photoEvolutionary Psychology Co-Editors: Bernhard Fink, Benedict C. Jones, and Todd K. Shackelford

Robert Kurzban

The Evolutionary Psychology Blog

By Robert Kurzban

Robert Kurzban is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Why Everyone (Else) Is A Hypocrite. Follow him on Twitter: @rkurzban

Elsevier and Evolution & Human Behavior

Published 6 February, 2012

Elsevier publishes Evolution and Human Behavior (E&HB), the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. Elsevier has recently been the focus of a controversy; last week, it was widely reported that thousands had signed an online petition to boycott Elsevier. The grievances are that 1) Elsevier charges too much for their journals, 2) Elsevier “bundles” journals together, and 3) Elsevier supports measures such as SOPA (the act that some have argued amounts to censorship of the web.) The petition asks people to sign and indicate which tasks – publishing, refereeing, editing – they plan to refrain from.

I’m not going to dwell on these points, and I don’t pretend to know what price Elsevier ought to be charging for its products or what units they should be selling them in. However, given the controversy emerging surrounding the boycott of Elsevier journals, I thought it appropriate to make some remarks and explain my position.

As a co-Editor-in-Chief of E&HB, I might be expected to be biased, and so probably I am. Having said that, I don’t consider myself to be an apologist for Elsevier, and while I am hoping that members of the evolutionary psychology community do not join the boycott, this is not due to any love for Elsevier or concern for their bottom line. (Disclosure: I do get a modest stipend for my editorial duties. By my last calculation, it comes out to less than about $9/hr.)

A tiny bit of history. Michael McGuire founded the journal in 1980, then titled Ethology & Sociobiology. The title was changed with the ascent of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson as co-editors. As with most new journals, impact was initially modest and submissions few. In 1996, the journal was receiving about 70 manuscripts per year. That number more than quadrupled to about 300 in 2011, and the impact factor currently stands at 3.6, up from 2.6 in 2008, helped, I believe, by the general improvement of scholarship in the area in general, but also by the hard work of Ruth Mace, Dan Fessler, Martie Haselton, and Steve Gaulin, who have served the journal as editors over the last decade as editors.

Like many other people, I do find it odd that we find ourselves in a situation in which authors are giving away content and reviewers are giving away time, both of which are then sold at a profit by the publisher, whether it is Elsevier or one of its competitors. This model made a certain amount of sense when publishers produced a service for which they had a comparative advantage, organizing the publication process, printing and distributing journals, and so on. Certainly, in the present technological environment, it makes sense to think about the logic of the model.

These points have been discussed in a number of forums, in other discussions about this topic, including on the AEPS group on facebook, and in this discussion and elsewhere the conversations have frequently given rise to two questions. First, why do people publish in Elsevier journals, and, second, why doesn’t someone generate alternatives?

The second question is easy to answer: they have. This blog is associated with an open-access journal that publishes in the same area as E&HB, and is run frugally by the editors, indeed frugally enough that authors aren’t charged to publish here. There is also Frontiers in Evolution Psychology, which I currently head, though we get almost no submissions, possibly because, unlike Evolutionary Psychology, there are fees to publish. And of course there are other journals as well, such as Human Nature, and so on.

This then makes the first question all the more puzzling;  why publish in E&HB, particularly given the open source alternatives? My guess is that the answer is that publishing work in E&HB is valued because it is the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and is widely read by people both inside and outside the field. For scholars who wish to promote their ideas, E&HB is an excellent option. In addition, and perhaps the more important reason for many, the fact of the matter is that Chairs, Deans, and personnel committees look at the impact factor of journals in which faculty place articles. For better or worse, scholars’ livelihood depends in no small part on placing their work in high impact journals. Newer journals tend to have less cachet and lower impact, which discourages some from submitting as a matter of professional strategy, which in turn makes starting new outlets difficult. None of this, I think, is likely to change significantly any time soon, though of course some newer journals do indeed bend upward with some speed.

So, with that as background, here is my view on the boycott. For me, the central issue should be about how we can produce the best scientific papers that reach the broadest audience. Whatever we do should, in my opinion, be in the service of this goal. I say this in part because it seems to me that the goal should not have to do with indulging jealousy. I would rather reach more people with Elsevier making more money than reach fewer people while reducing Elsevier’s profit margins. My business is in communicating scholarship; their business is, well, business. Yes, to the extent that their pursuing their goals interferes with mine, then, sure, we have conflicts to resolve. But my goals have to do with the communication of ideas, not the eroding of margins of our friends in the Netherlands.

Next, I do think it’s important to keep things in perspective. As of this writing, the drop-down menu on the petition web site indicates 80 people in the “Psychology” category as having joined. This is a tiny fraction of scholars in the field. If more scholars sign up, what will the impact be? Holding aside the symbolic value, I take it that the intended impact of the boycott will be that Elsevier journals such as E&HB will get fewer submissions, and the ones that we do get will get inferior vetting by the scholarly community, eventually leading to a decline in the quality of the journal. Will this ultimately harm Elsevier’s bottom line by forcing them to charge less because the quality of their product has gone down? Will they lose market share? Maybe. Certainly while this process is ongoing, the quality of papers could indeed be compromised. For obvious reasons, I would resist this outcome, and so I oppose the boycott as a means to achieve the particular end I have in mind.

