@thorsten4future Wenn der Kapitalismus allen die Luft abschnührt, merken vielleicht doch manche was.
Ich erinnere mich noch an eine Mail des Bibliothek-Chefs in Bremen aus dem Jahr 2003 mit der Betreffzeiel: Das #Elsevier-Trauma.
Seit dem ist alles nur noch schlimmer geworden.
Ganz genau! Macht einfach nicht mehr mit. Gründet die Zeitschriften neu und macht alles eigenverantwortlich. Dafür braucht man kein #Elsevier oder #Springer oder #Wiley mehr. Arbeitet nicht für die, weder als Autor*innen noch als Gutachter*innen.
Die #Linguistik hat das zum Teil schon geschafft.
ResearchFish Again
One of the things I definitely don’t miss about working in the UK university system is the dreaded Researchfish. If you’ve never heard of this bit of software, it’s intended to collect data relating to the outputs of research grants funded by the various Research Councils. That’s not an unreasonable thing to want to do, of course, but the interface is – or at least was when I last used it several years ago – extremely clunky and user-unfriendly. That meant that, once a year, along with other academics with research grants (in my case from STFC) I had to waste hours uploading bibliometric and other data by hand. A sensible system would have harvested this automatically as it is mostly available online at various locations or allowed users simply to upload their own publication list as a file; most of us keep an up-to-date list of publications for various reasons (including vanity!) anyway. Institutions also keep track of all this stuff independently. All this duplication seemed utterly pointless.
I always wondered what happened to the information I uploaded every year, which seemed to disappear without trace into the bowels of RCUK. I assume it was used for something, but mere researchers were never told to what purpose. I guess it was used to assess the performance of researchers in some way.
When I left the UK in 2018 to work full-time in Ireland, I took great pleasure in ignoring the multiple emails demanding that I do yet another Researchfish upload. The automated reminders turned into individual emails threatening that I would never again be eligible for funding if I didn’t do it, to which I eventually replied that I wouldn’t be applying for UK research grants anymore anyway. So there. Eventually the emails stopped.
Then, about three years ago, ResearchFish went from being merely pointless to downright sinister as a scandal erupted about the company that operates it (called Infotech), involving the abuse of data and the bullying of academics. I wrote about this here. It then transpired that UKRI, the umbrella organization governing the UK’s research council had been actively conniving with Infotech to target critics. An inquiry was promised but I don’t know what became of that.
Anyway, all that was a while ago and I neither longer live nor work in the UK so why mention ResearchFish again, now?
The reason is something that shocked me when I found out about it a few days ago. Researchfish is now operated by commercial publishing house Elsevier.
Words fail. I can’t be the only person to see a gigantic conflict of interest. How can a government agency allow the assessment of its research outputs to be outsourced to a company that profits hugely by the publication of those outputs? There’s a phrase in British English which I think is in fairly common usage: marking your own homework. This relates to individuals or organizations who have been given the responsibility for regulating their own products. Is very apt here.
The acquisition of Researchfish isn’t the only example of Elsevier getting its talons stuck into academia life. Elsevier also “runs” the bibliometric service Scopus which it markets as a sort of quality indicator for academic articles. I put “runs” in inverted commas because Scopus is hopelessly inaccurate and unreliable. I can certainly speak from experience on that. Nevertheless, Elsevier has managed to dupe research managers – clearly not the brightest people in the world – into thinking that Scopus is a quality product. I suppose the more you pay for something the less inclined you are to doubt its worth, because if you do find you have paid worthless junk you look like an idiot.
A few days ago I posted a piece that include this excerpt from an article in Wired:
Every industry has certain problems universally acknowledged as broken: insurance in health care, licensing in music, standardized testing in education, tipping in the restaurant business. In academia, it’s publishing. Academic publishing is dominated by for-profit giants like Elsevier and Springer. Calling their practice a form of thuggery isn’t so much an insult as an economic observation.
