[paulmd]

elsevier isn’t paying authors a dime lmao, the authors are the ones paying here.

A publisher would never deign to pay an academic. They get “paid in exposure”, and again, actually they have to pay for that exposure in the first place. Elsevier sits in the middle and skims the authors when they publish and the readers when they read. Peer reviewers, of course, work for free. Nice work if you can get it - billions of dollars a year for running a static website and providing a latex template. You could run the whole thing off a single server and cloudflare with some http basic auth lol.

(and if you’re asking “why don’t you start your own journal then”… that’s why arxiv and others are taking off like crazy over the past 15 years.)

[xhkkffbf]

Elsevier pays many authors. They may not pay the authors of some of the journal articles, but they also publish many books which generate royalties that are shared with the authors.

But why does pay have anything to do with this? Why does it justify the piracy? No one is holding a gun to the head of the journal article authors. They're making their own choice to submit it. And why? Probably because they want the fame and hope that it will generate big grants in the future. The editors, typesetters etc at Elsevier have ZERO chance of getting one of those grants.

And you mentioned the other academics who review papers. Again, they're doing it of their own free will. And why? Because they want to stay on the cutting edge. They want a chance to read the papers before they're published. Why? I would think that getting their own big grants is a motivator for many of them. Maybe all of them.

I'm glad that Arxiv is taking off. But riddle me this: why does Elsevier still exist? Why are enough scientists submitting their papers? Because they're making a rational decision about the benefits. They don't want to spend weeks fussing with LaTeX. They don't want to maintain archives. Everyone in this chain is a free person making a free decision.

If you don't like it, don't read the papers. Or complain to the authors who chose Elsevier.

But don't pirate someone's hard work.

[goosedragons]

No, they're doing it because their career is tied to it. No published papers, reviews, editorships, means you're not going to land that academic job, you're not going to move up the ladder to full professor and you're not going to have grants (which some places tie salary to!).

Elsevier exists because of inertia. There's so much inertia left over from when paper journals kind of mattered that it's hard to change at an individual level.

Publishing with Elsevier doesn't avoid LaTeX either. Some journals mandate you use their template and you still have to proof after acceptance and correct all the mistakes the typesetting staff makes.

[xhkkffbf]

So in the scientists' case it's a "career", but in Elsevier's case it's money and greed? Are those scientists being paid? If so, I would submit that it's just as much about money and greed for them too.

BTW many of the scientists are better paid than the editors and proofreaders in academic publishing. But, hey, this thread is all about hating on Elsevier so what am I saying?

[goosedragons]

Should carriage builders still be common?