Are there other routes to reform? In my view, HBES should work over the next year to consider alternatives to the existing contract. To this end, I will propose to the Executive Council at the HBES annual meeting this year that the Society appoint a committee to investigate alternatives to the present arrangement, and produce one or more concrete proposals. It seems to me that one possibility is going with another academic publisher, such as Wiley or SAGE, though of course many will view this as no better than the current state. Another option would be to try to develop a means of doing without a publisher entirely. I myself don’t know what this sort of option looks like, particularly if we want to continue to have a hard copy of the journal published, but these are the sorts of issues that a committee might look into. (Views differ on the value of having a paper journal. Are there places that we hope to reach that don’t have access to electronic resources that we take for granted? I don’t know the answer to that question.)

In short, I don’t care very much about Elsevier’s profit margins per se. I do care about making papers in our discipline – and other disciplines, for that matter – as good as they can be, and spreading ideas as broadly as possible. Elsevier does do something to advance this goal, including structuring the process of manuscript evaluation and disseminating the journal in print and on the web. Still, the US$31.50 price tag on a single article, or US$477 for a subscription does seem steep, though it’s worth noting that anyone joining HBES gets the journal and pays only a small fraction of that amount. (By the way, my understanding from Elsevier’s statement of policy on preprints, which I grant might be mistaken, is that Elsevier allows authors to post a version of their paper to their own web site, with the caveat that it can’t be the .pdf of the final, published paper itself. So if the issue is getting ideas out, for free, I think, but am not sure, that we as authors can do this. Someone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about this.)

Can we do better than the present arrangement? It seems like a possibility. Still, having said that, my view, for what it’s worth, is that refusing to submit to the journal and referee for the journal is not a constructive way to proceed. Evolution and Human Behavior is the official journal of HBES, and its current status is due to efforts of people like Margo Wilson, Martin Daly, and the dedicated authors and reviewers who have contributed over the years. It is not perfect, and of course authors, reviewers, and editors have made mistakes along the way. No doubt they will continue to do so, regardless of the means by which articles are published. My view is that we should be working to make our journal, the Society’s journal, as good as it can be, scientifically, while simultaneously working to increase its impact. If there are viable ways to preserve the journal while at the same time reducing the price, then we should work as a community to find those ways. I, for one, welcome any ideas, and any help, in the service of reaching this goal.

  • http://twitter.com/brembs Björn Brembs

    I agree that any boycott will do little as long as those signing it don’t come close in numbers to the 970,000 authors/reviewers/board members cited by Elsevier:
    http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/ataglance
    If you really want to consider sustainable alternatives where tax-dollars don’t line shareholders pockets (every tax-dollar not spent is potential research money), consider partnering with a library: they know how to archive and make accessible digital information and by saving in subscriptions they have large sums of money at their disposal if more journals would follow that idea. Libraries already host open access repositories so dissemination would be easy.
    P.S.: There is more to Elsevier than just prices, bundles and toll-access:
    http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment-n820.html

    • Anonymous

      I had never heard the option of partnering with a library. Interesting. A reader directed my attention to this [http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.15.4.183], which seems insightful to me, and also is a source of potential ideas.

      • http://twitter.com/brembs Björn Brembs

        I like this paper and do cite it in the post I linked to above. In the meantime, I’ve started a quest for suggestions as to what publishers actually do that could justify the profits they make: http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment-n829.html
        If people start thinking along those lines, maybe something will change.

  • Ben Toth

    Thanks – good thoughtful piece. It’s hard not to conclude that Elsevier have been taking out too much profit for many years. And that as a company they have been content to sit on this situation, with no prospect of genuine change until some people start jumping up and down.

    In your position I wouldn’t boycott Elsevier, though some journal boards have over the years. I do think it is worth reviewing your options.

  • Rick O’Gorman

    Hi Rob,

    Firstly, I’d like to commend your proposed next step. As a learned society, I find it a reasonable and tempered response at this stage. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that the individuals charged with reviewing this take on board the breadth of issues. They may even want to solicit comments from HBES members. It is not a simple issue for HBES, and certainly isn’t just about tweaking the system. A switch to Wiley or Sage may move us to a less profit-aggressive company, or just one that is less good at that (and to be fair, maybe less good at other things; Elsevier’s websites work fairly well, though I find it an encumbrance that to get my membership access, I can’t do it through the sciencedirect website and have to use medicinedirect, though the EHB journal is listed on both). Still, it is good for us as a society to pause and take stock.

    I agree that some boycott may not be the way forward. For reasons I discuss, many of us in the EP community will want to continue to consider EHB as an outlet. With that in mind, a boycott withdrawing reviewer contributions seems unbalanced, and not something I find I can countenance for myself, much as I despise furthering Elsevier’s profits. That said, a lead taken by those who are more insulated against the pressures that younger scholars face would create future possibilities by improving the profiles of alternative journals. As a society, I always think we should want to see the online Evolutionary Psychology journal, in particular, thrive.

    I can say that as someone who recently moved universities and wanted to get library access to EHB (beyond my own personal access through HBES), I am very aware of the costs that Elsevier charge. According to my university’s library, Elsevier wanted UK£800 for access, much higher than the apparent US figure that Rob mentions. It is an appallingly high figure. As it turned out, the library realised that they already subscribed to a package from Elsevier that gave us access, avoiding some departmental horse-trading being necessary by me (or just sacrificing access for my students).

