Elsevier on Michael’s Domain

The battle between the big publishers and the scientific community

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I participated in last week’s Townhall discussion Mikä on avoimen tiedon hinta? (“What’s the price to access knowledge?”), which was precipitated by the recent discontinuation of Finnish universities’ access to journals published by the Tyler & Francis group. Mikael Laakso introduced the audience to the open access issue and the problems of rising prices, and Arja Tuuliniemi reported about the ongoing negotiations with Tyler & Francis and the Wiley group. While publishers like to portrait themselves as the researcher’s friend and ally, fact is that most of the scientific publishing industry is owned by big multinational stock market-listed corporations, which primarily answer to their share holders and researchers needs play a secondary role in the best case. While one would think that electronic publishing is driving down the prices of publishing and accessing published material, the reality shows exactly the opposite.In the current situation, where many Finnish universities are struggling with shrinking budgets, these millions of Euros could be spend better and the FinElib consortium is constantly trying to negotiate fair deals with publishing giants like Elsevier, Springer, Tyler & Francis, Wiley and SAGE . If the negotiations do not yield results before the old agreements expire, Finnish universities are sometimes cut of from access to some journals. This has happened now again (after a similar crisis in 2016). At the beginning of February this year journals published by the Taylor & Francis group have been inaccessible for Finnish researchers. Plans S (i.e. the initiative of the European Research Council to mandate open access for all state-funded research by 2020) is certainly strengthening the negotiation position of the FinElib consortium, because all European customers are essentially lining up their requests according to the Plan S requirements. However, it is still unclear how Plan S will affect smaller, not-for-profit publishers like scientific societies ( https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/06/why-society-and-not-for-profit-journals-are-worth-preserving-better-economic-and-continuing-value-for-the-community ). My personal opinion is that there is no reason to panic. A similar shutdown of Elsevier access happened at the beginning of this year (2019) at all Max-Planck-Institutes and and seems to be tolerated by scientists quite well. Even though I might not be able to instantly access all content, this situation should be rather viewed as an opportunity. You can still access all the content that you need (perhaps with extremely rare exceptions).

Minireview about key molecules in lymphatic development, function, and identification

Fri, 08 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Erich Brenner asked us more than a year ago whether we could contribute to the special issue about human lymph vessels he was editing for Annals of Anatomy. We agreed that we might be able to contribute a minireview. In the beginning, I was also hesitating, because Annals of Anatomy is not per se an open access journal. However, our university has meanwhile started to cover the article processing charges (APCs) for several publishers (including the biggest scientific publisher on this planet - Elsevier ) to make articles open access . Thus, everybody can not only read the article already now, but also share, copy and redistribute it, remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose, even for commercial purposes as long as we - the original authors - are credited.The target audience is not the lymphatic research community, but outsiders, who need a first, very brief introduction to the molecules that are most central to the molecular biology of the lymphatic system. The selection is clearly biased by our own research history. Please write us an angry e-mail if we did not include your pet protein! If you convince us that your pet protein is central to lymphatic development or function, we’ll include it in our next review!

Being indexed

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

There are many databases storing and analysing scientific publications . “Being indexed” or “being listed” simply means for a journal that one of these databases includes the articles that are published in this journal. Importantly, several of these databases also include citation data for each article; therefore they are often referred to as journal citation databases. Since there are many such databases, virtually every journal is “listed” somewhere and if you want to get your journal listed, there are several guides out there, e.g. Getting your journal indexed . However, in the life sciences, there are a few databases that are substantially more important and authoritative than others. The big three are MEDLINE , Web of Science and Scopus . How are these three databases different? Clearly, the most important journals are covered by all of them. But less important journals and journals that publish in non-English languages might be only listed by one or two of the three. The databases have different journal selection criteria (see below) and the selection is subject to constant change.MEDLINE MEDLINE is a non-commercial database that is maintained by the US-American National Library of Medicine and the selection of journals happens under NIH -oversight. MEDLINE and especially its online portal PubMed are exceptional due to their free accessibility for everybody. In fact, PubMed is probably the only transparent academic bibliographic database that can be used for free by everybody to research life science literature. MEDLINE currently indexes 5620 journals.Web of ScienceThe Web of Science comprises several databases and they used to be maintained by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), before it was sold to Thomson Scientific & Healthcare (nowadays Thomson Reuters ). The ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield , who is considered to be the father of bibliometrics and scientometrics . The Web of Science currently indexes 13762 journals (combined Arts & Humanities, Expanded Science and Social Sciences Citation Indexes).ScopusThe other commercial journal database is Scopus , which is owned by Elsevier , the largest publisher of scientific journals. Scopus is the largest of these three databases covering many more journals than the other two. According to some, this is due to the somewhat loosely applied journal selection criteria ( http://www.issi2015.org/files/downloads/all-papers/1198.pdf) . There has also been some discussion about the independence of the journal selection for commercial databases. After all, according to a study published in PlosOne, five companies control more than half of all academic publishing, with Elsevier dominating at about 25% of the market ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502) . Scopus indexes currently over 22000 journals.People have been comparing databases and citation counts (e.g. here ). One database, that I have been omitting is Google Scholar . Even though the free accessibility of Google Scholar and its broader approach to measure impact have advantages as opposed to Web of Science or Scopus, Google Scholar is - similar to the general Google search engine - not very open about what journals and sources its search covers. In my opinion, this is a big draw-back, but on the other hand Google probably constantly has to tweak its algorithm to avoid exploitation. If you want to know more about Google Scholar as a citation database, I recommend this article . Journal ListsMEDLINE: ftp://ftp.nlm.nih.gov/online/journals/lsi2015.xml,http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog?cmd=historysearch&querykey=1 (currently indexed)http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog/?term=reportedmedline (all)Web of Science/Thomson Reuters: http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/Scopus : https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/excel_doc/0015/91122/title_list.xlsx Journal selection criteriaMEDLINE: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/jsel.htmlWeb of Science/Thomson Reuters: http://wokinfo.com/essays/journal-selection-process/Scopus : https://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/95118/SC_FAQ-content-selection-process-22092014.pdf