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Potential corruption of scholarly publishing in Europe

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Elsevier are corrupting open science in Europe
https://www.theguardian.com/science/poli...-in-europe

EXCERPT: . . . the European Commission have launched an Open Science Monitor to help provide data on the development of Open Science in Europe. [...] However [...] The subcontractor for the monitor is Elsevier, the publisher and data analytics provider. Within scholarly communications, Elsevier has perhaps the single worst reputation. With profit margins around 37%, larger than Apple and big oil companies, Elsevier dominate the publishing landscape by selling research back to the same institutes that carried out the work. It gets worse too. Throughout the methods, you can see that there is an overwhelming bias towards Elsevier products and service [...] It is worth highlighting some of the key issues here that the Commission seems to have ignored in subcontracting to Elsevier.

First, Elsevier has a notorious history of campaigning against openness in order to protect its paywall-based business. [...] Second, many EU member states are currently turning against Elsevier due to its anti-open business practices, high and ever-increasing prices, and dangerously powerful size as a commercial publisher. [...]

How is it reasonable for a multi-billion dollar publishing corporation to not only produce metrics that evaluate publishing impact, but also to use them to monitor Open Science and help to define its future direction? Elsevier will be providing data through the monitor that will be used to help facilitate future policy making in the EU that it inevitably will benefit from. That’s like having McDonald’s monitor the eating habits of a nation and then using that to guide policy decisions....

MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/science/poli...-in-europe



Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it
https://aeon.co/ideas/scholarly-publishi...-to-fix-it

EXCERPT: The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Recently, Springer Nature, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, had to withdraw its European stock market floatation due to a lack of interest. This announcement came just days after Couperin, a French consortium, cancelled its subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, after Swedish and German universities cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions to no ill effect, besides replenished library budgets. At the same time, Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub, a website that provides free, easy access to 67 million research articles. All evidence of a broken system.

The European Commission is currently letting publishers bid for the development of an EU-wide open-access scholarly publishing platform. But is the idea for this platform too short-sighted? What the Commission is doing is essentially finding new ways of channelling public funds into private hands. At the same time, due to the scale of the operation, it prevents more innovative services from getting a foothold into the publishing world. This is happening at the same time as these mega-publishers are moving into controlling the entire research workflow – from ideation to evaluation. Researchers will become the provider, the product, and the consumer.

A global community to coordinate and regain control – to develop a public open-access infrastructure – of research and scholarly communication for the public good is long overdue. The issues of governance and ownership of public research have never been clearer. Another isolated platform will simply replicate the problems of the current journal-based system, including the ‘publish or perish’ mentality that perverts the research process, and the anachronistic evaluation system based on corporate brands.

Researchers are still forced to write ‘papers’ for these journals, a communication format designed in the 17th century. Now, in a world where the power of web-based social networks is revolutionising almost every other industry, researchers need to take back control.

The European Commission has called for full, immediate open access to all scientific publications by 2020 – something often mocked for being unrealistic, and that current growth trends suggest we will fail to achieve. But it is unrealistic only if one focuses on the narrow view of the current system....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/scholarly-publishi...-to-fix-it
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