    What really galls me about the fees today for online access is that libraries are much more captive than in days gone by. It used to be that if a library stopped subscribing to a journal, they still had whatever copies of the journal they had previously received. Now, if the library has an online-only subscription, then terminating that sub terminates access to all back-copies also. I don’t know how common it is for libraries to have online-only access these days, but I’d certainly expect that publishers would be pushing it.

    The larger issue here is beyond HBES, though, and that is the current publishing system that sucks cash out of non-profit ventures (by and large)–education and research–and redistributes it to executives and shareholders in companies like Elsevier, for great profits (Björn Bremb’s linked-to-below website provides great info). In this day and age, is it really necessary, or the best way, to have private companies take research output and sell back access to researchers? What we need to ask as scholars is what does the current system give us, and what do we need?

    For example, switching HBES’ official journal to one that is open-access isn’t necessarily a solid solution. That increases access, but could still be to a profit-making company (not inherently problematic, and the open-access approach probably would keep them a bit more honest). It would be a problem for us in the UK, because being in a high impact journal matters for evaluation purposes (in a very explicit way). That is partly a critique of the UK’s research evaluation process.

    A further problem is that it would still leave us enthralled to particular organisations, though less so than the current system. As some become known for being high reputation, there would remain pressure to go to such journals, leaving open exploitation of researchers for financial gain.

    Ultimately, it seems that what science needs is a system in which research is in some way peer-evaluated (I use this as a distinction from the more specific peer-review) and a distribution system is in place. With the rise of the digital age, these things have become much easier than before (and perhaps partly why the profits for companies like Elsevier have risen). Indeed, given that editors, reviewers and authors already provide their portions of the system for free or low cost, the only elements needed is a framework to coordinate the review process and the distribution process. Moreover, these don’t even have to be the one system. Universities already are developing various repositories, alongside others run by various research communities. What is really needed is a centralised way to post reviews and point to papers.

    Ah, but! The real need is that job recruitment and promotions, and other related evaluations (such as the aforementioned UK system) not depend on ‘high quality’ journals with high impact factors (and other flawed metrics) as a central plank of deciding those critical things. The UK’s REF, for example, would need to find a way to evaluate research output that doesn’t weigh impact factors. Strictly speaking it isn’t supposed to, at least up to know (the next REF is supposed to consider citation metrics, at least for the hard sciences). Yet I can assure you that getting a job in the UK in a university will turn on where you have published. Thus, we are in a local peak (to borrow from Wright’s fitness landscape) or form of Nash equilibrium. To change the system will require a coordinated response from all the stakeholders, funders (including in cases government), scholars, and libraries. I exclude the for-profit publishers for the obvious reason.

    • Anonymous

      Rick, thanks for your remarks. I think input from the Society makes a good deal of sense. Just to clarify, the prices I indicated in the post were individual, not institutional. As you say, institutions are charged a lot more than individuals, and that is for sure one issue that any discussion of a new direction for the journal should take into account.

    • http://twitter.com/j2bryson Joanna Bryson

      Dear Rick, Thanks for your reasoned response. I’d just like to point out that the fact that your university “happened” to have a subscription to E&HB is a positive consequence of bundling. I’m talking more about that on my own post in a minute.

  • Geoffrey Miller

    Nice piece. It’s a good and constructive solution to ask the EHB executive council to look into alternatives to Elsevier. I agree that the goal is to improve scientific quality and communication, and not to get caught up in economic resentment of Elsevier’s success.

    • Rick O’Gorman

      Hi Geoff,

      I don’t think anyone is complaining because they resent Elsevier’s success per se. But it’s problematic when that success is providing 40% profits on the back of contributions from everyone else (and our time isn’t free–someone pays our salary) and selling that work back to the scientific community AND it is based on a restrictive model of access. Thus an open-access model that reaped the same profits would be an improvement, but would still a bit ridiculous. 40% profits are possible only because the publishers obtain a monopoly-type situation, where they control the content. It’s not like one can just shop around for the best deal for evolutionary psychology papers that you want to cite, though if more were available in quality open-access journals then a pressure might grow for more to choose such outlets.

  • http://twitter.com/gordoning Gordon Ingram

    I agree that “the central issue should be about how we can produce the best scientific papers that reach the broadest audience”. But Elsevier are manifestly not concerned with that. As you point out, “their business is business” – i.e., maximising shareholder (or more accurately, executive) value. It seems a little counter-intuitive to say that the best strategy for achieving one goal is to get into bed with a big, powerful organisation that has an entirely different goal…

    … Except, of course, that we are already in bed with them and getting out of bed would be difficult. I can’t really blame you, as an editor, for defending the status quo, but if you were doing things from first principles in the current climate, and you still wanted to produce the best scientific papers that reach the broadest audience, would you really do that by allocating most of the resources to the publisher? As you point out, that model may have made sense when (paper-based) distribution was costly and difficult, and most of the authors were tenured academics on a comfortable salary (I can’t believe the houses they were able to afford a few decades ago!) who didn’t need the money anyway. Nowadays, it makes no sense because distribution is EASY – many established academics have tens of thousands of Twitter followers, for example – whereas most of the people who produce the meat of the papers are hard-up PhD students or postdocs on short-term contracts, who are often faced with a choice of writing a paper or applying for a job (as I have been several times in my recent career). $9 an hour may seem like peanuts to you, but it would come in very handy to them!