With the steady encroachment of the likes of Elsevier into research assessment, it is clear that as well as raking in huge profits, the thugs are now also assuming the role of the police. The academic publishing industry is a monstrous juggernaut that is doing untold damage to research and is set to do more. It has to stop.
I appreciate the irony in my university inviting me to a workshop on Ethics in Scientific Publishing, hosted by Elsevier.
Du hast die #Linguistik vergessen. Die sind fast ok. Wir haben Teile, die wie Mathe ohnehin selbst LaTeX machen, weshalb das einfacher ist als in den restlichen Geisteswissenschaften.
Wir haben einen großen Verlag, der Diamond OpenAccess ist (weder Leser*innen noch Autor*innen zahlen) und wir haben die ganzen Journals von den Societies, die OA anbieten oder OA sind.
Zum Beispiel die Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft von der #DGfS ist auch DiamondOA, @glossa gibt es international. Die haben sich vom #Elsevier-Zeitschrift #Lingua neu gegründet.
Ihr müsst nur die Herausgeber-Boards dazu bringen, die Zeitschriften neu zu gründen. Scholar-owned. Die Marken müssen bei uns bleiben. Verstehe auch nicht, wieso Mathematiker*innen sich für diese Boards hergeben. Die #Mathematik war ja Vorreiter.
„Ganz am Ende (manchmal Jahre später) hat man dann seinen Verlagsbienchenstempel "Dein Paper wurde bei Famous Journal akzeptiert" und dann posten die das nochmal nur mit hässlicherem Typesetting, neu eingebauten Tippfehlern und ganz und gar nicht accessible unter einer URL die sich jederzeit ändern kann. Von Permalinks hat da noch nie jemand was gehört, da muss dann die DOI her.“
Du, die haben Jahrhunderte Erfahrung!
Aber genau so ist es. Was da für Zeit verplämpert wird für Proofreading usw. Die schicken das nach Indien, wo alle Symbole kaputt gemacht werden. Die Menschen vom Handbuch #Semantik können Lieder davon singen. Das sind enorme Kosten, die wir tragen (bzw. die Steuerzahler*innen), damit die Verlage sich das einstecken können.
If you're using a #QT #Webengine based browser like me (@qutebrowser or #Falkon), #Elsevier 's #ScienceDirect website may cause issues because they "only support the last 3 releases" of most browsers. Luckily, they use the user agent to detect the browser. So, a workaround is to use something like this, with a new enough version for the #Chrome version:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) QtWebEngine/6.8.2 Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
"Between 2019/20 and 2022/23, the University [of Cambridge] paid £12.6M to seven major commercial #publishers: #Elsevier, #Wiley, Taylor & Francis, #Springer, #Sage, Oxford University Press (#OUP), and Cambridge University Press (#CUP). This was the highest expenditure among 21 UK #universities that provided data."
We've got a new annual report by RELX (the company running #Elsevier). https://www.relx.com/media/press-releases/year-2025/annual-report-2024
The profit margins continue to be absurd. It just escapes me how we can be fine as researchers with throwing public money at these companies.
I’ve used Mendeley since I was an undergrad, but the bugs have worn me down and I want to switch. I think Zotero looks to be the best place to go next?
Now I just need to overcome the rage (and effort barrier) that I can’t transfer the library structure from Mendeley in one go, thanks for that Elsevier…
Peter Barr explains why three UK #universities recently cancelled their #Elsevier #ReadAndPublish agreements and why these deals are unsustainable.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20250211161002365
PS: My own objections to these deals overlap significantly with Barr's. See the #BOAI20 Recommendation 4 ("Move away from read-and-publish agreements").
https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai20/
Endspurt: Noch bis Freitag läuft eine NRW-weite Umfrage zur Qualität einiger wissenschaftlicher Verlage: https://www.ulb.uni-muenster.de/fachblog/archiv/9003
Wir wünschen uns zahlreiche Teilnahmen, um unsere Überlegungen zu Services v.a. rund um #OpenAccess weiter verbessern zu können!
