”. As you can see in this post the superscript is possible in html but then ugly varying line spacings are introduced.
The text lines in the Elsevier’s web texts are much to long. This makes reading tiresome. Narrowing the window does not help as the Elsevier developers have prevented the text from wrapping. In addition the text is not fully justified but ragged right. It is well-known that fully justified text can be read quicker.
Elsevier is afraid of open discussionI am not at all saying that the context of discovery is not important for science. In this respect I like the forum discussions and comments in which scientists participate. Elsevier started its new experiment, “the article of the future” and says it welcomes feedback. Reactions can be given in two ways: through a web form or via email. But these are old-fashioned one-way communication channels. Why not open up a forum and allow people to discuss openly? The company that claims to have invented the article of the future communicates with the community in a previous-century way.
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