    So I think one day publishers are going to have to look at paying authors and peer reviewers, otherwise they will eventually be overwhelmed by open-access and file-sharing. They can’t keep sitting on a pile of prestige and charging rent indefinitely: eventually that prestige will leak away to more quick and agile organisations. Impact factors may be great as an immediate, quick-and-dirty measure of an article’s worth, but in the long run, citation statistics are far more accurate and democratic. What looks better, an article that’s cited 3 times in EHB or one that’s cited 30 times in EP?

    • Anonymous

      Right. The article I linked to above speaks to your point here a bit; it’s a coordination game, and it can be tough to get off coordination points. So, generally, I agree, but I just want to resist the claim that I’m defending the status quo. I’m not at all trying to say the present situation is a good situation or that we should keep it. I’m trying to ask the question, given the present situation, what’s the optimal solution in terms of change from the standpoint of what we care about? As an aside, I think that paying reviewers is a good idea, and this in an innovation I would like to try to introduce in the future. My priority for reform is first the issue of the publisher, after which I hope that other issues such as that one can be addressed.

      • http://twitter.com/gordoning Gordon Ingram

        You’re right, you aren’t really being an apologist for the status quo at all – your position is admirably balanced. I guess what I meant was that you weren’t being as rabidly anti-capitalist as me :) .
        Your argument is very reasonable. I also looked at the economics article you linked to and it makes a lot of sense. The trouble is, when the terms of a coordination game that were previously pretty fair become blatantly unfair to one of the parties – as in the parable of the anarchists’ annual meeting – it becomes kind of a moral issue for me. People should resist being ripped off – plain and simple.
        As a junior researcher who has no editorial role, it hurts me very little to boycott Elsevier journals (much less than it would hurt the anarchists in the parable). I can submit my articles elsewhere (which has the beneficial side-effect of helping free journals such as Evolutionary Psychology), and there are plenty of things I can do with my time instead of peer-reviewing. So that’s why I signed up to the boycott.
        And if it achieves nothing else, the boycott has at least contributed to the public discussion of these issues – just like the Occupy movement.

  • Sarah

    I’d add that besides preprints you can also post a revised or updated version of a paper online (which you could use as a work around as well), and you can email the paper to whoever you want as long as it’s for non-commercial (scholarly) purposes. I know email isn’t as open as posting something online, but perhaps you could do something like listing it on your website and saying a digital copy is available for free on request.

  • http://www.facebook.com/thetbates Tim Bates

    Just right, Rob. The goal is to do the best science and tell the broadest audience. And costs of publishing, not Elsevier’s profit are the issue. They might make a fortune, but might still do a cheaper and better job than any competitor.

    Indeed, there are shrill voices elsewhere (esp. George Monbiot), claiming that publishing is a monopoly (it isn’t, as this blog shows), and with implied claims that academic publishing generates $4 billion/yr profit. My guess is that academic journals (as opposed to the text book industry which Apple is now chewing into) doesn’t even have that turn over, much less profit: perhaps 1% of that.

    But as you say, it’s not relevant: The question is how can we maximise the rate of increase of knowledge?

    If researchers really want to move to PloS and other publishers, then they should see how their institutional library budget would look if journals were free online, but each academic needed their open access accounts paid.

    At Edinburgh, we spend £4 million/yr on books and journals. With 3,000 academics, that’s about £1,300 per researcher: Barely enough to cover 1 article per person with CCC licensing. So I’m not sure how much cheaper we can make the process: My guess is Elsevier are pretty good at controlling costs.

    Likewise for bundled journals: Many have tiny readerships, and without bundling, would be inaccessible: It’s cross-subsidization of low impact articles by well-read journals.

    There might be a case for a PLoS-style replacement for expensive journals like Nature (and the Hughes’ and other charities are trying to do this..), but for the 10,000 big-but-little journals, the status quo is probably as cheap as it gets.

    What we really need is a global deal where universities and funders agree to fund open access. Here, we’ve discussed having our Edinburgh researcher’s articles made open access as part of the purchase bundle, which assure the publisher we will not opt out of paying AND buys open access for the world’s readers. That sounds fair to me.

    When charities and governments fund research, they should include the costs of free distribution of the raw data and the papers. Then let the researchers optimise their budget by minimising costs. Wellcome already do this.

    Societies too, as you say, are free to take their journals from one publisher to the next, and keep the impact factor. Feels to me like journal publishing is vulnerable rather than flush, and I would like to see a good outcome of this “Arab Spring” – one where we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and end up with no reliable curated outlets, which could happen if universities simply stop buying journals.

    • Anonymous

      One issue that I have heard discussed recently are the fees that PLoS and Frontiers charge. My sense is that many HBES members don’t have US$1,500 to pay for publication. The move to the open source model might mean that what we want is library budgets to be shifted from buying expensive journals to paying for authors to publish in open access. I think that a transition like that will be difficult at many institutions. Just a quick clarification. There are legal limits on taking our journal from one publisher to the next, by virtue of ownership of the title and our contract. But I take your point, and I share your optimism about the “academic spring” of publishing. Let no crisis go to waste and all that…

      • http://twitter.com/brembs Björn Brembs

        One could suggest to libraries to cut the subscriptions and use the saved funds to reimburse their faculty for OA fees…

        • http://twitter.com/j2bryson Joanna Bryson

          Excuse me, earlier in this thread Tim Bates pointed out that Edinburgh’s libraries “only” spend £1300 per person per year. That’s the cost of ONE open access article. In many disciplines an academic must publish a lot more than one article per year! rkurzban thanks for bringing this up.