#DeGruyter #Elsevier #Frontiers #MDPI #SpringerNature #TaylorFrancis #Wiley
Plus de détails sur l'accord avec Elsevier mentionné dans le billet.
France Culture nous parle du juteux business des publications scientifiques.
Yet another shoddy #Elsevier journal sending me chemistry or chemical engineering papers to review.
(Narrator: he was not a chemical engineer, chemist, or anything chemist adjacent. In fact, his only chemistry related skill was once putting out a fire in high school chemistry )
To add insult to injury, it includes some attempt at an NDA, and sign over of
rights
"You must not share your review or information about the review process with anyone without the agreement of the editors and authors involved, irrespective of the publication outcome. If the manuscript is rejected by this journal and the
author agrees that the submission be transferred to another Elsevier journal
via the Article Transfer Service, we may securely transfer your reviewer
comments and name/contact details to the receiving journal editor for their
peer review purposes."
OK Rongjun Chen and the Chemical Engineering Journal, I'm sharing your shoddy referee selection process. Come at me bro.
2. #CommercialScience wall 
3. #OpenScience delight 
https://delightful.club/delightful-open-science
"Commercial science" is a good term to denounce this shady practice that withholds knowledge and wisdom discovered with public money in order to use it for #HyperCapitalism and its greed fests.
Yes, you #Elsevier & co.
Latest horror from Elsevier: published scientific manuscripts littered with links whose ALT text says:
"Learn more about common descent from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages"
Like trying to discredit published research papers by pointing to AI-generated drivel?
The U of Surrey just cancelled its #ReadAndPublish agreement with #Elsevier, less than one month after the U of Sheffield did the same.
https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-universities-2025-1-uk-university-drops-elsevier-deal/
"Höchst peinliche" Einführung von KI: Redaktion von Wissenschaftsmagazin kündigt | heise online https://www.heise.de/news/Hoechst-peinliche-Einfuehrung-von-KI-Redaktion-von-Wissenschaftsmagazin-kuendigt-10223994.html #ArtificialIntelligence #Wissenschaft #science #Journalismus #journalism #Elsevier
Forschung, Publikationen (Elsevier) und peinliche Pannen: >>[...] Das geht aus dem Statement der Redaktion des Journals of Human Evolution (JHE) hervor, das auf dem Blog RetractionWatch veröffentlicht wurde. Das Vorgehen des Wissenschaftsverlags Elsevier, der das JHE herausgibt, widerspreche fundamental dessen Ethos, schreibt die Redaktion dort. Außerdem kritisiert sie die hohen Abogebühren des Magazins. Laut RetractionWatch handelt es sich bereits um den zwanzigsten solchen Massenrücktritt bei einem Forschungsmagazin seit 2023.[...] wird der Schritt vor allem mit Änderungen an der Struktur und den Zuständigkeiten begründet, die Elsevier durchgesetzt habe. Kritisiert werden aber auch Eingriffe in den Produktionsprozess, die "regelmäßig" Mehrarbeit verursacht hätten. Als Beispiel heißt es, Elsevier habe im Herbst 2023 ohne Rücksprache oder eine vorherige Information eine KI-Technik zur Überarbeitung der Artikel eingeführt. Die habe Schreibweisen und sogar bereits freigegebene Artikel wieder geändert. Das sei für das Magazin "höchst peinlich" gewesen, die Behebung der Probleme habe Monate [...] <<https://www.heise.de/news/Hoechst-peinliche-Einfuehrung-von-KI-Redaktion-von-Wissenschaftsmagazin-kuendigt-10223994.html
#Elsevier #Forschung #Publikation #KIEinsatz #Mehrarbeit #Genauigkeit #AI #LLM #KI
@BlumeEvolution@sueden.social
@queerwiki@mastodon.social
@scatty_hannah@queer.party
Wenn es nach mir ginge, würde ich diesen unredlichen Verlag #Elsevier komplett zerstören und abwickeln. Dieser Drecksladen ist mir schon seit geraumer Zeit ein Dorn im Auge.
in calmness 
