#reed elsevier

[what-ho-horatio]

Elsevier Mutiny: Cracks Are Widening in the Fortress of Academic Publishing

The editorial staff of a research journal have resigned to protest the company's failure to embrace open access.

Fair Open Access continues to rock the boat!

[iammeryann]

First day in Reed Elsevier (03/16/15)

[bookmania]

Silid Aralan, Inc. is a learning center in the Philippines for children with a mission of helping them figure out their lives' purpose and love for learning that will inspire and empower them in creating socially responsible innovations.

These children start learning business and arts early with the assistance of the non-profit organization.

Yesterday, I joined Reed Elsevier Philippines to entertain and to inspire these children through storytelling. It was a worthy event.The company gave the children a party and guess what! Thousands of books!

[trackernewsdots]

Publish, Perish & Disruptive Innovation: Scholastica's Better Answer

Disruptive innovation is fun—especially when the industry being disrupted is hopelessly lame. Few industries can match academic publishing on that score: (in)famously slow, pricey and capricious. Scholars, or their university departments, can pay thousands of dollars to submit a paper for review, then wait months, or longer, to find out whether it has been accepted, and then months, or longer, navigating the back and forth of peer review. When a paper finally is published, more often than not, it is sequestered behind a high subscription pay wall, inaccessible to those who might benefit most from the research. 

"Publish or perish"—the time-honored credo of academic upward mobility—has been turned out on its head. One could perish, or at least go broke, trying to publish. 

Thousands of scientists, including a trio of Fields medal-winning mathematicians, have staged a boycott of Reed Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, citing intolerable greed and monopolistic practices. When the world's top math geeks can't make sense of the numbers, you know something's really wrong 

Free open access journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) provide a publishing alternative, but the real game-changer may come from Chicago-based startup Scholastica, which provides a low cost, easy to use, fast and feature-rich publishing platform.

Setting up a journal is free. Scholastica's revenues come primarily from submissions fees, which cost just $5 for a law review and $10 for an academic paper. Although the law review price is actually higher than average, the research paper fee is orders of magnitude cheaper. 

Peer review, the cornerstone of academic publishing, relies on reputational currency. Reviewers are unpaid scholars who take on the onerous task analyzing others' research both out of professional interest and to increase professional stature.

Scholastic offers an advantage here as well. The web is brilliant for tracking reputational currency. From AirBnB and TripAdvisor to TaskRabbit and Facebook "likes," we have become a culture that loves to share ratings. 

The nuts and bolts of putting together a first rate journal still require considerable effort, but with costly and time-consuming logistical hurdles removed from the equation, the focus can go back to the mission: documenting and sharing knowledge. 

Although journal publishers using the platform can charge subscriptions if they choose, the lower cost structure means they still out-compete traditional publishers on price. They can also have an ongoing publishing program, pushing out new articles all the time, rather than waiting for a set pub date. 

Together with online educational services such as Coursera, video tutorial pioneer Khan Academy, the Open Science movement, and the emergence of an open source textbook market, Scholastica is part of a tech-enabled trend that challenges the educational status quo. This goes beyond offering an alternative to expensive educations that fewer and fewer can afford. It is about better ways to teach, learn and share research. 

Still, the forces of academic inertia are among the strongest in the universe...

...The biggest obstacle is the role that these journals play in academia itself, and how important publishing in a specific journal can be when it comes to promotions, granting of tenure, research grants and other aspects of academic life. Even some researchers who support the Elsevier boycott have said they will continue to publish in its journals because they feel that they have to.

Until that structure changes, or until enough researchers and academics decide they don’t care about the system and start to publish their work freely, the current system is unlikely to disappear any time soon. But just like the rest of traditional media industry, it is looking shakier and less stable all the time.

— Mathew Ingram / GIGAOM

•••••••••

As a platform, Scholastica is neutral: One could create a journal about almost anything. The Journal of Makerspaces, for example. Or The Journal of Urban Farmers, or Tech Incubators, or Pets, or perhaps The Journal of Humanitarian Tech. Transparent reputational currency can be used determine value, making it easier for readers to sniff out bogus, politically slanted or corporate-sponsored research. 

Just stay clear of the shady practices of Nicholas Ivanovich Lobachevsky (which, it should be pointed out, would get one booted off the Scholastica site as a TOS violation) and you'll be fine: 

RELATED:

Team Scholastica bios (University of Chicago grads on a mission...) / website

A talk with Rob Walsh: Will Scholastica disrupt academic publishing? / COGSCI

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

[sarahlee310-blog]

Reed Elsevier — a personal information provider (of services such as Lexis-Nexis) — and American Traffic Solutions — a provider of traffic technology solutions — have become the 9th and 10th companies to drop ALEC.

[...]

To recap, here is the list of companies that have dropped ALEC so far:

Coca-Cola

PepsiCo

Kraft

Intuit

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Wendy’s

Mars, Inc.

Arizona Public Service

Reed Elsevier

American Traffic Solutions

Keep the pressure on!

[sharpcrye-blog]

Variety, the entertainment industry trade paper founded in 1905, has gone on the block after several years of decline.  This will be the second time that parent company Reed Elsevier PLC has attempted to sell Variety this decade, the first being back in 2008 when advertising revenue took a steep drop.  The magazine also took a hard blow to its brand as well as its business with the 2009 exit of controversial editor-in-chief, Peter Bart.  Just as it did at the time of Bart’s departure, news media abounds with theories pinning Variety’s decline to an unwillingness to enter the digital era, despite the efforts of Variety reporter Jeff Sneider's one man Twitter campaign to dispel that notion.  Jeff is a very active Tweeter but, as many of his responding Followers note, 140 character missives do not carry the same weight as “Variety proper”.  And though Variety did go on-line with variety.com in 1998, their content was and remains available only to subscribers.  Variety owns one of, if not THE, most extensive archives of entertainment business history, and they have buried it behind a pay wall and suffocated it.  You even have to be subscribed in order to open links to articles, killing any opportunity to introduce themselves to new readers.  There will be a new owner and a new life for Variety.  May the next one be the Variety that always was, but the way we need it now.