          • Steven Hamblin

            Joanna, most (>80%) of OA journals don’t charge author fees (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/new-data-showing-that-most-oa-journals.html). In fact, the data show that publishers like Elsevier publish more journals that charge such fees than OA does! Tim’s numbers seem compelling, but they’re actually simplistic at best. Edinburgh may spend 4 million pounds on subscription costs, but you’re assuming that that’s what they *choose* to spend. What would Edinburgh spend if they could afford *all* of the journals that it’s users would like to have access to? That 4 million is the result of a complex set of trade-offs, which is why librarians have been at the forefront of complaining about publishers like Elsevier for years. It’s only recently that the suppliers of the product that publishers act as the middlemen for (us!) are starting to complain too.

          • Steven Hamblin

            Also, since Tim also raised the issue of profit and turnover (revenue), and dismissed the idea that academic publishers are raking in profits hand over fist, I’d like to use real data to disprove that too. Since the article here focused on Elsevier, let’s look at the numbers. In 2010 (the latest year available), Elsevier’s parent company Reed Elsevier reported (link below) that Elsevier had revenue of 2.026 billion GBP, or 2.419 billion Euros at today’s exchange rate as reported by Google. That’s $3.209 billion USD. Adjusted profit was 864 million Euros, or $1.14 billion USD. That’s not $4 billion in yearly profit, but Elsevier makes up a quarter of the figure that Tim waved off by *itself*. I’d be pretty surprised if the total profit across all publishers was less than half of $4 billion, minimum.

            And before the publishers cry poverty or recession, Wikipedia mentions that the revenue and profits of Elsevier in 2006 (not cherry picking, that’s the year they give for some reason) were €2.236 billion and €864 million respectively. That’s an increase of 8% in total revenue and something like a 49% increase in profit over those 4 years! (I say ‘something like because the profit figures in the Wiki article area not adjusted and the annual report are; my guess is that that makes the estimate conservative, though I welcome someone who knows more about that to clarify).

            Reed Elsevier annual report for 2010 found at : http://reports.reedelsevier.com/documents/pdfs/reed_ar_2010.pdf
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

          • Steven Hamblin

            Sorry, that should be €581 million in 2006 profit; stupid typo on my part.

      • Lisa DeBruine

        As EP shows, you absolutely don’t need to charge ~$1500 per paper to run an OA journal, as long as you don’t need paper copies. Even the “look” of traditional journal typesetting is very easy to replicate using free software (LaTeX). I agree that you should consider barriers to online access, but I suspect that institutions with no internet access will hardly have the budget for print copies.

        (P.S. I’d be keen to be involved in an HBES committee on the issues around journal change.)

        • Anonymous

          Right. I think this issue of whether we want to continue to have paper copies of E&HB is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be decided. And I’m pleased to hear that you’re interested in being on the committee. I’ll certainly pass that along when I make my proposal. Thanks.

  • http://twitter.com/BehavEcology Steven Hamblin

    “I would rather reach more people with Elsevier making more money than reach fewer people while reducing Elsevier’s profit margins.”

    The current audience of Elsevier’s journals is the restricted group of scholars and students who work at institutions that can afford institutional subscriptions or who have money to burn and don’t mind spending thousands of dollars perusing the literature by buying every article. The potential audience of open access journals is anyone with a internet connection; at least half a billion broadband subscribers as of 2010, and billions more with mobile internet. The true audience is somewhere in between those two, much closer to thousands / tens of thousands surely but certainly larger than is currently able to access it (especially if #icanhazpdf is any indication).

    And how does exactly Elsevier broaden the reach of scientific articles? By … hiding them behind paywalls? By creating fake journals that pretend to be medical journals and instead shill for pharmaceutical companies (http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55679/)?

    “Will this ultimately harm Elsevier’s bottom line by forcing them to charge less because the quality of their product has gone down? Will they lose market share? Maybe. Certainly while this process is ongoing, the quality of papers could indeed be compromised.”

    This is a false dilemma. The choice isn’t between “publish in Elsevier’s journals or science will suffer”. The quality of the science comes from the scientists who produce it and the reviewers and editors who help publish it. How, exactly, would reducing Elsevier’s profit margins reduce the quality of the science? They don’t pay the researchers, they don’t pay the reviewers, and they barely pay the editors (as you yourself mentioned).

    “So, with that as background, here is my view on the boycott. For me, the central issue should be about how we can produce the best scientific papers that reach the broadest audience. Whatever we do should, in my opinion, be in the service of this goal. I say this in part because it seems to me that the goal should not have to do with indulging jealousy.

    [..] Are there other routes to reform? In my view, HBES should work over the next year to consider alternatives to the existing contract.”

    You might want to acknowledge the contributions of the dissenters from Elsevier before you throw them under the bus; the furor they’ve raised over open access will only strengthen the bargaining position of your society when it comes time to talk to Elsevier.

    Look, I have my own issues with open access; as an early-career researcher, I don’t have the luxury of supporting open access in the way that I would like to, because if I don’t get my publications out the door I won’t have a job from which to support them *at all*. And I don’t know what to do about the problem of publishing fees, as I know that many of my friends are in the same position of not having the money to afford them. But I do think that they deserve better treatment than you’re giving them here, which amounts to a sort of bland dismissal.

