[MrGunn]

As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I decided to do something. A few years later, my company was acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden complexity that wasn't apparent before.

Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there are. Is research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will posting preprints or research blogging fix everything? Nope.

If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.

Information and analytical services that support researchers and clinicians is the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for many years now, and these businesses only get even more valuable as more and more content is available openly.

At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end services that scientific societies, funders, researchers, and their institutions need to keep the system running so they can focus on their research.

What are these systems?

Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to support the mission of the society - advocating on policy issues important to their research community - through the society journal. Elsevier makes running the journal financially sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers, attracting and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics complaints, and providing a cheap platform.

Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in alignment with the funders mission, not just by conferring status, but with more advanced ways of understand the broader impact of a work. Elsevier (including me personally) has worked to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the impact factor: https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-metrics...

Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase their work, recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for tenure & decide who should get it.

After spending years working on projects with these different groups, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of how everything works & what the levers of change actually are. Happy to discuss with anyone!

[xpe]

Thanks for your thoughtful and nuanced comment.

> If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.

First off, in reply to this part: "You don't want a system like this to change quickly." ... I don't accept this as a first principle.

It is useful to think about how research and funding interrelates with publishing and peer-review mechanisms. However, I would not advocate a "go slow" approach with regards to modernizing publishing, e.g. out of some concern for the ability of research and funding aspects to "keep up".

Generally speaking, I advocate for finding leverage points in systems to drive change. Right now, there is considerable leverage to apply to the big academic publishers. So, now, we should push. The big publishers will respond; there will be friction and academic and political fighting. If we're successful, there will be change.

I don't worry much about how such changes will hurt the research and funding system. The system will adapt.

I am mindful that people have jobs in these industries, and that change may threaten them. But it would be a fallacy to only blame promoters of change for risking the status-quo jobs. I think a big responsibility falls on the companies, too. They are (presumably) intelligent actors. So what is stopping the companies from reforming themselves internally? Doing so could provide continuity to their employees, preserving tacit knowledge.

When a company can fight change with PR and lobbying more affordably than adapting, I am rarely surprised at what happens.

[MrGunn]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree publishers could do more to change & I especially think we should do more to make all the changes that are happening under the hood more visible. I mean, that's literally my job. You gave me a sincere response & deserve one in return, but we need to work towards a shared understanding of what the current situation is if we want to have a conversation that's not just talking past one another.

My understanding of the situation includes the following: Elsevier has a new CEO. Elsevier has been reporting for several years now that revenue from services has been one of the fastest growing parts of the business, so much so that the company now calls itself an information and analytics company, not a publisher (1). Elsevier, though slow initially, is now fully behind open access. 9/10 of the journals launched last year were open access (2). Elsevier is pursuing a number of what the industry calls "transformative agreements" with libraries, consortia, and whole countries which involve full access to all Elsevier content and built in open access publishing for everyone covered under the arrangement (2). This specific issue was about one way of structuring such an agreement to reduce the financial burden on MIT while still ensuring all their content was published open access and was even designed to make it easier for librarians to keep a collection of the intellectual output of their institution by automatically pushing manuscripts into the institutional repository, which is something librarians have been asking for for a long time (3).

So given all this, the only way I can answer your question about what's stopping change is to say that nothing is stopping it. It's happening & has been happening for years. I am tempted to ask, looking at some of the comments in the parent thread, what's stopping change in people's perceptions of Elsevier? I don't just mean that rhetorically. I really would be interested in understanding why people have the views they do and how they're different.

What's your current understanding of the situation and does it differ in ways from mine that you'd like to highlight?

1. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/02/13/re... 2. https://www.elsevier.com/about/elsevier-and-open-access 3. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/learn-more-about-elseviers-...

[xpe]

I appreciate your comment. I don't have much time at the moment to reply, but I'll say this:

First, I would encourage you to seek out this kind of feedback broadly and systematically (as you probably already are).

Second, perceptions change slowly.

Third, with regards to viewing established players with skepticism, savvy people follow the money. Can you break down the financials of Elsevier and its parent company, the RELX Group? How much of these profits come from closed-access journals versus some of the newer initiatives?

Fourth, though it is less common, some organizations do put effort into long-term initiatives that may cannibalize their cash cows. Let's talk about what history has to tell us about those companies and those transitions.

[pessimizer]

> You don't want a system like this to change quickly.

I don't understand how one or two companies owning all of academic publishing doesn't count as as a quick change, but open access would.

[wdb]

Personally, my opinion is that any research funded by public money shouldn't be behind a paywall and should be freely accessible to the tax payers.