    • Robert Kurzban

      Thanks for taking the time to comment. With respect, I don’t believe that I dismissed open access journals, whether blandly or spicily; indeed, the journal that hosts this blog is on one such journal, and I feel I have had some role in promoting it, having published on its pages and acted for years as an Associate Editor, so I find that remark puzzling. I similarly don’t think that I threw anyone under any bus. I also didn’t make the claim that if people don’t publish in Elsevier’s journals, science (as a whole) will suffer. I do believe that if we at E&HB have a narrower range of submissions, then the articles that are published will be, on average, of lower quality. I’m not quite sure what I said that made you so angry, and I understand that this is a topic tinged with substantial emotion, but as I said, if you have constructive ideas about the best way to migrate E&HB from Elsevier to another format, given the constraints we are operating under, I would welcome such input.

      • http://twitter.com/BehavEcology Steven Hamblin

        I don’t know how I misinterpreted what you wrote, but I’m open to correction. Let’s take two specific examples; when you said:

        1). “Will this ultimately harm Elsevier’s bottom line by forcing them to charge less because the quality of their product has gone down? Will they lose market share? Maybe. Certainly while this process is ongoing, the quality of papers could indeed be compromised,” what did you mean? It’s hard not to interpret this as saying that the ‘quality of papers’ might go down if Elsevier’s profits were threatened. How exactly is Elsevier, in your opinion, connected to the quality of published science? Your words directly imply that published science – which *is* the main way that science “(as a whole)” is conducted – may be worse if Elsevier is challenged. Why?

        2). “[Quoted background above elided for concision] … I say this in part because it seems to me that the goal should not have to do with indulging jealousy.” What does that mean? You can perhaps forgive a naive reading that says that OA supporters, who advocate for a boycott of Elsevier because of their parasitic business model (in their words), are “indulging jealousy” and, by extension and context, don’t have a valid argument. How am I misinterpreting you here?

        You claim that you’re puzzled about my comments because this blog is hosted on an OA journal’s website. I say that that’s irrelevant, because you didn’t write this as an OA journal editor (which would have made the whole thing worse, frankly); in your own words, you wrote this “[a]s a co-Editor-in-Chief of E&HB”, which is not an OA journal.

        You say, “I’m not quite sure what I said that made you so angry”, but you didn’t make me angry, Robert. I’m critiquing what you wrote as a journal editor commenting on the efforts of people to challenge Elsevier’s hold on the science publishing process. Unfortunately, I can’t offer you any advice on how to move E&HB, because I have no experience with the administrative tasks involved in editing a journal. Maybe that makes *me* biased, but I’ll freely admit to it. I do wish you luck, though.

        As to whether you dismissed open access journals, I feel that my argument is supported by your own words. You called OA supporters jealous, and suggested that challenging Elsevier’s business model will harm published science. You also, as I mentioned in my first reply, suggested that actions to reduce Elsevier’s profits (by OA advocates, who are the only ones attempting to do so) would lessen the reach of scientific publications. I strenuously disagree with all of those ideas, and I further suggest that Elsevier as a corporation itself is a problem. Its business model that runs on free labor from practicing scientists, its penchant for publishing fake journals (which shows – unsurprisingly for a corporate entity – that it has nothing in mind but the profit motive), and its support of the Research Works Act are all strong reasons why I have come to believe that the influence of companies like Elsevier on scientific publishing needs to be examined, regulated, and perhaps even rejected.

        And yes, I think it was a bland dismissal. But I’ll happily upgrade you to spicy if you wish. :-)

        • http://twitter.com/j2bryson Joanna Bryson

          Steven, you make some good points, but so does Robert that he edits both types of journals! Also, it’s certainly not just about spreading our work as broadly as possible or we’d just put it on the web. We need a bottleneck not just to get ranked for tenure, but also as a selective pressure to improve quality. We want to optimise two different values: the amount of signal you get from seeing that a paper is published has traditionally been the most important one, but now people are also thinking about the number of people who have easy access to reading those papers.

          I’m not convinced it’s that hard to find papers on line in an age of Google. I admit you may at first hit a firewall. But that just means it has to matter to you enough to email the author — in the old days you had to actually write them a letter & find a stamp! To me, the value that matters most is how do we increase the signal — how do we know which papers we should read first and trust.

          • http://bath.academia.edu/RossMounce Ross Mounce

            Admittedly, we need peer-review (of some form) but “We need a bottleneck…” really? Do we really need extra artificial restrictions on the volume and speed of how we publish and share with the world academic knowledge? A control on the speed of progress? Maybe I’m taking it to extremes but I think that’s dangerous thinking.
            I do understand your point, from the POV of tenure evaluation boards & careerism – but I think this should play second-fiddle to progress though, there *are* other means of evaluating academics e.g. #altmetrics

            I think this statement also implies that Elsevier provides a bottleneck, that OA journals do not. But just to be clear both Elsevier journals and OA journals apply peer-review, so in terms of getting published (ignoring, accessing that published paper) they’re the same.

            Perhaps you’re referring to the fact that PLoS ONE reviewers only judge papers on technical accuracy, and not ‘novelty’ or perceived potential ‘impact’. I don’t see a problem with this myself. We already have the tabloids (Nature, Science etc…) to highlight the novel papers for us. This still doesn’t leave Elsevier with anything useful to contribute towards ‘added value’

            Point 2: emailing the author often doesn’t work in my experience.

            Authors change institutions frequently and thus change email address. Authors may have very common names, and little internet presence, and thus be hard to track down. Authors may be away in the field for 6 months at a time, or may not be willing to respond to your reprint request. Authors may have died… etc

            For papers requested in the year that they were published; sure you’ll likely have success. For a paper in computational fields, you’ll more likely have success. But try asking for pdfs in palaeontology for papers published 12 years ago… it’s not easy and it can take considerable time and effort.

            “how do we know which papers we should read first and trust.” again, I’ll just point out this applies equally to closed-access journals, as it does to Open Access journals. Only with Open Access journals I’d say it’s often easier to track usage/viewing #altmetrics . So if you think this is the most important thing, I’d suggest you support Open and transparent publishing models, rather than closed-access models where such data is more tightly controlled (and sold) for profit.

          • Lisa DeBruine

            “Do we really need extra artificial restrictions on the volume and speed of how we publish and share with the world academic knowledge?”

            I would argue yes. I’m not sure about your field, but a good proportion of the papers I review are unpublishable because of serious, objective mistakes in the methods or analysis. Not all scientists are brilliant and, especially in the field of psychology, not all research methods are equally valid.

            For example, I don’t think it would be of benefit to science to publish failed replications of Daly and Wilson’s findings that stepparents are more likely than non-stepparents to abuse or kill a child, just because a large number of researchers in the social sciences compare raw numbers rather than relative odds ratios. Or failed replications of menstrual cycle shifts in mate preferences that include data from peri-menopausal women (I hope the mistake here is obvious).

            These sorts of mistakes sneak through peer review sometimes (the two examples I gave above are actually published), and it takes up a lot of scientists’ time and energy to respond to them. Imagine the wasted time if we didn’t have that first barrier of peer review! You might say that each reader should judge the quality of a paper for herself, but I don’t have sufficient expertise to judge papers in some closely related areas to mine—we certainly can’t expect non-specialist members of the public to do so.

            You could address the quality somewhat with post-publication review, but that might just create a second-order problem with determining how we trust the reviewers. A system of rating the reliability of reviewers (like Slashdot) could work, but the whole system would take some time to implement.

          • http://bath.academia.edu/RossMounce Ross Mounce

            Hi Lisa, just to clarify. My very first sentence was “Admittedly, we need peer-review (of some form)”

            I never suggested doing away with peer-review – for all the obvious problems you mention. I’m just against the idea that “a bottleneck” in addition to, or on top of peer-review is needed, or that peer-review is good because it can *act* as a bottleneck (separate to it’s role in preventing bad science from being published). Ideally peer-review would be quick but rigorous, and so need not necessarily act too much like a bottleneck (provided an ample supply of willing reviewers). That was my intended point basically.

            I totally agree with many of your points. Indeed I have some experience of trying to correct published mistakes that got past peer-review (in a high-status journal no less!) so I completely agree with your point that it’s a lot of effort and takes time (~6 months in my case!) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v476/n7359/full/nature10266.html

          • http://twitter.com/brembs Björn Brembs

            “how do we know which papers we should read first and trust.” Unfortunately, only few researchers are aware of the technology that is available right now that will assist us in doing this much better than current ex-scientists serving as journal editors. In fact, it is precisely the employers of these editors, corporate publishers, that have kept this technology from us and forced us to live with a 17th century scholarly communication system.

            If we brought down corporate publishers and had the full 10bUS$ annually at our disposal that we currently pay them, we could have an IT assisted alert system at our disposal that would filter and sort all articles in your fields of interest according to a rank of relevance that you specify. This kind of technology has been around for about a decade and lots of companies are using it – only scientists are largely unaware of this technology and its potential. I wonder why the allegedly most advanced section of society is lagging behind the general population…

        • Anonymous

          On (1), suppose there at 10 papers in the world, ranked in quality 1 to 10. Suppose under the present regime, Elsevier gets the best three papers, 1, 2, and 3. The rest are published elsewhere. Under the boycott, with some probability, one of those three papers goes to a different journal. Now Elsevier’s journal gets, say, 1, 3, and 4. Their quality of Elsevier’s papers have gone down, but the aggregate quality of papers across science has not. This is why I wrote “the quality of their product,” in the material you quoted.

          On (2), my point is that the goal should not to be reducing profits per se. If publishers provide services, adding value, then I don’t begrudge them, as private firms, some fraction of the gains that they produce. (In the same way I don’t begrudge PLoS and Frontiers their fees for the services they produce.) The point is to keep in mind the goal. My view is that the goal should be facilitating the publication of the best science with the widest distribution. If, as a side effect of pursuing that goal, publishers are harmed, then that’s fine with me. But if we make the goal harming publishers, making the improvement of published work a side-effect, yes, I think that’s a mistake. I think that the latter goal is on some people’s minds, yes, because they are jealous of the profits publishers earn. In this context, I think the question should be, how can we in the field produce the best papers reading the greatest number of consumers. It should not be, how can we reduce Elsevier’s profits that they derive from our efforts.

          Thanks, again, for taking the time to comment.

  • http://evolutionaryanthropology.wordpress.com/ Fiona Jordan

    Thanks for starting this conversation, and the commitment to a review of alternatives for E&HB. Do solicit contributions from the wider HBES membership — if any group of scholars can figure out how to get us off the local optima (nice one, Rick) surely it should be us!

  • http://twitter.com/j2bryson Joanna Bryson

    Thanks everyone for a really interesting discussion. I have to say I’ve hated Elsevier for years because what they tend to do is wait until a journal has built up a reputation on some small academic publisher and then go buy it and/or the entire publisher, strategically getting all the journals that were absolutely essential for a university then cranking up prices on them. This used to seem predatory to me, like certain large software companies that used to force small companies to accept takeover or else reverse engineer their code & release their services to the public domain. But I have to say this discussion has actually made me hate them less. It seems from the above that they are actually *less expensive* for a University per academic than Open Access, and that their bundling policy actually successfully gets journals into universities for students & researchers to read even where there are no professors in a particular field. That can be invaluable at small universities or in developing countries (where, thanks to previous academic campaigns, their prices are lower.)

    I do not think it’s “just as bad” to move to Wiley or Sage or Blackwell. Truly academic publishers that actually care about academia and use their profits to support new journals & monographs and would have nothing to do with fraudulent journals *are* the best option. Although there are good Open Access journals, the paradigm is a moral hazard that lets people buy publication, and many journals are certainly there to sell it. I don’t know why everyone suddenly trusts that the US Military is “helping science” by asking to be able to buy publications & run academic publishers into the ground. And honestly, I can see why publishers & anyone else would be afraid of having one government have a huge say in how science is done, even if it is one of the better governments on the planet.

    It’s not just jealousy over Elsevier’s margins that drives this. First, margins are a good indication about how much a publisher cares about academia, which is notoriously underfunded, so it’s reasonable to worry about them. But second, there are a lot of other pressures: resentment about not getting into top journals, anger about peer review cabals that keep new ideas out, a desire to get cool stuff for “free” (which sometimes means “with the costs better hidden”), love of the underdog. We absolutely need to watch out for these kinds of psychological motivations, so thanks Robert for a really nice effort at a level-headed article. And thanks everyone that’s commenting!

    • http://bath.academia.edu/RossMounce Ross Mounce

      Elsevier’s bundling is clearly NOT a good thing. I think it’s absurd to try and portray it as such.

      For example at our university, our library has recently cut our subscription to Biology Letters (Royal Society) because we can’t afford it. I don’t disagree with that decision, we don’t have unlimited money to spend BUT I’d much rather have cut our subscription to Elsevier’s ‘International Journal of Coal Geology’ (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-of-coal-geology/) and other such subject-specific journals that are *extremely* unlikely to be of any use to any academics at our institution, given the research topics we cover.

      [no disrespect to that journal or the papers contained within btw, it's just not relevant to the research done at Bath]

      I blame this cut on Elsevier and other bundling deals. We’re effectively forced to buy the bundle. So when budget cuts need to be made, we have to cut other journals from other publishers. So I now quite possibly have access to 2600+ journals of which very few, I need. Whilst I don’t have access to a good and relevant journal (to more than just one research group in our department) that we even publish in ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2011.0295 ).

      “margins are a good indication about how much a publisher cares about academia”

      I couldn’t have put it better myself. The higher the profit margin* the less the publisher actually cares about academia.

      *which for Elsevier is incredibly high – 36% http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

      • David mitchell

        For the record here are the profit margins of 3 other big publishers:
        Springer: 34% (2010 full year)
        Wiley: 43% (FY11 for STMS business)
        Taylor and Francis: 26% (2010 AOP)

        Perhaps it’s not worth dwelling on the point that these are high, but perhaps that these companies have differing grades of internal efficiencies which realise these [varying] profit margins. It’s hard to effectively base an argument on profit margins alone, especially when you have no idea of how a company is structured or generates. Perhaps T&F just isn’t as good at getting a return on its revenue. Perhaps Wiley then is even better than Elsevier at maximising their gai

        • http://bath.academia.edu/RossMounce Ross Mounce

          Good point David.

          It’s not just Elsevier that’s making a morally reprehensible profit margin for denying access to scholarly literature, there are other companies doing it very well too.

          But just because others are doing it, doesn’t really excuse Elsevier.
          They do very little to add value and put a lot of effort (ironically, reducing their profit margins) into preventing access. If you can’t see the truth in this, then perhaps Dr Mike Taylor’s parable might show this more clearly:

          http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2012/feb/10/parable-farmers-teleporting-duplicator?CMP=twt_gu

          • David mitchell

            I’m not sure the parable you refer to is particularly helpful. I also don’t think discouraging private enterprise is the correct answer. With very few exceptions, scientists (myself included) do not have (a) the time to arrange an alternative method of dissemination (b) have the money to support such an undertaking (c) actually know how to to it if (a) and (b) weren’t an issue, and be able to deliver my work to the people who really want it – and it can’t just be a passive, “well, it’s free to read so come find it”, because unless it’s discoverable, they won’t. I actually think that the problem is with the vast gap between the scientists (and their complex scientific papers) and the public (with their extremely limited understanding of complex scientific papers). Posting article pre-prints online is always permissible, even by the big Wileys and Elseviers of this world. Therefore wouldn’t proper translation of science for the public’s consumption, plus access to the actual paper (via a repository, not the shiny Sciencedirect or other delivery platform) contribute greatly to reaching this elusive goal of total dissemination?

  • Roger Koppl

    Rob,

    I think publishing your journal with Elsevier is like hiring Bill Cosby to advertise Jell-O. It is a signal of quality. It’s like the peacock’s feathers: a costly signal that works because it is costly. Nor do I think it’s necessarily bad if that’s how it works, given limited our limited time and attention. Things like PLoS may put an end to traditional publishing, but that end is not yet in sight.

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